Study Explains Why Laws Are Written in an Incomprehensible Style
20th October 2025
Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?
MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.
Eric Martinez Ph.D. is the lead author of the study. Francis Mollica, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is also an author of the paper.
Good catch. What they call “center-embedding” may stem from the fact that in European countries many had laws that originated in Roman legal codes that were written in Latin. Latin can say many things more concisely and unambiguously than English (and Greek has the same advantage over Latin)(and Syriac has the same advantage over Greek),
Many fantasy stories that use magic require that magical incantations be uttered in a foreign (preferably ancient) language. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels have a lot of fun with this.