The point of legalese is to define everything in absolutely certain terms.

Legalese is what you get when you try to get a precise meaning from an imprecise language. It is like trying to get the type safety of Haskell in PHP, resulting in a lot of verbosity.

I think this is relevant: There is a paper+presentation from SPJ about defining a contract (financial, in this case) in Haskell. Precise and machine verifiable.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...