Language roundup
Since I'm not aware of any Carnival of the Linguists... not that one would need one, since the folks at Language Log are so good at linking to other folks...
Some law-related language and linguistics stuff.
Benjamin Zimmer references eminent legal thinker Chico Marx in the title ("There Ain't No Sanity Clause") of his interesting post on the so-called "liberty clause" of the Constitution - a clause with possibly magical properties, in my view. As Ben points out,
There's also a neat post, also at Language Log, about how strange it is to claim that "Scalito" is a diminutive of Scalia - since it isn't, and never was, even though the person who coined the phrase (a journalist) says it is.
Finally in LL matters, there's the amusing situation of artless and, in my view, moronic drafting resulting in a highly ironic result. A statute, clear in intention, designed to protect marriage from incursion, seems to outlaw marriage. Read about how Texas flubs elementary logic in the post Is Marriage Similar or Identical to Itself by Mark Liberman.
I am also moved - almost to tears - by a plaint from Death, a pseudonymous law student (hat tip to Mike at Crime & Federalism). Death (blog name: Death in the Afternoon) mourns the tendency of good writing to disappear under the influence of Law.
Legalizations - meaning specifically the bad language I dub Law-ese - will be reinserted. "The active voice will be trampled and beat back into its passive state. You will no longer use anything, certain objects will be utilized. The court will not find any statute to violate the Constitution, the statute will be held to be unconstitutional by the Court." Death is tilting at windmills, I am afraid. Bad writing is something individual can overcome. There is little to be done, however, about pervasive poor writing - as there is little to be done about pervasive poor thinking.
What we can do is make efforts (where appropriate) to rise above the worst tendencies of lawyers. Take a look in the mirror. Do you abuse jargon? Do you use unwieldy and meaningless phrases because you don't want to be clear and concise? Do you ever use long lists of near-synonyms in order to plug possible loopholes in discovery requests? Do you take refuge in obfuscation?
I was particularly amused by the comment from Evan that Death should relax - partners seldom have time to do a really thorough job of editing your work anyway. A grim hope to hang onto.
In fact, partners (or more-experienced lawyers) may know exactly what they are doing when they beat all the style and rhythm and creativity out of writing. That's because some writing is more than just an amusement. It serves legal purposes - it requests admissions, it crafts demands, it parries, it may even have the force of law, if adopted by a court. In such situations, a young enthusiast's eagerness to inject flavor can do unwitting harm.
I wonder how many junior associates have decided that the memo at hand would be ever so much cleaner if those annoying stock phrases were taken out and replaced with something neat and in plain English... only to be later told that the stock phrase was required, and they'd better revert all their changes, and not get any more bright ideas.
More law-related language and linguistics posts and news as I come across them.
Some law-related language and linguistics stuff.
Benjamin Zimmer references eminent legal thinker Chico Marx in the title ("There Ain't No Sanity Clause") of his interesting post on the so-called "liberty clause" of the Constitution - a clause with possibly magical properties, in my view. As Ben points out,
The definitive answer: maybe. Check out the post for further updates, including references to Dred Scott, confusion over which part of the Constitution is even involved (14th Amendment? 5th? All of the above?)
This is, on the face of it, further proof of the cultural divide between legal studies and linguistic studies. A syntactician might think a "one-word clause" in English would need to be an unmodified imperative intransitive verb like "Surrender!" (See Geoffrey Pullum's post on very short sentences.) But of course, the definition of clause in the world of law has nothing to do with syntactic structures. The legal sense, meaning "a distinct article, stipulation, or proviso in a legal document," has a long history in English. (The Oxford English Dictionary offers a quote from Chaucer's Troylus And Criseyde: "He shall me never binde in soche a clause.") Still, could the "liberty clause" really consist of a single word?
There's also a neat post, also at Language Log, about how strange it is to claim that "Scalito" is a diminutive of Scalia - since it isn't, and never was, even though the person who coined the phrase (a journalist) says it is.
Finally in LL matters, there's the amusing situation of artless and, in my view, moronic drafting resulting in a highly ironic result. A statute, clear in intention, designed to protect marriage from incursion, seems to outlaw marriage. Read about how Texas flubs elementary logic in the post Is Marriage Similar or Identical to Itself by Mark Liberman.
I am also moved - almost to tears - by a plaint from Death, a pseudonymous law student (hat tip to Mike at Crime & Federalism). Death (blog name: Death in the Afternoon) mourns the tendency of good writing to disappear under the influence of Law.
Legalizations - meaning specifically the bad language I dub Law-ese - will be reinserted. "The active voice will be trampled and beat back into its passive state. You will no longer use anything, certain objects will be utilized. The court will not find any statute to violate the Constitution, the statute will be held to be unconstitutional by the Court." Death is tilting at windmills, I am afraid. Bad writing is something individual can overcome. There is little to be done, however, about pervasive poor writing - as there is little to be done about pervasive poor thinking.
What we can do is make efforts (where appropriate) to rise above the worst tendencies of lawyers. Take a look in the mirror. Do you abuse jargon? Do you use unwieldy and meaningless phrases because you don't want to be clear and concise? Do you ever use long lists of near-synonyms in order to plug possible loopholes in discovery requests? Do you take refuge in obfuscation?
I was particularly amused by the comment from Evan that Death should relax - partners seldom have time to do a really thorough job of editing your work anyway. A grim hope to hang onto.
In fact, partners (or more-experienced lawyers) may know exactly what they are doing when they beat all the style and rhythm and creativity out of writing. That's because some writing is more than just an amusement. It serves legal purposes - it requests admissions, it crafts demands, it parries, it may even have the force of law, if adopted by a court. In such situations, a young enthusiast's eagerness to inject flavor can do unwitting harm.
I wonder how many junior associates have decided that the memo at hand would be ever so much cleaner if those annoying stock phrases were taken out and replaced with something neat and in plain English... only to be later told that the stock phrase was required, and they'd better revert all their changes, and not get any more bright ideas.
More law-related language and linguistics posts and news as I come across them.
Posted by Eh Nonymous on
Monday November 7, 2005 at 3:54pm
Re: Poor writing
I've been plagued by poor word choice in my last two memo and searching for some methods to improve my writing style. According to the prof (and your post), it is an entirely possible task to accomplish.
One of the books the prof mentioned was "The Red Book." I've just purchased it online. I hope, with plenty of practice, I'll overcome my tendency for abstractions.
But alas, on language I am an obstinate cuss.
More seriously, the high grades are usually handed out to actual high-grade legal reasoning, which necessarily involves either intensive use of jargon, or extremely thoughtful avoidance of it by using what the terms really refer to. Since law-ese as I diagnose it as a _disease_ obscures reasoning rather than conduces it (is that a word? is conducitory. that's much better), it's only an inattentive reader who would reward lawese. At best, I would think, it's an only-mildly irritating distraction, as they try to find whether you really did spot the issue, analyze the problem, and state a meaningful conclusion.
If you miss the point, then no amount of nonsensical handwaving will save your bacon. :)
*Not all comments welcome. Flippant, facetious, fierce, or fatuous, fine. Fraudulent, felonious, fabricated, facially insufficient, and farkin' futile, fuggeddaboutit.