At some point in our lives, we will all need a lawyer.
There are just things that the general public isn’t equipped to navigate on their own, whether it’s something as innocuous as writing up a will or something scary, like being arrested for a crime.
But this recent MIT research shows that lawyers have ways to keep you needing their services – and it’s more than a little sneaky.
The findings show that lawyers use “legalese,” or the often-cryptic language employed in court filings and official laws, to maintain their authority over the general population.
The researchers claimed that the people who write these documents are essentially casting “magic spells” that confound others with terrible style and structure.
MIT cognitive science professor and the study’s lead author, Edward Gibson, came to these conclusions by interviewing 200 native English speakers who were not lawyers.
He asked them to write laws about prohibiting things like drugs and drunk driving, and then to write a story about those issues out in society.
Most non-lawyer participants wrote the stories in plain English, but when writing laws, tried to employ “center-embedding,” in which long explanations are crammed into the middle of sentences.
They say this means we all expect legal documents to read the way we do.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way.”
And guess what?
Research finds that lawyers hate it, too.
“Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated. 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.”
The most compelling theory as to why we still use it, then, is the “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. We think maybe center-embedding is signaling legalese in the same way.”
Like the rest of us, the researchers hope we can make legal documents easier for everyone to understand 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.”
We might not even recognize legal documents for what they are, if changes were made.
At least, not at first.
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