So Much for Plain Language: An Analysis of the Accessibility of United States Federal Laws Over Time

Martínez, Eric Palacios; Mollica, Francis; Gibson, E.L.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4036863

Cited by 2 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Many studies suggest that legal language deviates quite heavily from plain English and has been and will continue to be more challenging to understand than standard English. This is in line with common intuition and plain-language advocates, as well as recent findings regarding private legal documents (Martinez et al, 2022;Martinez et al, 2022;Jiang et al, 2019;Yan, 2013), which suggest that the language of private legal documents is difficult to understand, (Martinez et al, 2022, p. 13;Lastres-López, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: a corpus-based study

Lin

Afzaal

Aldayel

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study compared the linguistic difficulty of legal translated texts with the syntactic complexity of native English legal writings in order to demonstrate the statistically significant differences between the two big datasets. The study applies features of the syntactic complexity of sentences within legal text translations that translated texts are less complicated than their original counterparts. It provides an example of how easy plain English translation in legal communication might result in understandable target writings. The findings of the legal translation of the people of three regions reveal striking patterns in terms of syntactic complexity and legal communication in plain English, which are consistent with previous research. Complex nominal and hypotactic structures result in a high number of propositions per sentence, placing a high demand on the cognitive processing abilities of those who read and understand the text. The statistics show considerable differences among the three locations and various forms of company law corpora. The study is the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the accessibility of legal jargon compared to other forms of English, emphasizing the efficacy of plain-language initiatives in legal translations.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: a corpus-based study

Lin

Afzaal

Aldayel

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If lawmakers' priorities differ from the reader's priorities they may even do this implicitly as opposed to engaging in an outright "conspiracy of gobbledegook" (Mellinkoff, 2004). This possibility seems to have been undercut by recent findings indicating that lawyers, like laypeople, disprefer complicated legalese to simplified legal language when tasked with reading and evaluating legal documents (Martínez et al, 2023a(Martínez et al, , 2023b.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The methods of this paper comply with the TOP guidelines of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General . In particular, all original data and code for this project can be cited as Martínez et al (2023b) and are available at https://osf.io/ambp4/?view_only=b4ab367e4cfb4f83acd2c51a000cfa68.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most notorious examples of such sentences contain center-embedded structures, in which a sentence or clause is embedded within the center of another sentence or clause ("all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the 'total payments'"). Center-embedded structures cause processing difficulty for readers (Gibson, 1998;Miller & Chomsky, 1963) and have been shown to inhibit recall of legal content relative to clauses of equivalent meaning that have been unembedded into separate sentences (Martínez et al, 2022(Martínez et al, , 2023a(Martínez et al, , 2023b). Here we calculated the percentage of sentences in each corpus containing a center-embedded clause.…”

Section: Center-embedded Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To address the above questions, we first conducted a corpus analysis of (a) every law passed by congress between January 1951 and May 2022 (as well as concurrent resolutions not signed into law and proclamations issued by the president), and (b) a large sample of magazine articles, newspaper articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books published over roughly the same time span. We analyzed a variety of linguistic and stylistic features, whose use is (a) discouraged by the Federal Plain Language Guidelines (Plain Language Action Information Network, 2011), (b) associated with language processing difficulty in psycholinguistics research (Martínez et al, 2022(Martínez et al, , 2023a(Martínez et al, , 2023bMasson & Waldron, 1994), and (c) purportedly common in legal documents (Tiersma, 1999). We found that most of these features had not meaningfully decreased in prevalence since the start of the plain-language movement, although we find an increase in the variability of some features post-2010.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

Martínez,

Mollica,

Gibson

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these effortscollectively referred to as the "plain-language movement"-have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n ≈ 225 million words), in which we compared every law passed by congress with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different baseline genres published during approximately the same time period. We also compared the entirety of the U.S. Code (the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force) with a large sample of recently published texts from six baseline genres of English. We found that laws remain laden with features associated with psycholinguistic complexity-including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon, capitalization, and sentence length-relative to the baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined since the initial onset of the plain-language efforts. These findings suggest top-down efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, and call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal doctrines whose validity rests on the notion of laws being easily interpretable by laypeople. Public Significance StatementOver the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. How effective have these efforts been? Here we analyzed every law passed by Congress between the years 1951 to 2022 along with a large sample of baseline texts published over roughly the same time period and found that laws remain laden with features associated with processing difficulty relative to other genres, and that the prevalence of most of these features has not meaningfully declined. We found similar results when comparing laws with academic texts. These findings suggest topdown efforts to simplify legal texts have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, raising and informing questions of law and public policy.

show abstract

So Much for Plain Language: An Analysis of the Accessibility of United States Federal Laws Over Time

Cited by 2 publications

References 21 publications

Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: a corpus-based study

Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: a corpus-based study

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of U.S. federal laws over time.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About