6 The Nepali law tie-in

The standard is not a taste of English teachers; it is written into Nepali law. The Constitution of Nepal 2072, Article 27, guarantees the right to information, which presupposes that an official decision is written in language an ordinary person can understand. The Electronic Transactions Act 2063 gives legal effect to electronic records, which makes the exact wording of an electronic notice decisive, since there is no clerk at a counter to explain it. The Civil Code 2074 and the Code of Civil Procedure 2074 both require pleadings and applications to state the facts and the relief claimed; a pleading that states neither, but is grammatically flawless, is rejected for what it does not say. And under the Nepal Bar Council rules, a draft that misleads the court about a date, an amount or a party is a matter of professional conduct, not of style. So the test at the end of this unit is not "is it good English" but "can a judge, a client and an opposing counsel all read the same thing out of this document".