Why Legal Writing Is So Hard for Mortals (i.e., Clients) to Understand
Praesent in multis potuit paucis? (Or...Why use a few words when many could do?) I wonder how much lawyers' love of Latin has to do with the hunger for academic respect that influences so much of their law school training. Or, with the powder-wigged, Boswellian affectations that characterize the case law they studied?
Take a peek behind the curtain of law school training in today’s New York Times. In it, reporter David Segal outlines the failure of legal education in the U.S. to prepare lawyers to practically earn their keep.
The piece made me think about what might inspire the florid written wordiness I so often see from lawyers, even in non-legal business development content. Could it have something to do with the obsession of law school professors to be taken seriously in academe? Or, with the hidebound, 18th and 19th-century (and earlier) case law that still comprises so much of what law students pack into their brains?
Is the use of Latin, hallowed despite its death (or, perhaps, because of it), another way of compensating for the profession’s inferred inferiority. Is Latin a way for lawyers to prove they they deserve to be taken as seriously and respected as much as, say, physicians or clergy?
Mr. Segal reports that the winds of reform are gathering, offering hope that law student loans and other wrongs will be blown away. Maybe these fresh breezes will arrive with copies of Strunk and White.
