One school of legal scholarship posits that civil laws arose not so much from religious or geographical influences, but from a collection of folk stories that put into statute that what was previously only told as local legends: quite literally, law from folk-lore.
A logical deduction from this proposition is that the language of the law (considered by some to be archaic and cumbersome) was actually, in its time, a simple and modern way of conveying information. As language has distilled, and some would argue devolved, the text of statutes has remained to a degree unyielding. For example, some real estate contracts still say “the party of the first part” and the “party of the second part”, rather than “buyer” and “seller.”
