Study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

Legalese may function like a “magic spell” by signaling authority rather than helping comprehension. MIT researchers argue that convoluted legal writing uses grammatical center-embedding and other complex structures as a cultural cue: even when people are asked to write laws, they tend to produce legalese-like syntax. Across experiments with around 200 non-lawyers, participants used center-embedded clauses when writing laws about crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. The same participants wrote related narratives in much plainer English. The researchers also tested a “copy and edit” explanation (that complexity is added later) and did not find it as the primary driver. They instead found patterns consistent with authority signaling, and plan to study historical roots by analyzing older legal traditions including British law and potentially early laws such as the Hammurabi Code.