Why is legal writing so convoluted?

Legal writing is famously inscrutable and inaccessible — especially fond of long parenthetical ideas shoved in the middle of sentences. And according to a recent study, their reader-unfriendly prose is contagious.

“Legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike,” write the authors of a study published this summer. In other words, nobody — not even lawyers themselves — can easily slog through their stuff. Yet they keep cranking out sentences like this gem I found online: “I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.”

In my books and columns, I sometimes take badly written passages and show how they could have been better. No can do this time. You can’t streamline a passage if you don’t know what it says. Bravo, returner of the stipulation to dismiss. Bravo.

If non-lawyers can’t decipher stuff like this and even lawyers themselves find it hard to understand, why do they write like this?

To find out, researchers asked 200 study participants to write laws prohibiting crimes like drunk driving and burglary. Then they asked them to write stories about those crimes.

The laws they wrote contained unnecessarily long, labyrinthine sentences with lots of parenthetical explanations crammed in. The stories, however, were written simply, without the parenthetical information stuffing. The kicker: None of the participants were lawyers. They were laypeople who somehow got it in their heads that bloated, fussy sentences make you sound more authoritative.

Researchers explain this with the “magic spell hypothesis” legal writing, which you can read about in my recent column.

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