Katja Kühn’s research while affiliated with Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and other places

European legislation prescribes that all clauses within legal contracts must be understandable and clear. But so far, there has been little research on the extent to which this is the case. The study whose first results are reported in this article aims at an account of how much and which parts of the content of a legal text are understood by expert and non expert readers. The text concerned the terms of insurance policies. Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, non expert subject read a sample text and performed a written free-recall task, a sentence-recognition task, a practical-case decision and a questionnaire. The aim was to assess in some detail the range of legal-text comprehension by non expert readers. In the second experiment, a semantic diffential was run with law students and students in other fields. It aimed at an assessment of the respective attitudes of the two groups toward the clearness of the text, the understandability, and other features. Both classes of subjects showed substantial problems of understanding. These problems, however, are not due to the lack of acquaintedness with juridical style, but due to the lack of special expert background knowledge, in this case, insurance law.