MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

Nature of legalese and precision

• Many see legalese as an attempt to use natural language like a programming language: precise, adversarially robust, and covering many edge cases.
• Others argue legal language is often still ambiguous despite being verbose and complex.
• Technical terms of art (“reasonable efforts”, “manslaughter”, etc.) serve as shorthand for long, litigated definitions, but make texts opaque to non‑lawyers.

Ambiguity, intent, and under-specification

• Several commenters distinguish harmful ambiguity (multiple plausible meanings) from deliberate under‑specification (clear principle, details left to judges).
• Some argue ambiguity can be socially useful, letting courts apply “intent of the law” in unforeseen cases; others see it as a power tool for the wealthy and for selective enforcement.
• Examples like “next Wednesday” and “this weekend” illustrate how ordinary time expressions are already hard to pin down, motivating more rigid legal phrasing.

On the MIT “center‑embedding / magic spell” study

• The paper’s focus on center‑embedded clauses as the main readability issue gets both interest and pushback.
• Several think the experiment (crowdworkers drafting laws) mostly shows people imitating the style of existing statutes, not necessarily trying to project authority.
• Some call the study underpowered and methodologically weak, and note it largely ignores centuries of legal‑linguistics scholarship and the role of judges and precedent.

Historical, institutional, and economic factors

• Case law and precedent strongly incentivize reusing exact, litigated phrases to reduce risk; changing wording can open new attack surfaces in court.
• In common‑law systems, statutes, regulations, and constitutional principles have different purposes and audiences, which shapes how “dense” each is.
• Commenters also mention professional gatekeeping, path dependence, political coalition‑building, and even “paid by the word” history as contributing pressures.

Comparisons to programming and formal languages

• Frequent analogies: law as code executed by human “compilers” (courts), written for adversarial interpreters.
• Some propose formal or domain‑specific languages for law (e.g., Catala), or highly constrained natural languages; others warn this would recreate a “Latin priesthood” of experts.
• There is interest in LLMs and knowledge‑graph tooling to navigate statutes and case law, but concern about hallucinations and persistent ambiguity.

Plain language and reform

• US “Plain Language” initiatives and clear drafting in places like Canada/New Zealand are cited as evidence that much legal text can be simplified without losing force.
• Lawyers in the thread report being taught to avoid unnecessary legalese, but entrenched templates and risk aversion slow change.