In basketball ... What is a travel? Seems straightforward ...

For this reason, I maintain that "The Lawyer" would be a more fitting nickname for James Harden than "The Beard".

That's a slightly different issue from what this study was about. Specifically this was looking at grammatical structure that's unique to legal documents rather than specific vocabulary choices (I.E. jargon). Legal documents tend to have both, a unique hard to understand structure, as well as using words that are both uncommon as well as have unique definitions in the legal context that are different from their common ones.

I suspect jargon is a problem no matter what, every specialized field suffers from that to a certain extent, but the unique grammatical structure is a problem that's really only seen in legal documents. The explanation for why that's the case seems to be potentially a historical accident and basically boils down to "because that makes it sound legal", despite literally everybody saying they prefer legal documents written in a normal style.

Maybe you should actually read it instead of talking out of your ass.

In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.

To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.

That's not what the study found, it in fact disproves that theory. It's an interesting study with results that are quite surprising.

My friend got an example of this recently in small town court. He went to court without a lawyer for what should have been a simple case and the judge chewed him out for not having a lawyer. The legal system is there to support the legal system. They want us to hire lawyers and to delay things as much as possible to keep the billable hours high.

Yeah, when corporate and lobbyist lawyers are passing around a doc, obviously the easiest method is to simply insert their own provisions. They're not paid to understand, rephrase and simplify the text. They're paid to make it as complex and obtuse as possible.