THE PARTY OF THE FIRST PART: The Curious World of Legalese

The Eats, Shoots & Leaves of legalese, this witty narrative journey through the letter of the law offers something for language lovers and legal eagles alike This clever, user-friendly discourse exposes the simple laws lurking behind decorative, unnecessary, and confusing legal language. For better or for worse, the instruction manual for today’s world is written by lawyers. Everyone needs to understand this manual-but lawyers persist in writing it in language no one can possibly decipher.Why accuse someone of making ‘material misstatements of fact,’ when you could just call them a liar? What’s the point of a ‘last’ will and testament if, presumably, every will is your last? Did you know that ‘law’ derives from a Norse term meaning ‘that which is laid down’? So tell your boss to stop laying down the law-it already is.The debate over Plain vs. Precision English rages on in courtrooms, boardrooms, and, yes, even bedrooms. Here, Adam Freedman explores the origins of legalese, interprets archaic phrasing (witnesseth!), explains obscure and oddly named laws, and disputes the notion that lawyers are any smarter than the rest of us when judged solely on their briefs. (A brief, by the way, is never so.) Freedman, who “translates” legal jargon into English for an investment bank and writes the “Legal Lingo” column for the New York Law Journal, offers a cornucopia of hilarious, offbeat and downright bizarre examples of simple concepts contorted into words that defy understanding, often retaining centuries-old lingo like “Further affiant sayeth naught” (which means: this is the end of the affidavit). Freedman is as much reformer as humorist, and he ably demonstrates that legal documents can be written in understandable prose. He also skewers the contingent of lawyers and academics who resist such changes in the name of precision and lampoons flaws in the legal system, such as judges’ refusal to explain instructions to jurors who are mystified by phrases such as “Circumstantial evidence is evidence that, if found to be true, proves a fact from which an inference of the existence of another fact may be drawn.” Occasionally the three-jokes-a-page approach is more cute than clever, but this lighthearted farrago of the follies of the law is sure to amuse and to convince readers that legal language can be made plain.