They were written using such legal woo you would have to have a reading level much higher than most American adults.

According to a new paper published on SSRN (Social Science Research Network), the average readability level of the agreements reviewed by the researchers was comparable to articles in academic journals.

Co-author Samuel Becher, a law professor at Victoria University of Wellington, said that consumers were legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, but businesses were not required to make them readable.

Most accept terms without bothering to read the fine print. But with these new types of contracts, known as sign-in-wrap agreements, there is a danger in clicking “agree” without reading or understanding them—they’re regularly enforced.

Becher and Dr Uri Benoliel, from the College of Law and Business in Ramat-Gan, Israel, selected 500 of the most popular US websites that featured these types of contracts and applied two widely accepted readability tests to their terms and conditions.

Most studies on readability suggest consumer-facing texts should be written at no more than an eighth-grade reading level when using the F-K test or have an FRE score of 60 or above.

Becher and Benoliel’s found only two of the contracts analysed met that standard, with the other 498 having an FRE score below 60 and needing an average of more than 14 years of education to understand.