Why legal writing is so awful

“THE FIRST thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” is one of Shakespeare’s . You would struggle to find such a line in the writings of lawyers themselves—and not just because they would, presumably, disagree. Though are sophisticated stylists, most legal language is fussy, tangled and incapable of producing anything so pithy. (This is no doubt one reason so many people want to kill all the lawyers.) But do lawyers write that way to impress, to bewilder—or perhaps because they must?In a study published in , Eric Martínez and his colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh tried to find out. Contracts written in “legalese”, as well as simplified versions conveying identical concepts, were shown to American lawyers and laypeople. It turns out that lawyers struggle with, and dislike, legal language almost as much as their clients.