What did I sign? A study of the impenetrability of legalese in contracts

Legal documents, in the form of terms of service agreements and other private contracts, are now an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life. While legal documents have long been acknowledged to be difficult to understand without training, it remains an open question whether the ever-increasing exposure to contracts might have mitigated this difficulty. Moreover, insofar as this difficulty has persisted, there remains no systematic analysis of which linguistic structures contribute most heavily to the processing difficulty of legal texts, nor whether this difficulty is heightened for those with less language experience. Here, we investigate these issues, and in a well-powered experiment find evidence that (a) both recall and comprehension of legal propositions in a contract are hindered by use of a legal register relative to plain-English translations; (b) certain linguistic structures, such as center-embedding, hinder recall to a greater degree than others, such as passive voice; and (c) language experience influences comprehension of legal propositions. Surprisingly, language experience did not influence recall, nor was there an interaction between legal register and language experience on recall or comprehension. These findings suggest that legal language poses heightened difficulties for those with less language experience--who tend to be of lower socioeconomic status and with diminished access to the justice system--and that eliminating complex features of legalese would benefit those of all reading levels

So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of United States federal laws (1951-2009)

Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the US government to simplify public legal documents for the benefit of society at large . However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts--collectively referred to as the ``plain language movement''--have been. Here we report the results of a large-scale longitudinal corpus analysis (n$\approx$225 million words), in which we compare every law passed by congress between 1951 to 2009 (as well as concurrent resolutions and proclamations), with a comparably sized sample of English texts from four different genres published during the same time period. We find that laws remain laden with features associated with processing difficulty--including center-embedding, passive voice, low-frequency jargon and capitalization--relative to each of the four baseline genres of English, and that the prevalence of these features has not meaningfully declined since the onset of the plain language movement (in some cases, their prevalence has increased). These findings suggest that top-down efforts to simplify legal language have thus far remained largely ineffectual, despite the apparent tractability of these changes, raising and informing difficult questions of law and public policy

Measurements of neutron cross sections for advanced nuclear energy systems at n_TOF (CERN)

The n_TOF facility operates at CERN with the aim of addressing the request of high accuracy nuclear data for advanced nuclear energy systems as well as for nuclear astrophysics. Thanks to the features of the neutron beam, important results have been obtained on neutron induced fission and capture cross sections of U, Pu and minor actinides. Recently the construction of another beam line has started; the new line will be complementary to the first one, allowing to further extend the experimental program foreseen for next measurement campaigns

Neutron capture cross section measurement of 238U at the CERN n_TOF facility in the energy region from 1 eV to 700 keV

The aim of this work is to provide a precise and accurate measurement of the 238U(n,γ) reaction cross section in the energy region from 1 eV to 700 keV. This reaction is of fundamental importance for the design calculations of nuclear reactors, governing the behavior of the reactor core. In particular, fast reactors, which are experiencing a growing interest for their ability to burn radioactive waste, operate in the high energy region of the neutron spectrum. In this energy region most recent evaluations disagree due to inconsistencies in the existing measurements of up to 15%. In addition, the assessment of nuclear data uncertainty performed for innovative reactor systems shows that the uncertainty in the radiative capture cross section of 238U should be further reduced to 1–3% in the energy region from 20 eV to 25 keV. To this purpose, addressed by the Nuclear Energy Agency as a priority nuclear data need, complementary experiments, one at the GELINA and two at the n_TOF facility, were proposed and carried out within the 7th Framework Project ANDES of the European Commission. The results of one of these 238U(n,γ) measurements performed at the n_TOF CERN facility are presented in this work. The γ-ray cascade following the radiative neutron capture has been detected exploiting a setup of two C6D6 liquid scintillators. Resonance parameters obtained from this work are on average in excellent agreement with the ones reported in evaluated libraries. In the unresolved resonance region, this work yields a cross section in agreement with evaluated libraries up to 80 keV, while for higher energies our results are significantly higher

Fission fragment angular distribution measurements of 235U and 238U at CERN n_TOF facility

Neutron-induced fission cross sections of 238U and 235U are used as standards in the fast neutron region up to 200 MeV. A high accuracy of the standards is relevant to experimentally determine other neutron reaction cross sections. Therefore, the detection effciency should be corrected by using the angular distribution of the fission fragments (FFAD), which are barely known above 20 MeV. In addition, the angular distribution of the fragments produced in the fission of highly excited and deformed nuclei is an important observable to investigate the nuclear fission process. In order to measure the FFAD of neutron-induced reactions, a fission detection setup based on parallel-plate avalanche counters (PPACs) has been developed and successfully used at the CERN-n_TOF facility. In this work, we present the preliminary results on the analysis of new 235U(n,f) and 238U(n,f) data in the extended energy range up to 200 MeV compared to the existing experimental data

High accuracy 234U(n,f) cross section in the resonance energy region

New results are presented of the 234U neutron-induced fission cross section, obtained with high accuracy in the resonance region by means of two methods using the 235U(n,f) as reference. The recent evaluation of the 235U(n,f) obtained with SAMMY by L. C. Leal et al. (these Proceedings), based on previous n_TOF data [1], has been used to calculate the 234U(n,f) cross section through the 234U/235U ratio, being here compared with the results obtained by using the n_TOF neutron flux