I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.
Parsing through the what and how of what a law regulates isn’t easy; people get sent to school for it, after all. But it is more complicated than it needs to be. The occasional Latin flourishes don’t do many favors for one — we could replace res ipsa loquitor with “duh” overnight if everyone got on board — but the difficulty of reading the law goes deeper than that. The unnecessary complexity is structural; a recent MIT study honed in on what makes legal writing so difficult to process and found that even laypeople ratchet up the reading difficulty. MIT has coverage:
That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand…“Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated,” Gibson says. “Lawyers don’t like it, laypeople don’t like it, so the point of this current paper was to try and figure out why they write documents this way.”
At the onset of the experiment, the researchers assumed that legal writing’s idiosyncrasies could be explained by repeated drafting: You write a thing, realize that a term is undefined, then you lob the definition in the middle of the sentence ad infinitum. I mean, on and on. As it turns out, lawyers and lay folks write laws in a convoluted way whether or not they have the option to draft, redraft, and make their language more concise. That led the researchers to assume that the reason that people write laws that way is, in essence, to impress whoever is reading the damned thing.
Thinking like a lawyer makes you a prestige hound, even at the level of grammar.
Speaking concretely, what’s so bad about center-embedding? At the end of the day, it’s all grammatical, right? In short, the shit just isn’t conducive to memory and comprehension. If you’d like a longer explanation, I suggest you clear your schedule for the next 50 minutes:
What can you do to not fall for the center embedding trap? Keep it simple, Esquire. Let this be a reminder that the words you deploy can either save or cause your readers a bunch of trouble. Clarity may not bring you prestige but it may offer your readers comprehension. That’s worth bragging about.
MIT Study Explains Why Laws Are Written In An Incomprehensible Style [MIT]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.