Legally Speaking: Public Perception and the Fine Print of the Law

Abstract

Legal argumentation operates internally, in the construction of decisions, and externally, in the communication of those decisions. In this paper, I am interested in the external communication of legal decisions and the standards they assume. Treating “fine print” as a metonym that stands for much more than just contract disclosure, I explore what legal argumentation highlights and ways in which it marginalises features that a fully informed public should reasonably require for its own deliberations. In the course of this, I consider the nature of the “reasonable person” that the law addresses.