The LexPublica Blog

The spelling of English is a small bugbear for websites with an international focus – especially for those few sites like LexPublica that need to dance on the point at the intersection of correctness, comprehensibility and the law. While spelling isn’t the biggest issue we’re facing, it is still important for us to choose a consistent and well-considered approach.

An early example of the issue is “licence”. In much of the English-speaking world, licensing is accomplished through a licence. The licence is the document, while license is the activity. In the United States, however, license may also refer to the document.

Choosing to use licence or license is a small point, but attention to detail is significant because we’re building a legal commons and precision in language matters in the law. It matters especially because one of LexPublica’s long-term objectives is the standardization of contracts and contract language.

When we hashed out the issue, the major choices seemed to be: laziness, provincialism, simplicity or commonality.

The lazy approach is to let spelling sort itself out in the future, as it becomes an issue. We didn’t think that this would be a particularly good approach to take – we’ll have enough trouble with doing this sort of thing by accident.

Provincialism would let us stick to the Canadian dialect of English and subject others to our uncomfortable compromise between British and US English. This approach might nettle our friends to the south and induce them to waste time fiddling with the spelling in LexPublica documents.

Simplicity would let us choose the simplest version of any given spelling, dialects be damned.

Finally, commonality would dictate that we choose the variant shared across the greatest number of dialects.

Of all the approaches, commonality seems to give us the best result. So long as the meaning is consistent with the shared spelling, then the common spelling has the best chance of having the right meaning to the most people.

It’s been a surprising amount of work to come to the decision to use “licence” as the noun and “license” as the verb.

Like many rules, this rule has an exception: when “license” appears in the name of a specific document, or when quoting from a document, one should leave the use as is. For example:

The Creative Commons Attribution License is the licence used by LexPublica to license its blog content.

Of course, this is the kind of issue for which style manuals are written. We’ll write more about our plans for a community-developed style manual for contract drafting in another post.