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13 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 519 (1984-1985)
Issue 3

handle is hein.journals/nyuls13 and id is 529 raw text is: THE END OF LEGALESE: THE GAME* IS OVER ROBERT W. BENSON** TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................ 520 I. Criticisms of Legalese .......................................... 520 A. The Strange Style ......................................... 522 1. Characteristics of the Language ........................ 523 a. Vocabulary ......................................... 523 b. Syntactic Features .................................. 524 c. Organization ....................................... 524 d. Style ............................................... 526 2. The Social Effects of the Strange Style .................. 527 B. Comprehensibility ......................................... 531 1. The Educated Guess that Legalese Fails to Communicate .......................................... 531 2. Legalese Fails the Field Tests .......................... 532 3. Legalese Fails the Comprehension Tests ................ 536 a. Multiple Choice, Oral Questioning, Cloze ........... 537 b. The Loyola Cloze Tests ............................ 540 c. Tests of Consumer Contracts ....................... 544 d. Tests of Jury Instructions ........................... 545 4. Legalese Fails the Readability Formulas ................ 547 a. The Formulas: Objections and Answers ............. 551 b. Readability Scores of Sample Legal Documents ...... 555 II. Defenses of Legalese, and Rebuttals to Them ................... 558 A. It Works/It Does Not Work .............................. 558 B. It Is Precise/It Is Imprecise ............................... 559 C. It Is Settled/It Is Unsettled ................................ 561 D. The Law Is Too Complex/Any Complex Law Can Be Simplified ................................................. 563 E. The Process Is Too Complex to Produce Simple Language/ The Process Is Rarely Too Complex for Competence ....... 567 Copyright © 1985 by Robert W. Benson * I use the word game to emphasize that legal language is not taken seriously enough. I do not use the word in the Wittgensteinian sense of language game, though the information in this article may provide some useful data for a Wittgensteinian analysis. See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (3d ed. 1968); W. Probert, Law, Language and Communication (1972); H. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (1972). ** Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. A.B., Columbia College, 1964; J.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1968. 519 Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change