Legal documents are famously hard to decipher. Even seasoned lawyers find themselves tripping over the dense, convoluted language also known as “legalese”. But why is legalese so difficult to understand? You might think it’s because laws need to be incredibly precise, leaving no detail unspecified but complicating language in the process. However, this is only part of the picture. A team of cognitive scientists from MIT believes they have found the answer, and it might surprise you. According to the researchers, legal language is not merely a byproduct of historical tradition in law or necessi…