Legal language, also known as “legalese,” is notoriously difficult to comprehend. It contains complex linguistic structures and unusual word choices that make it more challenging to understand than other styles of writing, such as non-fiction, news media, and even complex academic texts.
The convoluted structure of many legal sentences makes it tough to understand and remember legal obligations, even for lawyers themselves. However, a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago and MIT suggests that even laypeople resort to using legalese when asked to write laws. This finding indicates that the complexity of legal language may serve as a kind of ritual that helps give the law its power.
One of the main reasons readers struggle with legal texts is a linguistic feature called “centre embedding.” Centre embedding occurs when one sentence is placed inside another sentence. For example, in the sentence “the cat that chased the mouse avoided the dog,” the sentence “the cat chased the mouse” is placed within the middle of the sentence “the cat avoided the dog.” Legal sentences often have much longer centre-embedded structures, making them even more difficult to process.
In their study, the researchers analyzed the 2021 edition of the US legal code and compared it to other genres of writing in English. They found that centre embedding is far more common in legal texts than in other types of writing. The dependency length, which refers to the distance between words that depend on each other, was also much longer in legal language.
Efforts have been made in the United States and elsewhere to write laws in plain language, but the prevalence of centre embedding and other difficult linguistic structures in US law has remained largely unchanged since at least 1950.
The researchers explored possible reasons for the use of legalese. They found that lawyers do not believe texts written in legalese are more enforceable than plain-English texts with the same content. Lawyers also believe that using plain English can improve their career prospects and make clients happier.
Two possible reasons for the use of legalese were investigated. The first is the “copy and edit” hypothesis, suggesting that lawyers may unconsciously copy difficult structures from templates or add them during the editing process. The second is the “magic spell” hypothesis, which suggests that legal language is performative and aims to change the world rather than simply describe it. Difficult structures like centre embedding may be used to highlight the performative nature of legal text.
To test these hypotheses, the researchers asked non-lawyers to write laws, stories about breaking the law, or explanations of a law to a tourist. The participants used more centre-embedded structures when writing laws, supporting the magic spell hypothesis. They did not include more centre embedding when asked to edit their text, contradicting the copy-and-edit hypothesis.
These findings suggest that the difficulty of processing linguistic structures in legal text serves as a cue to the performative nature of the text. If legal language is like a magic spell, simplifying it becomes more feasible. By choosing a new linguistic feature as a marker, alongside plain English, it may be possible to help people better understand legal obligations.