Do you speak legalese?

For work or for other more mundane needs, I happened to delve into the obscure language of contracts, tenders and regulations. Although I believed I could manage on my own, thinking that my level of education was adequate enough, I had to ask for help from experienced friends/colleagues. The most obvious example was, a few years ago, for the purchase of a property and access to the related government bonuses. After nights spent understanding the conditions of applicability of certain rules (which in turn referred to others, which in turn referred to others...), I still had to ask for confirmation from a couple of accountants and architects, who, in their opinion time, they expressed different opinions. The complexity and regulatory uncertainty, among other things, seems to implicitly determine and perpetrate a discriminatory condition: for reasons of education, lack of networks and resources to pay consultants, many people end up being excluded from exercising a right. A policy with a redistributive vocation, in fact, can therefore end up benefiting those who need it least.

But I don't want to dwell on the redistributive consequences of complex regulations, but rather to focus on this complexity and understand to what extent those who work with these regulations are really aware of the degree of difficulty of the legal language. Doing a quick search in one of my favorite scientific journals (PNAS), I came across an article with a rather provocative title: Even lawyers don't like legalese.

The article first focuses on the fact that the language present in contracts, laws and other legal documents is notoriously inaccessible to ordinary citizens. For example, at the syntactic level, the language of contracts and legislation is extremely full of clauses and subordinate clauses, which involve long-distance syntactic dependencies. Furthermore, legal documents have been found to be loaded with words that are rarely used in everyday language. It has also been shown how the use of such complex syntactic and lexical elements inhibits the ability to remember text.

If there is broad consensus regarding how and how complicated legal language is to understand, the question remains open as to why this happens. Understanding why jurists and legislators write in such complex ways can contribute to political efforts to make laws more accessible, ensuring that citizens understand and respect them. The authors conduct two experiments to answer this question. In the first experiment, they demonstrate that lawyers, like “ordinary people”, are less able to remember and understand the content of a complex legal text than equivalent content written in a simplified register. In the second experiment, the authors find that lawyers rate simplified contracts as equally “enforceable” as contracts written in legalese. Additionally, they rate simplified contracts as preferable to legalese contracts on several dimensions, including overall quality, appropriateness of style, and likelihood of being signed by a customer.

According to the authors, jurists who write in complex ways do so out of convenience and tradition, rather than out of mere preference. Simplifying legal documents would therefore be beneficial for both professionals and non-professionals. Furthermore, the formal format that is often necessary for some documents is not necessarily synonymous with complexity: lawyers could adopt a simpler register to achieve a level of formality that better aligns with their communication objectives, rather than burdening clients and if themselves with “deceptive legalese”. We are alluding here to a possible instrumental use of legalese, fueled by an asymmetry of knowledge, which can dangerously result in the exercise of power: when ordinary people do not understand the dense plots of the law, they rely on the expert, who therefore has hand the power to "cheat" them or direct them towards understanding and exercising their rights. Also for this reason, it would therefore be appropriate to improve the process of democratization of the language of our regulatory apparatus.


Perluigi Conzo
NP November 2023