Study finds legalese language a "magic spell" of authority

Researchers at MIT set out to study the origins of impenetrable legal language, especially complex sentences that mix definitions with directives—a hallmark of "legalese." Expecting to find that such language results from legislators or officials adding to and editing earlier, plainer versions of the text as the need and opportunity arises, they instead found that they were like that from the outset. Legalese is an unnecessary "magic spell" that requires intense memorization and contexual awareness to be understood.

In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.

To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.

"When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-embedding in either case," Martinez says.

It looks rather like authority keeping readers out of the texts that bind them, doesn't it? The researchers are moving on to earlier sources from English law to parse out whether Americans invented all this or if they just made it worse.

Two things come to mind regarding what is surely a more intentional path to legalese: a desire for logical precision. First, well put today by Hacker News commenter Swizec:

Is legalese not just the result of trying to use English as a programming language? Any time I try to write English (or other natlang) precisely and unambiguously and robust against adversarial interpretations, it comes out looking like legalese.

And second, I thought of some of the writings of Judith Butler, performing likewise in the humanities. Both the hacker and the sociologist are averse to authority, but require a level of control over words that ask more of the reader than most readers can give.