Legal Language Is Deliberately Arcane To Signal Power, Study Finds

A new MIT study reveals why legal documents are so hard to read: Both lawyers and non-lawyers instinctively use complex language to signal authority, similar to how magic spells use archaic terms. The research, published in PNAS, found that even laypeople default to convoluted 'center-embedded' clauses when writing laws, but switch to plain language for other tasks. From a report:

[Edward] Gibson's [an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences] research group has been studying the unique characteristics of legalese since 2020, when Martinez came to MIT after earning a law degree from Harvard Law School. In a 2022 study, Gibson, Martinez, and Mollica analyzed legal contracts totaling about 3.5 million words, comparing them with other types of writing, including movie scripts, newspaper articles, and academic papers.

That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences -- a feature known as 'center-embedding.' Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand. 'Legalese somehow has developed this tendency to put structures inside other structures, in a way which is not typical of human languages,' Gibson says.

In a follow-up study published in 2023, the researchers found that legalese also makes documents more difficult for lawyers to understand. Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents. 'Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated,' Gibson says. '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.'

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