Author: Francis Mollica, Lecturer in Computational Cognitive Science, The University of Melbourne

Legal language, or “legalese”, is notoriously hard to understand. Legalese contains more difficult linguistic structures and unusual word choices than most other styles of writing, including non-fiction, news media and even complex academic texts. The convoluted structure of many legal sentences can make it tough to understand and remember legal obligations. Even lawyers don’t like legal language. So why does it work this way? In a new study with my colleagues Eric Martínez (University of Chicago) and Edward Gibson (MIT), we found that even laypeople resort to legalese when asked to write laws – which suggests the complexity of legal…