Abracadabra in the law
Why legal language sounds so complicated
Legal texts are complex and probably difficult for most people to understand. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (USA) has now investigated why this is the case. It even sees parallels to magic spells ...
Just as the sayings contained special rhymes and archaic terms to signal power, the convoluted language of the lawyers conveys a sense of authority, they say. For their study, the team led by Edward Gibson had more than 200 non-lawyers from the USA write official laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson and drug dealing. They were also asked to write unofficial descriptions of laws.
Embedding in sentences
The result: when writing, the participants tried their hand at typical legal language. "People seem to understand that there is an implicit rule that says this is how laws should sound, and they write them this way," said Gibson. For example, there were typical embeddings in the middle of sentences. In the unofficial description, on the other hand, this was dispensed with - even when the participants were asked to add certain things to their text afterwards.
In an earlier analysis, a team led by the cognitive scientist had also shown that legal documents often have long definitions in the middle of sentences. This can make it considerably more difficult to understand the text. "Legal language has somehow developed this tendency to build structures into other structures in a way that is not typical of human languages."
Legal language has somehow developed this tendency to incorporate structures into other structures in a way that is not typical of human languages.
Wissenschaftler Edward Gibson
Simplified paraphrasing possible
According to the researchers, they want to motivate legislators to formulate laws more comprehensibly in future. After all, they are convinced that laws can be rewritten in a simplified style without losing or distorting the legal content.
This article has been automatically translated,
read the original article here.
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