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Comment on MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

667@lemmy.radio ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The researchers had a couple of hypotheses for why legalese is so prevalent. One was the “copy and edit hypothesis,” which suggests that legal documents begin with a simple premise, and then additional information and definitions are inserted into already existing sentences, creating complex center-embedded clauses.

“We thought it was plausible that what happens is you start with an initial draft that’s simple, and then later you think of all these other conditions that you want to include. And the idea is that once you’ve started, it’s much easier to center-embed that into the existing provision,” says Martinez, who is now a fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.

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WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Yeah, when corporate and lobbyist lawyers are passing around a doc, obviously the easiest method is to simply insert their own provisions. They’re not paid to understand, rephrase and simplify the text. They’re paid to make it as complex and obtuse as possible.

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- 667@lemmy.radio ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
  Emphasis mine. That’s not to say what you’ve mentioned doesn’t happen, but even non-lawyers wind up writing this way. The article is interesting and worth reading.
  
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