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bingham-plain

Rewrite legal prose in Lord Bingham's plain-speaking voice — short declarative sentences, plain words, active voice, one idea per sentence, concrete before abstract, judgment last. Fact-narration first (statements of fact, chronologies, condescendence narration, fact segments of submissions); argument passages optional. Use when asked to make legal writing plainer, more readable, more Bingham, less dense, or to rewrite a facts section in plain narrative. Standalone skill — no integration with the register locks or other skills.

Source: .opencode/skills/bingham-plain/SKILL.md — site rebuilt 2026-09-05.

bingham-plain

Rewrite legal prose the way Lord Bingham of Cornhill wrote it. He was described as the most plain-speaking judge of his generation, and his judgments — and his book The Rule of Law — are the model.

This skill is standalone by design. It does not enforce the informational register targets used elsewhere, and it is not wired into any drafting pipeline. You apply it where you choose. Its designed use is factual narration: statements of fact, chronologies, condescendence narration and the facts segments of submissions. Argument passages may be passed through the same rewrite, but plainness there is a choice, not a requirement.

The voice

  1. Short sentences. One idea per sentence. Break anything over about thirty words. Bingham: "In this appeal two barristers (Mr Bernard Weatherill QC and Ms Josephine Hayes) challenge a wasted costs order made against them by the Court of Appeal." (Medcalf v Mardell [2002] UKHL 27, [1] — in-tree text).
  2. Plain words. Anglo-Saxon over Latinate: "give" not "provide", "use" not "utilise", "end" not "termination", "about" not "in relation to". If a word needs a dictionary, it is the wrong word for a facts section.
  3. Active voice with a named subject. "The BBC bought the game show", not "The game show was bought". The agent is named unless the agent is genuinely unknown or the law or court is the actor.
  4. Concrete before abstract. Say what happened, in order, with dates and names: "In July 1993 Mr Medcalf issued proceedings against Mr Mardell, Mr Kemp, the BBC (which settled before the action came to trial and played no further part) and the TMO." (Medcalf [3]). The reader must be able to see the story.
  5. The point comes last. The narrative leads; the conclusion lands at the end of the passage, not the beginning.
  6. No nominalisation chains. "The making of averments" is a noun pile; "he averred" is a sentence. If the verb is hiding inside a noun, let it out.
  7. No multiple negatives. "Not without reason" is "with reason".
  8. No jargon, no Latin tags, no "inter alia". If a term of art is needed, use it once and explain it in the same sentence.

Workflow

  1. Diagnose. Read the input passage and mark: sentences over 30 words; passives without a named agent; noun-string subjects; Latinate words with a plain alternative; buried verbs; multiple negatives; evaluation or conclusion stated before the facts that carry it.
  2. Rewrite. Keep the facts and their order; keep every date, name and figure exactly; cut nothing material. Recast each diagnosis item per The voice above. In fact mode: past tense, third person, no evaluation — the rewrite must not introduce an opinion, a comment or a conclusion of its own.
  3. Per-sentence gate. Every sentence of the output must pass all of:
  4. ≤ 30 words;
  5. one main clause, at most one subordinate clause;
  6. subject–verb–object order (no front-loaded abstractions);
  7. a named or obvious subject (no "it is believed that");
  8. no nominalisation chain, no double negative;
  9. in fact mode: no evaluative word (appalling, manifestly, clearly, outrageously, plainly — none of these belongs to a facts section written this way). One failing sentence fails the passage. Fix and re-check.
  10. Output. Before/after with the changes itemised; nothing else.

Verified seed corpus

The style protocol above is illustrated by Lord Bingham's speech in Medcalf v Mardell [2002] UKHL 27, whose full text (parliament.uk extract, paragraph-numbered) is filed in-tree at H:\My Drive\01673-The Building Law Practice Limited-Campbell\ChangedLocks\Case_Source_Documents\Medcalf_v_Mardell_2002_UKHL_27.txt:

  • [1] the opening, quoted in The voice (1) above — two named parties, one sentence, everything the reader needs.
  • [2] the facts of the quiz game: "The plans for this new game show went through various different versions and were the subject of much discussion and refinement. Presentations were made on several occasions to the BBC, which was slow to respond. In the end, however, the BBC did respond. It bought the new game show and programmes were transmitted. They have proved to be a continuing success." — plain narrative, short sentences, concrete detail, the point last.
  • [3] quoted in The voice (4) — dates, parties and outcomes in order.
  • [11] the Code of Conduct rule 606(c) quoted verbatim ("A practising barrister must not devise facts which will assist in advancing his lay client's case and must not draft any originating process pleading affidavit witness statement or notice of appeal containing: … (c) any allegation of fraud unless he has clear instructions to make such allegation and has before him reasonably credible material which as it stands establishes a prima facie case of fraud").
  • Bingham's conclusion on privilege, in the same speech: "It is better that in certain circumstances the wasted costs jurisdiction should be emasculated by the principle of legal professional privilege than vice versa."

Book corpus (acquired 12 August 2026): Tom Bingham, The Business of Judging: Selected Essays and Speeches (OUP, 2000; 2011 edn) — full text, page-marked OCR (===== PAGE N ===== markers), filed at corpus/Bingham_Business_of_Judging_OUP2011.txt (1.2 MB, 448 pages). Verified passages (page references are the file's own page markers; the OCR has occasional letter noise — spot-check any quote against the print before court use):

  • p.11 — the opening of Part I, "The Business of Judging": "The judge's job at a civil trial, it is often said, is first of all to decide what happened (in legal jargon, 'find the facts'), then to identify the relevant rules or principles of law, and then to apply the law to the facts as he has found them." The paragraph continues by breaking the generalisation into its cases ("sometimes... sometimes...") and lands on the plain conclusion: "But judges are not, on appointment, invested with some magical gift."
  • p.13 — the opening of "The Judge as Juror: The Judicial Determination of Factual Issues": "In the hierarchy of legal skills, pride of place is given, and quite rightly, to the great exponents of legal principle... In comparison with these mandarin arts, the judicial determination of factual issues occupies a somewhat lowly place, an activity of its nature ephemeral, uncreative and particular." — plain words doing ironic work; the fact-finding essay is the natural companion to fact narration.

Book corpus 2 (acquired 12 August 2026): Tom Bingham, Lives of the Law: Selected Essays and Speeches 2000–2010 (OUP, 2011) — epub-extract (chapter-section markers ===== OEBPS/html/... =====, no page numbers in the file), filed at corpus/Lives_of_the_Law_OUP2011.txt (1 MB, essays 1–22). Verified passages:

  • Ch 1, "Magna Carta" — the definition of the Rule of Law: "As now understood, the core of the existing principle of the Rule of Law is that all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts. That is something of a mouthful, and may savour of legal mumbo-jumbo. But it is really a compendious way of gathering, within a single principle, rules which, spelled out, will strike most of us as obvious." — the plain-speaking manifesto: an abstract proposition, a self-deprecating aside, then the concrete payoff.
  • Same chapter, the eight rules, rule (1): "The law should be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear, and predictable. The reason is not far to seek." — and the aside on judicial prose: "It is, one may add, a problem compounded by the length and prolixity of many judicial judgments."
  • Introduction — the voice in his own words: "he captures the spirit of liberty and the rule of law... which rest, in his view, upon a set of simple and obvious values and practices... never hectoring or sanctimonious."

Page references for Lives of the Law quotes are to the print edition (chapter/section markers only in the file); add print page numbers when the edition is to hand. The Rule of Law definition is the anchor passage of the skill.

Corpus status (verified 12 August 2026): the passages above are quoted from the in-tree files. The paragraph numbering in the parliament.uk extract is that extract's own; confirm any pinpoint against the ICLR report ([2002] UKHL 27; [2003] 1 AC 120; [2002] 3 WLR 172) before court use.

Not yet harvested (target corpus, all [UNVERIFIED] until verified against the ICLR reports): the classic plain-speaking speeches — R v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex p Simms [2000] 2 AC 115 (freedom of expression); A v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Belmarsh) [2004] UKHL 56; R (Jackson) v Attorney General [2005] UKHL 56; Reynolds v Times Newspapers [2001] 2 AC 127; R v Inland Revenue Commissioners ex p MFK Underwriting Agents [1990] 1 WLR 1545. Sources: parliament.uk judgments are indexed by search engines even though direct fetches are blocked (snippet-harvest, then verify against the printed report); the National Archives Find Case Law holds no House of Lords judgments (UKSC coverage begins 2009), so it cannot supply these; BAILII is Anubis-blocked. No quotation from any of these cases enters a rewrite until the pinpoint is verified.

Hard rules

  • No fabrication. No quotation, passage or attribution that is not verified against a source text (verbatim, with pinpoint). Unverified material is [UNVERIFIED], never silent.
  • Style only. The rewrite changes how the facts are said, never what they are: no new facts, no invented dates or figures, no new legal propositions, no citations added.
  • No evaluation in fact mode. A plain facts section is not a licence for comment; evaluation belongs elsewhere.
  • Numbers and names survive verbatim. Dates, sums, names and quotations inside the passage are preserved exactly.

Self-learning

Append lessons to learnings.md (which passages served as exemplars, what the per-sentence gate caught, source-harvest notes).