Why legal writing is so awful
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by mere convenience
“THE FIRST thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” is one of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines. You would struggle to find such a line in the writings of lawyers themselves—and not just because they would, presumably, disagree. Though some judges 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?
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Why legal writing is so awful”
From the June 3rd 2023 edition
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