More Golden Gobbledygook Swag!

Great news: Joe Kimble, legal writing guru at Thomas Cooley Law School and plain language crusader, is donating several copies of his new book Lifting the Fog of Legalese as a prize. So in addition to the prizes listed in the post below, contest winners will also receive a copy of this book, which has won praise from Bryan Garner and others.

Submit your favorite bad legalese - either post it as a comment; or email POFP at adamjfreedman@yahoo.com.

Announcing the Golden Gobbledygook Award!

Just what you've all been waiting for -- a Prize for the best example of bad legalese.

The term "gobbledygook" was coined by a Texas congressman, Henry Maverick. He meant for the word to evoke the sound that gobbling turkeys make. The word was meant as an indictment of confusing legalese and officialese.

But people have come to take legalese in stride; to which POFP says "Enough!

Send the worst example of legalese you can lay your hands on to POFP (adamjfreedman@yahoo.com) -- and you can be the proud winner of the Golden Gobbledygook Award. The winner will get a boxed set (without the box) of my new book The Party of the First Part, together with Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer, and Grammar Girl's new audiobook! The first two runners-up will also receive prizes. Entries will be accepted until September 14th. The winner will be announced on September 21st.

Looking for inspiration? Check out the Legalese Hall of Shame at POFP's website.

Word of the Week

Heart Balm Action

A generic name for any of the common law actions for the torts of alienation of affections, breach of promise of marriage, criminal conversation, and seduction. For more on these delicious torts, see my earlier post, The Art of Conversation.

"Tragic Wordplay" in the DC Circuit

Until a few days ago, terminally ill patients had a constitutional right to access potentially life saving drugs - even if those drugs had not yet been approved by the FDA.

On Tuesday (August 7), in the case of Abigail Alliance v. Eschenbach, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held that no such right exists, reversing last year's decision in the Abigail case by - the DC Circuit. In other words, the court reversed itself. Ooops.

The issue is clearly one of life and death, but in the courts it came down to a battle of semantics.

Read the rest on Huffington Post!

My Way or the Highway?

One of the early Lord Chancellors of England was Thomas Egerton. (The Chancellors were the officials who created the branch of law we call "Equity" - which brings us such nifty things as injunctions and TROs)

Anyway, Egerton was elevated to the post by Queen Elizabeth. After Elizabeth's death, Egerton sought to curry favor with the new King, James. He wrote the King a letter to assure him of his loyalty; he wrote "I have learned no waye but the King's highe waye . . ."

Is this the origin of the phrase "my way or the highway"?

Word of the Week

Endorse and Indorse

English is full of words in which there is a "hesitation" (as Fowler puts it) between the initial i- and the initial e-. Here is a fine example from the law.

A person indorses a document by signing it on the back, or as they say in Latin, in dorso (dorso, of course, being the root of the English dorsal, as in the dorsal fin of a shark). In Britain, people spell the word endorse while in the US, it’s indorse for checks and endorse for all other meanings. “Indorse” is the more traditional spelling; it was favored by Blackstone, who enthusiastically reported that the payee of a negotiable instrument may assign his rights “to any other man, by indorsement . . . and he may assign the same to another, and so on in infinitium.” I don’t think he meant that last bit literally.

POFP on HuffPo!

Your faithful correspondent is now featured on the Huffington Post, commenting on Congress's attempt to redefine discrimination. What Congress is trying to do is increase the Statute of Limitations for employment discrimination cases -- about which reasonable minds may differ -- but their tactics are abominable. Rather than come straight out and change the limitations period, Congress proposes to change the definition of discrimination to the point of meaninglessness. Under Congress's definition, "discrimination" occurs any time an employee receives a paycheck or any other benefit, the amount of which may have been affected by an act of discrimination at any time in the employee's career, no matter how long ago.

Speaking of incomprehensible things, people at technorati say I have to put the following into a blog post:

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