About

Efforts to simplify legal language—often grouped under the “plain language” agenda—have gained institutional traction in Europe and beyond. The usual assumption is that clearer legal writing increases comprehension and trust. Yet emerging evidence suggests a more complicated picture. Simplification does not benefit all readers in the same way, and some features associated with legal complexity may not be as decisive for comprehension as commonly assumed. More importantly, both lawyers and lay readers may interpret the stylistic markers of “legalness” as signals about the drafter’s competence and the text’s authority. 

If that is correct, then reforming legal writing is not merely a technical exercise in readability. It is also an intervention into a social relationship: who is recognised as an authority, what counts as a proper legal text, and how legal institutions communicate legitimacy. This project therefore provides an empirical basis for improving legal communication without ignoring the symbolic functions that legal language performs. 

We investigate the social representation of “the legal” in legal writing: the shared expectations through which people recognise a text as legal and assess whether it “sounds right” for law. A social representation can be understood as a shared “mental map”, or a set of taken-for-granted ideas that people in a given environment develop and transmit about how things typically work and what they are supposed to look like. It is not primarily about what isolated individuals think, but about the patterns of understanding and evaluation that become established within a society and come to feel self-evident. In our case, this concerns ideas about what makes a text “legal” and which features create an impression of expertise, correctness, and authority. 

We focus on genres where authority and persuasion are especially salient and where lay readers may plausibly encounter the consequences of the text: judicial decisions and pleadings. 

Across the project, we address three connected questions. We identify which textual traits make people perceive a text as legal and how these traits overlap with traits usually assumed to reduce comprehensibility. We test whether those traits affect lawyers’ and lay readers’ satisfaction in similar or different ways. We then examine how such traits shape the perceived clarity and convincingness of a text, the reader’s feeling of “rightness”, and the reader’s sense that the text fits what a legal text is supposed to look like. 

The project combines legal scholarship, corpus linguistics, and empirical social science. Its main theoretical framework is the Social Representations Approach, which treats meaning as socially produced and maintained through shared interpretive patterns. In practice, this allows us to study legal language not only as a vehicle for information, but also as a cultural form that conveys authority and professional identity. 

Methodologically, we connect three strands. We build and refine a targeted corpus of Czech legal texts, designed to capture judicial decisions beyond apex courts and to include pleadings, so we can map candidate “law-signalling” traits as they appear in real-world texts. We conduct qualitative interviews with legal practitioners to capture how lawyers themselves describe what makes writing properly legal and how they recognise authority in style. We then run controlled experiments that manipulate selected textual traits and measure how readers’ judgments change, including differences between lawyers and non-lawyers and the role of individual cognitive characteristics.  

The project begins with conceptual groundwork. We refine the key outcomes we want to measure—how readers judge clarity, convincingness, and “rightness”, and how they assess whether a text matches their expectations of legal writing. In parallel, we review existing debates on legal language and plain-language reforms, paying particular attention to the possibility that reforms operate as a form of power rather than a neutral improvement in communication. 

We then adapt and expand an existing Czech legal-language corpus to fit the project’s aims, with particular emphasis on judicial decisions and pleadings. The corpus work is not a purely descriptive exercise; it is used to locate and quantify the linguistic and textometric traits that may function as signals of “the legal”, and to inform the experimental manipulations. 

Next, we conduct an exploratory qualitative pilot study with legal practitioners. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine how participants describe good legal writing, which stylistic features they treat as necessary, and where they locate authority in linguistic form. This step keeps the project anchored in professional practice and helps us avoid imposing an external definition of “legalness” without empirical support. 

The project’s experimental core then tests the symbolic effects of law-signalling traits. One experiment conceptually replicates a well-known design from cognitive psychology by replacing pseudo-scientific jargon with legal-language cues, allowing us to measure how such cues affect satisfaction, perceived trustworthiness, and perceived authority. A second, original experiment tracks how readers’ evaluations change as they read a legal text in segments, enabling a more ecologically realistic account of how judgments form and update over time.