Law new is legislation enacted to address specific issues, update existing policies, or respond to changing social needs. It is a vital tool that allows Congress to shape public policy, reflect the values and priorities of the electorate, and adapt to new challenges. Laws are created through a complex legislative process, including drafting, committee review, floor debate, and voting. Often, laws are more successful when they have bipartisan support.
A new study finds that legalese, the convoluted language used in written legal documents, helps convey a sense of authority. Researchers found that reading complex legal documents—including contracts and statutes—can make people believe that they are better informed, even when they’re not.
The study’s authors, MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson and graduate students Eric Martinez and Francis Mollica, analyzed legal contracts totaling about 3.5 million words. The analysis revealed that, when writing legalese, writers use an underlying “rule” to construct sentences in a particular way that makes the document more authoritative. They call this “center-embedding”—meaning that the sentence’s subject, verb, and object are centered in the middle of the clause. This construction creates a sense of authority, but it also obscures the meaning and may make the document harder to read.
Gibson’s team is continuing to research legalese and its effect on readers. They plan to examine more legal documents and conduct interviews with lawyers to learn more about how they write. They’re also going back in time to look at early American laws and British law, as well as the Hammurabi Code—the world’s earliest set of laws, dating to 1750 BC. They’ll be looking for evidence that the same grammatical structure was used in ancient legal texts as well.
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