Definition
In legal drafting and document description, *artificially* means drawn up or expressed with technical precision — using terms of art, formal legal phrases, and a structured arrangement characteristic of trained professional draftsmanship. A will, contract, or other legal instrument is said to be "artificially drawn" when it is couched in apt technical language and exhibits an organized, legally sophisticated arrangement, as distinguished from a document written informally or in plain lay terms.
The word does not carry its modern connotation of falseness or contrivance. In legal usage it is a term of quality, not suspicion — an artificially drawn instrument is a well-crafted one.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "In an artificial manner; by or because of human effort" — often implying something produced synthetically or inorganically, and in contemporary usage frequently suggesting something that is forced, fake, or not genuine.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "By art, or skill and contrivance, not by nature; ingeniously; skillfully" — also noting the now-obsolete senses of "craftily" or "artfully" in a deceptive sense.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant and can mislead researchers. Where a modern reader sees "artificially" and suspects manipulation or inauthenticity, the legal usage signals the opposite: careful, professional, technically competent draftsmanship. A document described as "artificially drawn" in a 19th- or early 20th-century legal source is being praised, not questioned.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering "artificially" in older legal sources — particularly probate and contract opinions — sometimes read it as an allegation of fraud, contrivance, or unnatural construction. It is neither. The term is a descriptor of formal quality and technical skill in drafting. Separately, "artificial" as applied to legal persons (e.g., "artificial person" or "artificial entity") is an entirely distinct usage; *artificially* as an adverb does not appear in that context.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a research trap in historical legal sources. Pre-20th-century opinions and treatises use "artificially drawn" as a compliment to a document's craftsmanship. A researcher unfamiliar with this usage may misread a court's description of a will or contract as signaling concern about manipulation or bad faith when the court is actually noting the document's technical excellence — which may bear on how strictly or literally it should be interpreted.
The practical significance: courts sometimes applied different interpretive rules to "artificially drawn" instruments versus lay documents, giving greater weight to precise technical language in the former. If a historical opinion hinges on whether a document was artificially or informally drawn, the distinction affects the interpretive standard being applied, not the document's legitimacy.
This term has largely disappeared from modern legal writing. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in sources after the mid-20th century. When it does appear in that later period, it almost always carries the modern common meaning (i.e., something contrived or manipulated), making date-of-source awareness essential.
No direct connection to the contemporary legal discussions around artificial intelligence — despite surface similarity in vocabulary. Do not conflate.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide nearly identical entries and converge on the same core definition: technically; scientifically; using terms of art. Both use the same illustrative example — a will or contract described as "artificially" drawn when couched in apt and technical phrases and exhibiting a scientific arrangement. The consistency across editions suggests the term was stable in legal usage through the period Black's covered, and neither edition flags any jurisdictional variation or contested meaning. Neither source addresses the term's decline in usage or the risk of misreading it through a modern lens — a gap that researchers working with historical corpora should supply for themselves.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Note: The encyclopedia entries matched to this term address Artificial Intelligence in criminal law, healthcare, and intellectual property contexts. Those entries concern "artificial" as a modifier for intelligence and technology — a conceptually unrelated usage. No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses legal drafting quality or document construction in the historical sense that *artificially* describes. Researchers interested in the interpretive treatment of technical legal instruments may find relevant context in encyclopedia entries on contract interpretation or will construction if available in the corpus.