Abstract

Legal texts are particularly difficult to produce and interpret due to their specific characteristics. A useful tool to respond to the problems that citizens have when reading these texts is plain language. Plain language is the movement that seeks to solve the comprehension problems that citizens have when reading specialized documents, framed in communicative practices that manifest themselves in stereotyped discursive genres, written in a very formal and specialized register, far from the standard register shared by the average citizen (Meza and others, 2020). Therefore, a text is in plain language if its writing, structure and design are so transparent that its recipients can find what they need, understand what they find and use that information (International Plain Language Federation, 2023). In this context, we developed a systematic review, whose guiding question aims to identify which are the linguistic-discursive features that make legal texts more complex and simplify for citizens with or without legal knowledge. To guarantee the transparency, validity and replicability of the study, the review has been carried out following the PRISMA 2020 declaration. In this way, 60 research articles were analyzed at different stages. The descriptive results indicate that the first publication on the subject is identified in 1979, then more than half of the articles are published from the year 2013. Likewise, the studies have been carried out mainly in Europe and are published primarily in law journals. On the other hand, the content analysis allowed the identification of 309 complexifying features and 485 facilitators. The features that make legal texts more complex are the technical disciplinary terminology (31.67 %), long sentences (28.33 %) and a complex syntactic structure (20 %). On the contrary, the features that would facilitate the production of clear legal texts are short sentences (38.33 %), the use of the active voice (31.67 %), as well as the short sentences and the short paragraphs (both with 23.33 %). In conclusion, the features that are most frequently mentioned as facilitators or complexifiers of clear legal texts are mainly related to linguistic rather than legal issues. © 2025, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. All rights reserved.