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WHY ARE LAWS SO COMPLICATED FOR ORDINARY CITIZENS?

Have you ever thought about the complexity of laws, why are they so difficult for the average person to understand?

Recent research, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has attempted to find a possible explanation for this phenomenon. According to this study, legal language, with its archaic terms and Latinised expressions, may have a single purpose: to impose a sense of authority. But does this approach still make sense today?

The urgent question is whether the current model of judicial organization and the way the law is applied or even dealt with still makes sense today. Contemporary society is increasingly simplified, connected, dynamic, and very accessible, but the legal system maintains its archaic format, remaining distant from reality, to most people.

The law is a tool for access to justice for everyone, regardless of their background or level of education. However, when legal texts are unintelligible to the majority of people, an obstacle arises that can often result in a lack of trust in the system and, ultimately, exclusion from it.

Reflecting on the complexity of laws and their language is not just an academic issue, but represents a real concern for the effectiveness of justice and the operation of its system.

At a time when data, through information, represents knowledge, does it make sense to maintain a legal system full of obstacles that hinder understanding and access to justice?

Evolution is crying out for an adaptation of the way we communicate. Legal language needs to be re-evaluated, so that authority is not imposed by the complexity of words, but by the clarity and efficiency of its rules.