The Statute Plain-Language Complexity Index

Methodology

This index is an original dataset. We did not pull it from anywhere. We computed it at build time from the plain-language explainer text we publish on our own state pages, so it measures our writing, not the raw statutes. For each state page we take the plain-English intro paragraph plus every answer in that page's FAQ, which is the prose a reader actually sees, and we run three measures over it.

The first measure is the Flesch-Kincaid reading-grade level, a standard formula that estimates the US school grade needed to read a passage on the first try. It combines average sentence length with average syllables per word, so long sentences and long words both push the number up. The second is average sentence length in words per sentence. The third is the total word count of explainer text in the topic. We average the grade level and the sentence length across the state pages in each topic and sum the word counts, then rank the topics from hardest to easiest.

Because legal citations are full of periods, a naive sentence counter would read "Ala. Code" as two sentences and distort the result. We neutralize abbreviation and citation periods before counting sentences, and we apply the exact same procedure to every topic, so the ranking stays internally consistent. If a page's text cannot be parsed we skip it and count the skip rather than guess. This run measured 1,400 pages and skipped 0, across 57 topics.

Reading-grade numbers are estimates from a formula, not a judgment of quality. A higher grade level often just reflects a denser area of law. We publish the whole table above so you can see the inputs and check our work against the source pages.