“That Law French was barbarous in its decrepitude does not in the least diminish the value of it to our law when it was full of vitality. It helped to make English law one of the four indigenous systems of the civilized world, for it exactly expressed legal ideas in a technical language which had no precise equivalent.” Percy H. Winfield, The Chief Sources of English Legal History 14 (1925).
“To the linguist, law French is a corrupt dialect by definition. Anglo-French was in steady decline after 1300. Lawyers such as Fortescue, on the other hand, were probably serious in maintaining that it was the vernacular of France which was deteriorating by comparison with the pristine Norman of the English courts. That Fortescue could make such a claim, while living in France, is in itself a clear demonstration that by the middle of the fifteenth century there was a marked difference between the French of English lawyers and the French of France.” J.H. Baker, A Manual of Law French 11 (1979).
“Law French refers to the Anglo-Norman patois used in legal documents and all judicial proceedings from the 1260s to the reign of Edward III (1327–1377), and used with frequency in legal literature up to the early 18th century. When first introduced into England, this brand of French was the standard language used in Normandy; by the 1300s, through linguistic isolation, it became a corrupted language — by French standards, at any rate.” Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 504–05 (2d ed. 1995).
