Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?
MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question.
Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
The origins of legalese
Gibson’s lab is now investigating the origins of center-embedding in legal documents. Early American laws were based on British law, so the researchers plan to analyze British laws to see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction. And going back much further, they plan to analyze whether center-embedding is found in the Hammurabi Code, the earliest known set of laws, which dates to around 1750 BC.
Even laypeople use legalese
These results further suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.