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Legal documents are notoriously difficult to parse, and a new study attempts to explain why: the so-called legalese that dominates this kind of writing is apparently adopted to convey a sense of knowledge and authority.
Legalese is now so well embedded in our collective thinking that even non-lawyers use it, as shown by a team of researchers from the University of Chicago Law School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Melbourne in Australia.
In the same way that magic spells are often invoked in a rather grand and verbose style – to give them that extra air of importance – people also tend to apply the same sort of ratcheting up of complexity when it comes to legal documents, the study found.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says cognitive scientist Edward Gibson, from MIT.
Previous research had shown that long definitions in the middle of sentences – known as ‘center-embedding’ – contributed significantly to the complexity of legal documents. Here the team wanted to explore the possible reasons for this center-embedding.
Gibson and his colleagues ran experiments in which 286 non-lawyer volunteers were asked to compose different types of writing: texts describing laws, stories about crimes involving those laws, and explanations of the laws to people from other countries.
The results showed center-embedding was common in law writing, whether or not the participants were asked to go back and edit their drafts later – suggesting that it’s not rounds of revisions that make legal documents complicated.
More plain language and less center-embedding were noticeable in the writing that wasn’t describing laws, so this is something that only really appears in legal texts. The next step is to find out the source – and the researchers want to look back into older legal texts to see where this style started.
“In English culture, if you want to write something that’s a magic spell, people know that the way to do that is you put a lot of old-fashioned rhymes in there,” says Gibson. “We think maybe center-embedding is signaling legalese in the same way.”
As far back as the mid-19th century, Dickens was writing about a lawsuit that had “become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means,” – and there has been little improvement since. That goes against the natural human drive to communicate more effectively and to be better understood.
So essentially, in legal writing, clarity is being sacrificed in an effort to sound more authoritative. The good news is this means there’s a simple solution.
“These results… suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content,” the authors write in their paper.
The research team is hoping that the study leads to legal documents becoming more straightforward and accessible. Lawyers themselves don’t like legalese, and the rest of us have even less chance of making sense of it.
“Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated,” says Gibson.
“Lawyers don’t like it, laypeople don’t like it, so the point of this current paper was to try and figure out why they write documents this way.”
The research has been published in PNAS.