Emily Chan
Have you ever had to read legal documents or contracts and found that the language they were written in was utterly incomprehensible?
The antiquated wordage, run-on sentences, and giant blocks of paragraphs are frustrating for anyone who doesn’t have a law degree.
In fact, even lawyers sometimes struggle to understand legalese. So, why does this style continue to be used?
A team of cognitive scientists from MIT has suggested that the complex nature of legalese is meant to convey a sense of power and authority.
In a new study, the researchers found that even people who weren’t lawyers used this type of language when asked to write laws.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” said Edward Gibson, the senior author of the study and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
Since 2020, the research team has been analyzing the characteristics of legalese. In 2022, they evaluated legal contracts and compared them to other types of writing, such as newspaper articles, academic papers, and movie scripts.
The assessment revealed that legal documents tend to have long definitions situated in the middle of sentences, a feature called center embedding.
Previously, linguists have found that the structure can make text significantly more difficult to understand because it is not typical of human languages.
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