The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity
Across modern civilization, societal norms and rules are codified and communicated largely in the form of written laws. Although principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, legal documents have long been attested to be incomprehe...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157156 |
| _version_ | 1824458267974172672 |
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| author | Martínez, Eric |
| author2 | Gibson, Edward |
| author_facet | Gibson, Edward Martínez, Eric |
| author_sort | Martínez, Eric |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Across modern civilization, societal norms and rules are codified and communicated largely in the form of written laws. Although principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, legal documents have long been attested to be incomprehensible to those who are required to comply with them (i.e. everyone). Why? This thesis investigates this question using the tools of cognitive science. Chapter II approaches the question from the comprehender side, documenting the cognitive and linguistic factors that make legal documents difficult to understand for non-lawyers. Corpus analyses reveal that legal contracts are laden with psycholinguistically complex structures at a strikingly higher rate than nine baseline genres of English. Experimental evidence further reveals that some of these structures, such as center-embedded syntax, inhibit recall and comprehension of legal content more than others, suggesting that difficulties in understanding legal content result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge. Chapter III extends these results to other legal genres and investigates the cognitive and linguistic profile of law over time. Analyzing every law passed by congress between 1951 and 2022 with matched texts from four different genres, we find that laws have and continue to be disproportionately laden with psycholinguistically complex structures relative to baseline genres of English, suggesting that top-down efforts to simplify legal texts over this period have largely failed. 3 Chapters IV and V turn to the producer side, investigating why legal actors write in a complex manner in the first place. We find that lawyers likewise struggle to recall and comprehend legal content drafted in a complex register and prefer simplified legal documents to complex documents across virtually every dimension. We further find that people tasked with writing official laws write in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity, whereas people editing a legal document do not write in a more convoluted manner than when writing from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language towards communicative efficiency. In particular, these results indicate law’s complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law’s authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a legal perspective, these findings call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal theories and principles whose validity rests on the notion of law being comprehensible to laypeople, such as ordinary meaning, fair notice, and modern variants of textualism. From a policy perspective, this work informs long-standing efforts to simplify legal documents for the public at-large, which, despite bipartisan support, have remained largely intractable. Finally, from a field-building perspective, this thesis lays the foundation for a broader interdisciplinary research program that uses insights from cognitive science to inform long-standing and cutting-edge questions of legal doctrine and policy. |
| first_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:23:11Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | mit-1721.1/157156 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| last_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:23:11Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publisher | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1571562024-10-10T03:30:25Z The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity Martínez, Eric Gibson, Edward Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Across modern civilization, societal norms and rules are codified and communicated largely in the form of written laws. Although principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, legal documents have long been attested to be incomprehensible to those who are required to comply with them (i.e. everyone). Why? This thesis investigates this question using the tools of cognitive science. Chapter II approaches the question from the comprehender side, documenting the cognitive and linguistic factors that make legal documents difficult to understand for non-lawyers. Corpus analyses reveal that legal contracts are laden with psycholinguistically complex structures at a strikingly higher rate than nine baseline genres of English. Experimental evidence further reveals that some of these structures, such as center-embedded syntax, inhibit recall and comprehension of legal content more than others, suggesting that difficulties in understanding legal content result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge. Chapter III extends these results to other legal genres and investigates the cognitive and linguistic profile of law over time. Analyzing every law passed by congress between 1951 and 2022 with matched texts from four different genres, we find that laws have and continue to be disproportionately laden with psycholinguistically complex structures relative to baseline genres of English, suggesting that top-down efforts to simplify legal texts over this period have largely failed. 3 Chapters IV and V turn to the producer side, investigating why legal actors write in a complex manner in the first place. We find that lawyers likewise struggle to recall and comprehend legal content drafted in a complex register and prefer simplified legal documents to complex documents across virtually every dimension. We further find that people tasked with writing official laws write in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity, whereas people editing a legal document do not write in a more convoluted manner than when writing from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language towards communicative efficiency. In particular, these results indicate law’s complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law’s authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a legal perspective, these findings call into question the coherence and legitimacy of legal theories and principles whose validity rests on the notion of law being comprehensible to laypeople, such as ordinary meaning, fair notice, and modern variants of textualism. From a policy perspective, this work informs long-standing efforts to simplify legal documents for the public at-large, which, despite bipartisan support, have remained largely intractable. Finally, from a field-building perspective, this thesis lays the foundation for a broader interdisciplinary research program that uses insights from cognitive science to inform long-standing and cutting-edge questions of legal doctrine and policy. Ph.D. 2024-10-09T18:25:06Z 2024-10-09T18:25:06Z 2024-09 2024-10-09T13:42:47.974Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157156 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Copyright retained by author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| spellingShingle | Martínez, Eric The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title | The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title_full | The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title_fullStr | The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title_short | The Cognitive Underpinnings of Legal Complexity |
| title_sort | cognitive underpinnings of legal complexity |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157156 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT martinezeric thecognitiveunderpinningsoflegalcomplexity AT martinezeric cognitiveunderpinningsoflegalcomplexity |