NYC police officer Eduardo Delacruz refused to arrest a homeless man.  The NY Time reports that he may lose his job and his pension for doing what he thinks Jesus would have done.

 

(Incidentally, the subject of this post, and the two below, came to me courtesy of SojoMail, Sojourners' email newsletter.  To find out more about them, go to "Sojourners" under the "Faith" heading at right.)

This is freezing cool.  Go there.

You news-feed addicts should love this.  Brought to you by Newseum.org.

Ernie the Attorney touts Running With Lawyers, a web log maintained by an anonymous in-house attorney whose pen name is Rufus T. Firefly.  (If you want to know where that pen name came from, look here.)  RWL is wickedly funny--worth checking out.

You can morph faces on Morphases.com. Go there, pick out a random face, and twist it until it looks like a Picasso.

At right, I've added three new links, under the heading "News."

 

Opinions You Should Have, by Tom Burka, consists of his "political humor and random musings."  He's a man after my own heart, and is very funny.  Today's post, Senate Revises Voting Procedure, may make us over-40's nostalgic for the days of "expletive deleted."

 

Burka's site, in turn, led me to The Raw Story, which Burka describes as "a glossy web-based antidote to the poison [Matt] Drudge spews daily."

 

DerfMagazine.com describes itself as "Cincinnati's most irrelevant news source."  While it's mostly inside jokes, I like its attitude; plus it's the only local-news parody I've found.

On May 15, I expounded on the difference between tortious and tortuous.  But my headline, "A Tortuous Mistake," was wrong: it should have read "A Torturous Mistake."

 

Torturous is the adjective form of torture; it means causing torture or pain.  Tortuous, the word I used instead of torturous, means full of twists, turns, or bends.  Tortious, often misspelled as tortuous, means pertaining to a tort.

 

All three word share the root tort, meaning to twist.  Torturous is relatively easy to remember; of the three, it's the only word with torture in it.  I can't think of a handy mnemonic to keep the other two straight.  The best advice I can give is to write nothing without having a dictionary nearby.

Bryan Garner says that cite, as a noun, is a casualism, though "[s]ome excellent legal writers have used it in this way ..."  Dict. Modern Legal Usage 156 (2d ed. 1995).  The more proper noun form of the verb cite is citation.

 

Many writers confuse the noun cite with its homonym, site.  Perhaps the best way to avoid this confusion is to always use citation rather than cite in writing, and to restrict the noun cite to spoken communication.

The auxiliary verb may can be ambiguous, especially in the negative.

 

May can mean (a) is permitted to, or (b) might.  Thus, the sentence, "The court may disallow a late-filed affidavit," can mean that (a) the court is permitted to disallow the late-filed affidavit; or (b) the court might disallow the late-filed affidavit.  That ambiguity isn't so bad, because there's only a shade of difference between the two possible meanings.  In fact, (b) could be a corollary of (a).

 

But the ambiguity becomes much worse when the negative may not is used.  May not can mean (a) is not permitted to, or (b) might not.  Imagine a court rule that requires papers to be filed on letter-sized paper, and says, "The clerk may not accept for filing anything printed on legal-sized paper."  Does that mean the clerk is not permitted to accept legal-sized filings?  Or does it mean that if you file something on legal-sized paper, the clerk might or might not accept it?  Both meanings are equally possible.

 

Ambiguity is the greatest sin that a legal writer can commit.  So to avoid ambiguity, avoid may not.  If your mean that something is not permitted, better to use the passive is not permitted to than the ambiguous may not.  If you mean that something might or might not occur, better to use the unambiguous might not than the ambiguous may not.

You may notice a new title on the navigation column at left:  "RAQs."  That's "Rarely Asked Questions" about this site.

Tom Bihn, a manufacturer of laptop bags, briefcases, and backpacks, sold merchandise with this care label, in English and French:

For those, like me, who don't know French, the last three lines translate into English as follows:  "We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We did not vote for him."  It started as an inside joke -- they say to poke fun at the company president, not at GWB.  Regardless of which president the label refers to, the company is capitalizing on it.  (If you go here, you'll see that's capitalize as in capitalist.)

This morning I taught a 90-minute session at the International Legislative Drafting Institute, held at Tulane Law School (alien territory to me, a Loyola Law grad).  My presentation was on drafting court rules.  This was another experience where the teacher may have learned more than the students did.

 

I've taught CLE classes before, but this was the first time I've ever been interpreted UN style.  Many of the attendees were Russian speaking.  They had these little receivers in their ears, while an interpreter with a little microphone and transmitter sat on one side of the room, simultaneously translating my presentation into Russian.  Occasionally someone would raise a hand and ask me a question in Russian.  (Fortunately, the first time this happened, I had caught on that there was an interpreter in the room.)  The interpreter would repeat the question in English.  I would answer in English, then listen to the interpreter repeat my answer in Russian. 

 

After my presentation, I had lunch at Mat & Naddie's with David Marcello and two other presenters, legal-drafting expert Phil Knight and Georgetown Law professor Bob Stumberg. David heads the Public Law Center at Tulane -- the organization that puts on the ILDI.  One of the topics we discussed was how the "plain English" movement in legal writing translates into other languages.  (Richard C. Wydick, author of Plain English for Lawyers, was also on the faculty; on June 15 he had given a three-hour presentation on plain-language drafting.)  David said that many other legal cultures have the same problems as English-speaking ones do with flowery, highfalutin legal writing.  So the attendees needed to hear, and appreciated hearing, what Prof. Wydick had to say.

The Brushback.com does for sports what The Onion does for news. Whatever that is.

On May 23, I opined that flying Formosan termites are a worse plague than cicadas.  In light of this shocking information, I may have to change my mind.

A couple of days ago, I posted A Linguistic Oddity?, about my wife's and my habit of using the past tense to talk about present-tense desires or plans, e.g. "What time did you want to eat?"

 

I got two interesting comments.  First, my sister Wendy Jo Ward, who teaches English at Miami Dade College, thought the usage might have something to do with the conditional mood, and sent me this link.

 

Meanwhile, Casey Fos sent the question to a friend, Gerhard, an Austrian who teaches English as a second language at the University of Innsbruck.  Gerhard replied:

Mr. Poon makes an excellent point about the word speechless.

The Legal Writer is my other ongoing web project: a traditional web site where I keep articles that I've written about legal writing.  I spent some time this weekend updating it.  First, I got rid of the legal headlines on the bottom of the home page, and substituted a couple of search engines (Lycos and Hot Bot, same as on this page).  I also added a pages titled Short Takes, which is simply a collection of links to Rain Man postings about legal writing.

Notes is Evan Schaeffer's web log.  He cares about legal writing, so much that he pays people who spot a typo or grammatical error on Notes.  That bit of bravery earned a permanent link to Notes at right, under Other Legal.  If you're too lazy to scroll down, just click here.  To read Evan's articles on legal writing and other law-related topics, click here.

In a prior post, I raved about John Mellencamp's Trouble No More.  I just found Mellencamp's web site, which includes a page about this great album.  Go there and listen to Teardrops Will Fall (plus clips from all other songs) and watch a couple of music videos.  Make damned sure you watch the video for Going to Washington.

I've noticed an odd way that my wife and I talk about what one or the other of us wants to do: we use the past tense to refer to present desires or plans.  For instance, she will ask me, "What time did you want to have dinner?" when she means "What time do you want to have dinner?".  Or I will say, "I was going to watch TV," when I mean, "I'm going to watch TV."  I don't know whether I picked it up from her, she picked it up from me, or we both picked it up from New Orleans.  Does anyone else talk this way?

 

When speaking in the first person ("I was going to watch TV"), use of past tense could signal a willingness to change plans.  "I was going to watch TV, but I wouldn't mind going for a walk."  But that theory doesn't hold when speaking in the second person ("What time did you want to eat?"), unless the speaker wants to suggest that the other change his or her plans.

 

If you know of others who talk like this, or if you have a theory about why we do it, please send in a comment.

In Louisiana, prescription (statute of limitations) is suspended by the doctrine contra non valentem agere non currit praescriptio, meaning "prescription does not run against one unable to act."  Lawyers and judges often refer to this doctrine by the shorthand phrase contra non valentem.

 

The word valentem is often misspelled valentum, not only in briefs but in reported decisions too--even old ones.  See, e.g., Cox v. Von Ahlefeldt, 105 La. 543, 583 (1900), which proves that just because it's old doesn't mean you can trust it.

 

Even though most of us are ignorant of Latin, let's pretend that we aren't.  It's valentem, with an e; not valentum, with a u.

"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes.  But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings.  And of course that's Moses, not Jesus.  I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."

 

Source: AlterNet, via SojoMail.

Lately I've been listening to Pee-Wee Get My Gun by T-Model Ford.  This is raw blues from Scott County, Mississippi.  Tomorrow's Eric Claptons and Keith Richardses are listening to stuff like this today.  You can listen to two songs from this album on Fat Possum's site here.  Amazon has 30-second clips of five songs plus a couple of free MP3 downloads here .

This little story hit me in the heart -- from Martin Buber, via Bruderhof's "Daily Dig":

"Rabbi Barukh's grandson Yehiel was once playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for is playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of his hiding-place, but the other was nowhere to be seen. Now Yehiel realized that he had not looked for him from the very beginning. This made him cry, and crying he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. The tears brimmed in Rabbi Barukh's eyes and he said: "God says the same thing: 'I hide, but no one wants to seek me.'"

(To sign up for your own "Daily Dig," click on the Bruderhof link, right side of this page, under "Faith.")

Gambit Weekly features this 2002 interview by American Routes host Nick Spitzer.  (American Routes is a syndicated public-radio program based in New Orleans.)

Left Out describes itself as "a haven for progressive pro-lifers."  Meanwhile, Feminists for Life shows that feminism doesn't have to be monolithic on this issue.

Split the baby is a figure of speech that people often use, inaptly, to describe a compromise.  Usually what they mean is split the difference.  For instance, in a mediation, suppose plaintiff's last demand is $125 and defendant's last offer is $75.  The difference is $50; splitting the difference means the defendant offers $25 more and plaintiff agrees to take $25 less.

 

Splitting the baby connotes a "compromise" in which everyone loses everything -- not what people have in mind when they suggest splitting the baby.  The phrase comes from a story about Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16-28.  Two women in the same house had given birth to sons three days apart.  One son died, and each claimed the living son as hers.  They brought their dispute to King Solomon.  Solomon called for his sword, and ordered that the living son be cut in half, with each woman getting half.  One woman cried out in anguish, ""Please, my lord, give her the living child -- do not kill it!"  The other said, "It shall be neither mine nor yours.  Divide it!"  Solomon answered, "Give the first one the living child.  By no means kill it, for she is the mother."  Thus, Solomon did not resolve the dispute by "splitting the baby," but suggested splitting the baby to find out who the real mother was.  Had he really cut the baby in half, both children would be dead and both mothers bereaved -- hardly a satisfactory compromise.

 

James Schwarze of Employers Reinsurance Corporation wrote this article explaining lessons that mediators can learn from the story about Solomon.

The pi site you can link to below claims to show you pi to 1 million decimal places.  I've verified the claim -- I copied all digits right of the decimal point to clipboard, then pasted the whole thing into MS Word, then had Word count the characters in the file -- exactly 1 million.

Partner and pal Jeff Richardson passed along this link. (When you go there, note the URL.)

GE has this virtual sketch-pad called Imagination at Work. To doodle on your screen, just click and drag the Magic Marker. (It requires Macromedia Flash Player, which you can get here.)

"Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand."

-- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Yesterday's post about peremption got me thinking about the word peremptory, as in peremptory challenge to prospective juror or (in Louisiana) peremptory exceptions.  Not surprising, the etymology of peremptory is similar to that of peremption.  The word comes from the Latin peremptorius, meaning "destructive, deadly, mortal, that puts an end to, decisive."  Peremptorius is a form of perimere, which we saw in yesterday's post.

 

In Roman law, peremptory refers to something that destroys, puts an end to, or precludes all debate, e.g. a peremptory order, edict, or decree.  In English law, a peremptory challenge came to mean an objection to a prospective juror without showing any cause.  In Louisiana civil law, a peremptory exception can be pled in response to a civil action; its purpose is "to have the plaintiff's action declared legally nonexistent, or barred by effect of law, and hence this exception tends to dismiss or defeat the action."  La. Code Civ. Proc. Art. 923.

Today I'm working on a case that involves the Louisiana concept of peremption, and I keep reading briefs and judicial opinions that confuse the term with another similar term, preemption.  The confusion is understandable, but preventable with a little etymology.

 

Peremption is defined in La. Civil Code Art. 3458 as "a period of time fixed by law for the existence of a right.  Unless timely exercised, the right is extinguished upon the expiration of the peremptive period."  You common-law types can think of it as a statute of repose.

 

Preemption is defined in Black's Law Dictionary (7th ed.) as "the right to buy before others," or, in Constitutional law, "the principle (derived from the Supremacy Clause) that a federal law can supersede or supplant any inconsistent state law or regulation."

 

A little Latin can help you keep these words straight.  Black's first definition of preemption consists of the prefix pre followed by the root word emption.  If you remember the old saw, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), then it's easy to remember that emption means buying (from the Latin emere meaning "to buy").  And of course the prefix pre means before.  Thus, preempt means "buy before."

 

The word peremption has no prefix.  It comes from the Latin word perimere, meaning "to destroy, cut off, kill."  In Louisiana, when a claim is perempted, it's dead.

Gasbuddy.com says it's "the portal site to more than 170 web sites that help consumers find cheap gas prices."  If that doesn't grab your attention, see a psychiatrist immediately.

Meetup.com is a forum for finding others who share your interests.  It boasts 1.2 million users in more than 1,000 cities, and a menu of more than 4,000 topics.  I signed up for the Sojourners Magazine group.  We'll see how it does.

At right, under the Music heading, I've added a link to JPF Music. The company describes itself as "a New Orleans based music company that promotes independent music, particularly in the singer-songwriter and roots-rock area."  They sponsor a monthly show at House of Blues called 15 Minutes, at which 8 to 10 artists play 3 songs or 15 minutes before talent buyers, music critics, and a crowd averaging 100 to 200 per show.  In other words, they help talented but unknown artists gets discovered.  JPF also sells a CD titled 15 Minutes -- it's in my car CD player now, and it's excellent.

I can't say enough good things about Awareness by Anthony de Mello.  I picked it up during a 5-day Ignatian retreat four years ago.  It helped change my way of looking at the world and at myself.  I've added it to the About Me page under the heading My Handbook for Life.  That about sums it up.

 

The Vatican has this "review" of de Mello's writings generally, which deserves to be ignored.  Unlike the Vatican, de Mello never claimed to know everything.

At right, you'll see three new features that I added over the weekend:  Lycos and Hot Bot searches and an easy way to recommend this site to your friends.  At left, you'll see a link to a new page for submitting comments.  Please try them out.

I haven't read The Da Vinci Code.  But if you have, you may interested in this story on Religion News Blog , reprinted from the New York Times: "Defenders of Christianity Rush to Debunk 'The Da Vinci Code'."  The story summarizes The Da Vinci Code as "a historical thriller that claims Christianity was founded on a cover-up — that the church has conspired for centuries to hide evidence that Jesus was a mere mortal, married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendants live in France."  The story quotes many biblical scholars and church historians who criticize the book for its inaccuracies.

Today I re-learned a lesson about the necessity for deep legal research.  I was drafting a motion to erase a judicial mortgage.  In Louisiana, you can record a money judgment in the mortgage records and obtain a judicial mortgage on the judgment debtor's property.  As a litigator, I rarely go near mortgage law.  But a litigation client for whom I am appellate counsel needed this service in connection with the judgment we are appealing.  Through computer research, I found a case by the Louisiana Supreme Court exactly on point: Goldking Props. Co. v. Primeaux, 477 So.2d 76 (La. 1985).  I Keycited the case in Westlaw, and the Keycite came back clean -- the case appeared to be good law.  But in the middle of drafting the motion, I decided I needed to beef up the procedural aspects.  I went to the Civil Code, and found a comment to Article 3304 saying that Goldking had been legislatively overruled in 1992!  The comment was included in the 1992 legislation revising the Civil Code articles on mortgages generally, including judicial mortgages.  (I studied security rights in 1989 in law school, and took the bar exam in 1990.)  Fortunately, I had time to re-work my motion to base it on statutes enacted in 1992 along with the Civil Code revision.

 

The lesson I re-learned is this:  When researching any question in an unfamiliar area of law, do what my friend Scott Smith describes as "deep legal research." This requires books. Get generally familiar with the overall area of law (in my case, judicial mortgages). I should have done that on the front end of this particular project. Fortunately, though I did it on the back end, I did it before we filed the motion.

 

Another friend, Scott Stolley, has written a terrific article on how to conduct this kind of old-school legal research. Just go here, and flip to page 20 of the PDF file (page 39 of the magazine).

I like yesterday's Peanuts strip.  Today's is pretty good too.  Installments like these are what made Charles Schulz an artist.

On last night's news, the TV reporter said, "Sulfur has a corrosive effect on ...."  He should have said, "Sulfur corrodes ...."

 

The lesson:  Be sensitive to verbs masquerading as nouns or adjectives.  When you find one, decide whether the hidden verb better describes the action in the sentence.  If it does, rewrite the sentence to bring out the hidden verb.

 

Here, the reporter used a weak verb, has.  To convey the idea of corrosion, he had to help the weak verb by adding an article (a), an adjective (corrosive), a noun (effect), and a preposition (on).  Had he used the more descriptive verb, corrodes, he wouldn't have needed those four extra words.

Used-car dealers once sold used cars.  A few years ago, they started calling their merchandise pre-owned vehicles.  Now, a local automobile dealer has come up with this Orwellian euphemism:  newer car.  He has a commercial targeted at people with bad credit histories, promising them a chance to buy a "newer car" -- presumably that means "newer" than the cars they're currently driving.  Since he never promises these folks the chance to buy a new car, we can infer that he's really talking about selling them used cars.

 

In 1984, George Orwell wrote about a hellish world where words meant the opposite of what they should mean.  In a sane world, newer would mean "more new than new."  Now, it seems newer can mean just the opposite.