MIT-Studie erklärt, warum Gesetze in einem unverständlichen Stil geschrieben werden: Das verworrene „Juristendeutsch“, das in juristischen Dokumenten verwendet wird, hilft Anwälten, ein besonderes Gefühl von Autorität zu vermitteln, die sogenannte „Zauberspruch-Hypothese“. Die Studie ergab, dass sogar Nichtjuristen diese Art von Sprache verwenden, wenn sie mit dem Schreiben von Gesetzen beauftragt werden.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehensible-writing-style-0819
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I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121)
From the linked article:
MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style
The convoluted “legalese” used in legal documents conveys a special sense of authority, and even non-lawyers have learned to wield it.
Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?
MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
In a study appearing this week in the journal of the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.
“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.”
However, the findings ended up pointing toward a different hypothesis, the so-called “magic spell hypothesis.” Just as magic spells are written with a distinctive style that sets them apart from everyday language, the convoluted style of legal language appears to signal a special kind of authority, the researchers say.
“In English culture, if you want to write something that’s a magic spell, people know that the way to do that is you put a lot of old-fashioned rhymes in there. We think maybe center-embedding is signaling legalese in the same way,” Gibson says.
Important part from the abstract:
“these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that **laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.**”
I can’t remember where, but I was told by one of my instructors once that if a judge asks if you *understood* a contract when you signed it, and you said no, you signed it without actually understanding what it all meant, the judge *could* rule that the contract is not valid. Obviously, there are some conditions to this, and it’s open to interpretation, and may not apply at all to whatever contract you may have signed. Just a concept.
As a lawyer, a large part is also simply boilerplate language being passed down from person to person, edited and tweaked by teams of people who didn’t originally draft it. Even if it were in plain language, it leads to a sort of pseudo-English that reads like an AI wrote it.
Laws need to be written in a formal programming language. Doing it in a human language just leads to ambiguity and confusion due to the implicit and subjective nature that human languages inherently have.
That… feels like some nonsense to me.
The primary purpose of legal writing isn’t clarity of the intent for the reader. It’s ironclad establishment, enforcement, and protection of the nitty-gritty technical details. Yknow, that place the devil lives?
It’s why contract attorneys go back and forth over every little word choice. It’s not density for its own sake — a piece of legal writing is chainmail, woven carefully, link by link, to withstand attack down the road.
I’d also add that it’s a shibboleth
I remember being in an argument with a lawyer who insisted that lawyers were famous for writing clear and comprehensible documents.