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.
Nuttapong punna – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
A follow-up study in 2023 determined that legalese makes documents more difficult for lawyers to understand as well.
Overall, lawyers favored plain English versions of documents and thought they were just as lawful as legal documents written in the traditional style.
“Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated,” said 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.”
For the most recent study, the authors wanted to figure out why legalese was still so widespread if even legal professionals were not fans of it. They asked 200 people without legal backgrounds to write two kinds of texts.
First, the participants had to write laws banning crimes such as arson, burglary, drunk driving, and drug trafficking. Then, they were asked to write stories about the crimes.
Half of the participants were instructed to add more information after writing their initial law or story. The researchers noted that all the participants used center embedding to write their laws, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to add to it later.
Additionally, the stories related to the laws were written in much plainer English, even if they had to add to it later.
The findings pointed toward the “magic-spell hypothesis.” Magic spells are written in a style that’s different from everyday language, just like legalese. Doing so may signal a certain authority that makes laws sound stronger and more enforceable.
The recent study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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