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Why care about ‘style’ in legal scholarship?

In discourses in and about law, the term ‘style’ proliferates. It is used in a bewildering variety of senses and contexts, mundane and refined, practical and theoretical, referring to characteristic ways in which (1) legislators, judges, law-enforcement agents behave and look; (2) specific legal institutions operate; or (3) legal systems solve problems and express distinctive mentalities and cultural patterns. Sometimes it refers to typical (national) features of judicial reasoning or certain characteristics of judgments by individual judges (Yung, 2013), sometimes to professional ‘folkways’: technicalities and rhetoric to be followed by legal actors in how to write, talk and dress. ‘Style books’ in courts provide more or less binding guidance, assuring formal consistency in adjudication by regulating the written form of judicial decisions; a ‘plain style’ as opposed to legalese and jargon is supposed to make law accessible; the ‘legal stylist’ as a paralegal specialism in the ecology of modern law firms takes care of compliance with formal and substantive standards for legal documents. Does this frequent use of the term also imply usefulness? Is the concept of style helpful in understanding law or at least some aspects of law better? Arguably, style is best characterised as a protoconcept: ‘an early, rudimentary, particularized and largely unexplicated idea’ (Merton, 1984, p. 267) that has heuristic value but lacks a clear definition. At present, it seems too rudimentary to be used in a scholarly manner. While there is a risk that the term causes confusion rather than contributes to organising and expressing our thoughts clearly, the problems it refers to are unlikely to disappear. If ‘style’ is to be used in legal discourse, it is worth asking how this use can be enriched by/distinct from the usage of the term in other disciplinary discourses, such as art history, cultural studies, linguistics or sociology of science. Perhaps legal scholars have simply not paid enough attention to other discourses and disciplines where the term ‘style’ has a well-established meaning. For clearly, or at least intuitively, art historians, linguists and sociologists of culture could not easily do without the term. Yet how is ‘style’ related to ‘content’, ‘form’, ‘mentality’, ‘culture’ or ‘narrative’? Is legal scholarship able to rely on any well-established understanding of the term in those other disciplines? If scientific ideas were patentable and legal scholars were brought to court to acknowledge that the term ‘style’ they use is not theirs, then, in the first instance, they would readily concede this borrowing. Lawyers and legal scholars could indeed refer to other disciplines for its precise meaning, not only by acknowledging the impact of art history and cultural studies, but embracing them as providers of genuine insights and starting points for new interdisciplinary research more generally. The very subjects of legal aesthetics, legal semiotics or legal rhetoric are hard to imagine without such interdisciplinary transfers of ideas. But this is just the first instance of our imaginary trial or ‘conflict of the faculties’. The second one is perhaps just as interesting. Law could make the counter-claim that, in fact, ‘style’ is a legal term. By this, I do not mean the trivial truth that, for instance, intellectual property law can provide legal protection for the use of certain patterns of design and, while doing so, introduce a technical legal