I must confess that some of the funniest moments in my proffessional experience have taken place while discussing about technology with corporate lawyers, and I have to recognice that reading their best texts is not far from the inspiring experience of reading Marcel Proust…

Although recent work has revealed that even lawyers prefer simplified legal documents, it remains an open question why complex features such as center-embedding make their way into legal documents.

To answer this question, a study¹ published last July tested two leading hypotheses for why lawyers write the way that they do:

• The magic spell hypothesis, according to which lawyers and lawmakers write in a convoluted manner in order to lend legal documents a ritualistic, spell-like element.
• The copy and-edit hypothesis, according to which conditions and specifications are often considered only after the creation of an initial draft and are more easily embedded into the center of existing sentences as opposed to being written-out into separate sentences.

In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found that people tasked with writing laws wrote in a more convoluted manner (i.e. more center-embedding) than when tasked with writing control texts of plausibly equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the document from scratch.

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(1) Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, ‘Even Laypeople Use Legalese’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 35 (27 August 2024): e2405564121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2405564121.

Featured Image: Voynich manuscript