I think legalize is the way it is because it requires precision. A lot of the words and phrases that show up in legal documents don't have an easy definition be

I think legalize is the way it is because it requires precision. A lot of the words and phrases that show up in legal documents don't have an easy definition because they're litigated terms. "fair use" isn't just "a justified use of some media", it's a specific pointer that points at a corpus of laws and decisions over decades and decades. We generally want to be able to assume that the legal system makes similar decisions given similar situations, but the world doesn't hand it precise duplicates. Words that point at specific facts of a situation from the past are always going to be complex. It's not just for describing the situation narratively, it's also got to communicate specific categories of facts. How would we simply communicate that we (western legal tradition for example) care about the fact a murder was planned. What is planning? Is planning a murder a crime, and if not, why does it make the crime of murder worse? "Mens Rea" gives us a pointer to refer to the non-criminal act of having the intention to commit a crime. That's pretty useful, especially when you can CMD+F for that over centuries of people hashing out each case where the mental state of the accused mattered. I do think there's a case for simplified explanations of legal text, but the source document should probably remain the "real" document.