I find that most legalese is difficult to read. In the best cases, it's impenetrable up-front, and in the worst, it's meandering and strings you along you thinking you can barely read it until you get to the end and realize you have no clue what you just read. And this could be for a number of reasons, but often it's because the terms are nonconcrete and the logic is hazy.
It turns out that this isn't an accurate generalization of "legal text" and indeed, vague and misleading wording isn't always what the world of law revolves around. An illustration comes to us today from the Tenth Circuit, which delivered an opinion (PDF) to D. Bruce Oliver, an attorney who had appealed a lower court's decision to reprimand him due to the fact that he violated court orders in many, many cases. In his appeal, D. Bruce Oliver calls into question the constitutionality of the law allowing the court to reprimand him, stating:
[D.U. Civ. R. 83-1.5] permit[s] a lesser standard of preponderance rather tha[n] requiring clear and convincing evidence, by encouraging arbitrary application and enforcement, by encouraging ex parte communications between the committee, the actor, and the court, the judex, against the defendant, Mr. Oliver, the reus, by failing to dispose of pretrial motions at the pretrial stage, by failing to conduct the trial in the final stage of litigation.
To which the Tenth Circuit responds:
We do not address this muddled statement.
Score one for cutting through the nonsense.
Hat tip to Decision of the Day, which discusses the facts of this case in greater detail.
I used to have problems reading it too, but now that I've done a few contracts and learned some of the ropes from lawyers, it's not too bad. The reason it is in that form is to reduce the possible ways that you can say something. Much of law stuff is also in boilerplate whose meaning is known and well vetted in courts. That way you can build on things like precedence too.
Danny (Armchair Lawyer)
My experience is the same. My point is that to the unindoctrinated, anything legal is usually unnecessarily "complicated," and that's due to wordy lawyers and not to the inherent unreadability of, you know, law stuff.