Speaking as a lawyer, this is entirely false. The reason most legalese exists is because most lawyers are bad at writing, and reuse blocks of text from other lawyers who are bad at writing.

It is entirely possible to write plain and understandable english that is legally unambiguous. As someone mentioned above, there has been a huge movement towards this in law schools. It has had some impact, but it's still going to be a long time.

That said, even some of the older folks in the legal field hate legalese. When I clerked for an appeals court judge, we used to do two things: 1. Read every single opinion out loud to all the clerks in order to make sure it sounded sane and was understandable to the other folks at the table, who had no idea what the case was about. 2. Remove all unnecessary words and anachronisms. The judge used to pull out his copy of strunk and white and beat us over the head with it.

This is clearly wrong. All you need to do is read a bit of legalese to someone, have them ask "what's that mean?", and then realize that what you say next to them is entirely different.

Legalese has all manner of special constructs that have to be learned to understand.

There's a difference between a dense legal definition of what an escape door is (so that a small number of people can correctly create escape doors) and obfuscatory fluff that everybody should be adhering to but that nobody reads. ToS often feel like they've been created to give the company a get out clause for anything they want.

(http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/less-than-words-can-say...)

> As it happens, that horrid prose serves its aims perfectly. Regulations of this nature have one clear purpose, and that is to answer, before the fact, any imaginable questions that might be asked in a court of law.

There are some problems with The Underground Grammarian, but it's entertaining if you're in the right mood.

That's like saying The Odyssey was written in plain Attic Greek, which is false.

As an amateur linguist, I would say that legalese (like Homeric Greek) is a specialized dialect which is both hyperdefined and formulaic (except that lawyers call formulas "terms of art").

As a piece of interesting trivia, Calvert Watkins suggests that formulas of Roman legalese derive from pre-Roman liturgical, magical, and mythological poetics so there probably is a connection between the formulaic dialect of Homer's epics and the legalese of today to the extent that it is related to Roman legalese.

Sometimes legalese is intentionally constructed to create ambiguity and double meanings.