The reputation of "legalese" is really a cultural artifact we forgot to forget.
Back when Men were Men and the masses were somewhere between illiterate and "see spot run", the man on the street wouldn't have had much chance of understanding legal documents in the first place.
Later on, in the English world, the continued use of a lot of Latin also served to alienate people.
There have been explicit efforts to bring legal language back to the real world, and these days it's really no worse than any other professional jargon. Try reading through, say, the New England Journal of Medicine.
(If this weren't Hacker News, I'd tell you to go try reading a programming language reference manual, but you probably wouldn't have any trouble with that.)
Back when Men were Men and the masses were somewhere between illiterate and "see spot run", the man on the street wouldn't have had much chance of understanding legal documents in the first place.
Later on, in the English world, the continued use of a lot of Latin also served to alienate people.
There have been explicit efforts to bring legal language back to the real world, and these days it's really no worse than any other professional jargon. Try reading through, say, the New England Journal of Medicine.
(If this weren't Hacker News, I'd tell you to go try reading a programming language reference manual, but you probably wouldn't have any trouble with that.)