Anyone who has read a law article, a sentence or a report has come across legalese: a complex, convoluted language, made up of obsolete terms, very long sentences and a flood of subordinate clauses, which make it almost incomprehensible to the layman. Even those in the field, it seems, do not seem to like it, and often admit that they find summaries of legal documents written in everyday language clearer. For this reason, a group of researchers from MIT asked themselves where the characteristics that make legalese so difficult come from, arriving at a surprising conclusion: it is a linguistic style that perpetuates itself because it seems to give authority to jurisprudential texts, no more necessary – in reality – than speaking in rhyme to pronounce a magic formula.
The example of magical language is not accidental: it is precisely in analogy with the archaic rhymes pronounced by magicians and sorcerers in films and fantasy stories that the hypothesis described by American researchers in their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was born. They call it the “magic spell hypothesis”, and it states that the convoluted language of legalese serves to distinguish it from everyday language and to give it a special authority, similar to what happens in magic, in which rhyming formulas, exotic and archaic words contribute to creating a language to which it is easy to attribute arcane and supernatural properties.
How to confirm this possibility? The researchers used an experiment, which compared two possible explanations for the birth of legal language: the “magic spell hypothesis”, and a phenomenon called “center embedding”, that is, that legal texts are born as relatively simple drafts, both conceptually and linguistically, and are then gradually enriched with specifications, exceptions, clarifications, which are inserted inside (hence center embedding) the already formulated sentences, complicating them and making the periods progressively longer and richer in subordinate clauses, transforming the original everyday language into legalese.
To test the two hypotheses, they involved 200 volunteers in the experiment, chosen among people who were not experts in the law, who were asked to write two types of texts: legal rules that prohibited a certain crime, such as drunk driving or theft, and fictional stories in which the same crime was staged. During the experiment, the participants were also asked on the fly to modify the laws and stories they were working on, to take into account some small changes or clarifications to the rules they were writing about that were reported by the researchers.
The experiments revealed two things. The first is that even people completely ignorant of the law, when they find themselves writing a legal provision by hand, end up using a garbled language very similar to legalese, which did not happen when the volunteers wrote about the same topics in the form of a story. The second is that by complicating or specifying the provisions to be written on the fly, the volunteers did not produce increasingly convoluted texts: the center embedding hypothesis, in short, proved incorrect, because the impulse to write complicated and convoluted legal texts was present in all the participants from the beginning of the experiment.
Legalese, in short, is somehow intrinsic to our legal culture. Something we all expect to find in the norms that punctuate the code of our laws. Where these expectations come from is not clear, and that is what researchers now want to find out.