‘Magic spell’: the secret of why legal texts are difficult to understand

Published:

Sep 8, 2024 09:34 GMT

The complicated structure of most legal rulings may be a deliberate choice to impose a particular kind of authority, rather than the result of ingrained habit, a new study has found.

A group of researchers from scientific institutions in the US and Australia found evidence suggesting that the main reason why Legal documents are difficult to understand, it is due to attempts to write them in a language that conveys the feeling of authority and power, reported Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The complicated structure of most legal sentences can make it difficult to understand and memorize legal obligations. However, legal language is so ingrained in the collective thinking, that even those who are not lawyers use it.

Previous research has found that the difficulties people, including lawyers, experience when reading legal texts could be due to the long definitions inserted in the middle of sentencesThis particular linguistic characteristic is called ‘central inlay’.

Professor Francis Mollica explained that centered sentences are difficult to process, as readers have to remember words that depend on each other. This situation complicates the reading of the legal document. In an attempt to find out the possible reasons for the use of center embedding, scientists undertook a new study.

The imposition of an authority?

The results of the investigation, which were published In the journal PNAS, they revealed that the complex ‘legalese’ It may be a deliberate choice to impose a special kind of authority, rather than the result of habit.

The researchers examined a variety of approaches to understanding the persistence of legal language. In one theory, called ‘copy and edit hypothesis’it was suggested that legal documents They start out simple and then become more complex as more information is inserted into existing sentences..

However, the findings obtained in the investigation indicated a different explanation, so the specialists proposed a new theory which they named ‘magic spell hypothesis’This approach proposes that, just as Spells are crafted in a specific style to convey authorityThe complex language of legal documents serves a similar function.

Both hypotheses were tested in several experiments in which participants from the US were asked to write laws and stories about those laws. It was found that participants used social embeddedness when writing the laws. However, this method was not used when writing the stories.

The researchers concluded that they wish to investigate the historical origins of this linguistic feature in legal documents. They also stressed that they hope that their study will lead to legal texts being simpler and more accessible to the general public.

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