Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language.

Area of Science:

• Linguistic analysis
• Cognitive psychology
• Legal studies

Background:

• Contracts are increasingly common but remain difficult for non-experts to understand.
• Previous theories suggest legal inaccessibility stems from specialized expert knowledge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify specific linguistic features contributing to contract inaccessibility.
• To experimentally test the impact of these features on comprehension and recall.
• To challenge existing theories on legal text comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Corpus analysis of approximately 10 million words across contracts and nine other genres.
• Two experiments involving 184 participants evaluating text excerpts with and without specific linguistic features.

Main Results:

• Contracts exhibit significantly higher proportions of difficult-to-process features (jargon, center-embedded clauses, passive voice, non-standard capitalization) compared to other genres.
• Excerpts with these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates, even by experienced readers.
• Center-embedded clauses demonstrated the most significant negative impact on recall.

Conclusions:

• Contract inaccessibility is largely due to poor writing and associated working-memory limitations, not solely a lack of specialized legal knowledge.
• Simplifying legal texts by removing problematic features is feasible and would enhance societal access to legal information.
• Findings challenge the "specialized concepts account" of legal theory.