MIT Researchers Find That Lawyers Do Something Very Sleazy to Keep Themselves in Demand

"People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound."

Fluent in Legalese

If you've ever felt like you're reading gibberish when trying to sift through legal language, you're not alone — and as a new MIT study has found, that may be the intended effect.

According to the researchers' findings, lawyers use so-called legalese, or the cryptic language associated with court filings and laws, to assert authority over those less versed in such language.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper penned by MIT cognitive scientists posits that people who pen legal documents are essentially casting "magic spells" intended to confound and dominate readers using this uniquely terrible style and structure of writing.

Using a crowdsourcing platform, MIT cognitive science professor and senior study author Edward Gibson asked 200 native English-speaking non-lawyers first to write laws about prohibiting things like drugs and drunk driving and then to write a story about said societal ills.

As the researchers discovered, most of the non-lawyer participants used the so-called "center-embedding" style, in which long explanations are shoehorned into the middle of sentences, without being prompted when writing their fake laws. The related stories, in contrast, were written in much plainer English. This suggests that legalese essentially proliferates because people expect legal documents to sound that way.

"People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound," Gibson said in a statement, "and they write them that way."

Witchcraft

In a previous study published last year, Gibson and his team found that this language, which is very much "not typical of human languages," is detested by lawyers, too.

"Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated," Gibson said in the statement. "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."

Though the paper presents varying theories as to why legalese is still the lingua franca of law, the most compelling is the aforementioned "magic spell" hypothesis.

"In English culture, if you want to write something that’s a magic spell, people know that the way to do that is you put a lot of old-fashioned rhymes in there," the cognitive scientist said. "We think maybe center-embedding is signaling legalese in the same way."

By studying this cryptic take on the English language, the researchers are hoping to make legal documents much easier to read in the future.

"We have learned only very recently what it is that makes legal language so complicated, and therefore I am optimistic about being able to change it," Gibson explained in the statement.

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