Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis ( n = 59) million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments ( n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis , we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law’s complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law’s authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a law and policy perspective, 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.

中文翻译：

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即使是外行人也会使用法律术语


尽管沟通效率和法律原则的原则规定法律对于普通世界来说是可以理解的，但经验证据表明法律文件对于律师和外行来说在很大程度上是难以理解的。在这里，语料库分析（n = 59）百万单词）首先复制并扩展了先前的工作，揭示了相对于六种基线英语流派而言，包含显着更高比例的复杂句法结构的规律。接下来，两个预先注册的文本生成实验（n = 286）测试了关于这些复杂结构如何进入法律文档的两个主要假设。根据魔法咒语假说，我们发现负责撰写官方法律的人的写作方式比负责撰写具有同等概念复杂性的非官方法律文本的人的写作方式更加复杂。与复制和编辑假设相反，我们没有发现证据表明编辑法律文档的人比从头开始编写同一文档时的书写方式更复杂。从认知角度来看，这些结果表明，法律是人类语言提高沟通效率的一般趋势的罕见例外。特别是，这些发现表明法律的复杂性源自其表现性，由此可以插入低频结构以表明法律的权威性、改变世界状态的性质，但代价是增加了对读者的处理要求。从法律和政策的角度来看，这些结果表明，法律的普遍性和不可理解性之间的紧张关系并不是固有的，而且法律可以在不丢失或扭曲沟通内容的情况下进行简化。