They don't, though. Plenty of words in law mean something precise but utterly detached from the vernacular meaning. Law language is effectively a separate, more precise language, that happens to share some parts with the parent language.

There was that "smart contract" idea back when immutable distributed ledgers were in fashion. I still struggle to see the approach being workable for anything more complicated (and muddied) than Hello World level contracts.

Because law isn’t a fixed entity, it is a suggestion for the navigation of an infinite wiring

Backwards compatibility works differently there, and legalese has not exactly evolved naturally.