The article isolates and explicates those characteristics of legal language which may cause difficulties to non-law graduate students undeliaking interdisciplinary research theses requiring n understanding of law. These characteristics consist of three categories. The first category relates to the vocabulary of the law. The second relates to the continued use by lawyers of overlong
syntactically complex sentence structures. The third relates to what James Boyd White has called the 'unstated conventions' by which legal language operates: a second layer of meaning underpinning legal language, but which is seldom stated in it. Linguistic schema theory is applied to these 'unstated conventions' to explicate them.