“Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language”, 2022-07 (; backlinks):
Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why?
Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈ 10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features—including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization—relative to 9 other baseline genres of written and spoken English.
Two experiments (n = 184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features.
These findings (1) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts; (2) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (ie. poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge; and (3) suggest editing out problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial for society at-large.