[idoh]

Your theory cannot be true, because legal writing is equally dry and opaque in non-adversarial settings:

- litigation, where the aim is to persuade a judge

- court opinions, where the aim is to persuade the parties and other judges

- I'd add law journals as well, which are written for peers

I'd say that the reason legal writing gets singled out is that people are expected to read and understand it, while people are not expected to read and understand equally difficult writings from different fields, such as something from a medical journal.

[lmkg]

Keep in mind that an adversarial opponent is a game-theoretic abstraction. The useful thought-experiment of an adversary is often used even when there is not a literal 'opponent,' eg in natural-disaster-proof design. In essence, imagining an adversary is a useful thought experiment for reasoning about worst-case situations. In the situation of a natural disaster, an adversarial opponent is not the literal truth, but you won't go far wrong by designing against one.

I would say that any form of persuasion benefits from imagining an adversarial opponent (in face, they're usually called a Devil's Advocate!). In this case, your judge you are persuading can be modeled as an adversarial opponent, characterized as being Maximally Skeptical of your position, within the constraints of still being Perfectly Rational.

You may also be confusing "adversarial" with "confrontational." An adversary can still be very dry. In fact, in game theory, they probably are very dry because they're assumed to be perfectly rational. Adversarialism defines the other participant's goals, not their approach.

[hristov]

Litigation is very much adversarial. True your arguments are aimed at a judge, but another party is free to attack them and misinterpret them. Thus, there is still an intentional desire to misinterpret your arguments.

Court opinions are not technically adversarial, but the same issues apply. It is virtually guaranteed that other parties down the line will try to misinterpret court opinions to get a judgement they are not entitled to.

It is true that journals are probably not subject to active intentional misinterpretation, but people that write legal journals are already lawyers and thus are already trained in that particular adversarial style of writing.