pageok
pageok
pageok
[Eugene Volokh, August 14, 2008 at 7:10pm] Trackbacks
A Reason to Resist Getting a Legal Education:

Bill Poser (Language Log) reports:

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

Hoosier:
Yeah. That's what I told my parents when they wanted me to go to law school.
8.14.2008 8:43pm
Fub:
...but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.
In The Law of the Land, the late, great, anti-censorship litigator and author Charles Rembar remarked,
"...for centuries, our lawyers, a priestly caste, used a mysterious tongue, composed of Latin, French, English, incantation and a bit of mumbling. These continue, more or less, to the present day - Latin less, English more, French absorbed, incantation down a bit, mumbling steady."
TLOTL contains hilarious examples of the Latin-French-English pidgen from old cases.
8.14.2008 8:59pm
neurodoc:
Indifferent student that I was, relying on a pony (interlinear translation) to get me through Caesar as I did, I thought I got a pretty good return on the little bit of Latin I managed to learn. Not only great for vocabulary, but also helped with grammar, sentence diagraming, etc. Was greatly impressed when I read about the British general who after he captured the Indian city of Sind wired back to headquarters, "Pecavi" (I have sinned).
8.14.2008 9:58pm
neurodoc:
Completely OT...

Fub: you have piqued my curiosity. Are you passed your 40th reunion, but with your 45th still ahead? Still a few years a way from the cardinal red blazer? What path did you take in life after VIII tempered by some XXI?
8.14.2008 10:03pm
Duncan Frissell (mail):
And the quality of the Latin has only declined since then.

There was a young lawyer named Rex
Who had a diminutive instrument of sex
Charged with indecent exposure
He pleaded with composure
De minimus non curat lex

--Courtesy of the National Committee for the Preservation of Politically Incorrect Law School Jokes
8.14.2008 11:44pm
Hoosier:
"diminutive instrument" has too many syllables

"small organ"?
8.15.2008 12:00am
martinned (mail) (www):
@neurodoc: Didn't Schwartzkopf read Livy in Latin before dreaming up the strategy for Desert Storm?

Also, I would like to note for the record that my three years of Latin in high school have proved woefully inadequate when I recently ventured into looking up the origins of a few legal rules in the Digesta or Pandecta. (The rule that ex turpi causa non oritur actio is not literally taken from Roman Law, but the basic principle can be found in Book 12 Section 5 of the Digest.)
8.15.2008 3:16am
DiverDan (mail):
If he thought the LATIN was bad, he should have seen how these Texans butcher the FRENCH phrases - I was absolutely appalled the first time I showed up in Court for voir dire, and was asked by the Judge if I was ready for "vor DY-er".
8.15.2008 3:57pm
Oris (mail) (www):
That's a very compelling argument, both as to the Latin and the French. I spent much of my first year of law school learning not to flinch when learning new legalese terms with only the barest of relationships to their Latin and French counterparts.
8.15.2008 4:19pm
Dave Hardy (mail) (www):
My late father in law, a classical language scholar, could never get over the fact that we lawyers pronounced praecipe as press-ipee.

Antony Herbert, in his hilarious book Uncommon Law, has a fictional oral argument in which counsel pronounces ultra vires as ooltra wee-rays, certorari as kert-ee-orahree, etc. etc. until the court informs him that in the law, Latin remains a living language, and as such changes its verbal form over the centuries, and continues the argument until appellant's counsel can learn modern Latin.
8.15.2008 5:07pm
A.J. Sutter:
to Duncan Frissell: "de minimus" instead of "de minimis" (dative plural) indeed represents a deplorable decline.

But one doesn't need a limerick to demonstrate that. Check out Section 202 of Sarbanes-Oxley, amending Section 10A of the 1934 Act, with its reference to a "de minimus exception" to audit committee preapproval requirement concerning certain services to be provided by auditors to issuers (15 U.S.C. 78j-1(i)(1)(B)).
8.16.2008 1:53am
A.J. Sutter:
Vultus ruberrimus est: I mean of course ablative plural.
8.16.2008 1:58am
neurodoc:
When wishing to sound portentous, portentously say, "alea jacta est," then fall silent.
8.16.2008 2:45am
 
pageok