I just accidentally noticed this significant date. I may remove this whole blog from the Web in the near future as I am no longer updating it and its post-Brexit survival on a German site with UK registration is complicating my life. It’s been fun!
Two photos from Fürth.
In the Jewish Museum there is one room whose roof can be removed and replaced by branches, where the family who lived there could stay during the Feast of Tabernacles (Laubhüttenfest/Sukkot). This is a shot of it:
This is a balcony in Friedrichstraße – according to the famous FürthWiki this is a tabernacle, built in 1907: “Balkonanbau, vermutlich Sukka, von Adam Egerer, 1907″:
And here is an advert for the Fürth football team, Greuther Fürth, as seen in Nuremberg Airport in both February and September 2023:
I know things are bad in this country – I know courts have been closed (even without containing RAAC), I know legal aid has been cut, I know prisons are overcrowded (while the government calls for more and harsher sentences) – but this still doesn’t sit very well with me.
A court in Karlsruhe decides against extradition of Albanian man ‘in view of the state of the British prison system’.
A German court has refused to extradite to the UK a man accused of drug trafficking because of concerns about prison conditions in Britain, in what is thought to be the first case of its kind.
This was the Oberlandesgericht.
Karlsruhe higher regional court in south-west Germany made its decision earlier this year, and it has only recently been made public.
A translation of the court report said: “The court decided that the extradition of the Albanian to Britain was ‘currently inadmissible’. Without British guarantees, extradition is not possible in view of the state of the British prison system. There are no legal remedies against this.”
The man was arrested by German police and held in extradition custody.
His defence lawyer, Jan-Carl Janssen had studied in Glasgow and had written a thesis that looked at UK prison conditions.
In court, Janssen cited his research about chronic overcrowding, staff shortages and violence among inmates in British prisons. On the back of this evidence, the German court sought reassurances on two occasions from the UK authorities about prison conditions there.
The court said guarantees from the UK of compliance with minimum standards in accordance with the European convention on human rights were required. In addition, the court asked the British authorities to specify which prisons the Albanian man was going to be detained in and what his conditions of detention would be in those prisons.
A police station in Manchester replied to the court’s first request on the final day of the deadline for a response, saying 20,000 extra prison places were being built to deal with the problem of overcrowding. The second request for reassurance about UK prison conditions received no response from the UK.
…Since the UK is no longer a member of the EU, the rules of the European arrest warrant no longer apply.
It does look as though similar decisions have been made in Ireland and the Netherlands. It does sound rather weak to promise that the UK is building prisons for 20,000 more people.
From the Frankfurter Rundschau:
In dem neueren Fall hatte der Verdächtige einen Anwalt, der so etwas wie ein Experte für den Zustand der britischen Gefängnisse war. Jan-Carl Janssen schrieb seine Dissertation über das Strafvollzugssystem in England, Wales und Schottland und führte vor Gericht seine Untersuchungen zu Themen wie chronische Überbelegung, Personalmangel und Gewalt unter Insassen an. Er sagte auch, dass einige Zellen zu klein, zu dunkel und schlecht belüftet sind.
That’s a one-year LL.M. dissertation btw.
Here is Jan Carl Janssen and here is his book on prison conditions.
LATER NOTE: A report on this case on Udo Vetter’s blog, with four comments (glad the UK is out of the EU, especially because the right of silence has been weakened). Not yet references to how a prisoner escaped from Wandsworth last week. Udo gives the file number of the German case: 301 OAus 1/23
(Excuse the lack of spaces between sections – I don’t understand the latest edition of WordPress)
On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Mary Aspinall-Miles (followed by 27 people I follow) wrote:
May I ask a question about criminal justice language: When did the word “perpetrators/perp” start getting wide-scale use in the UK generally?
After the pandemic when we all started watching too many US cop shows on Netflix?
Has it though? I don’t hear this at work: it’s suspect / offender / nominal / defendant; and very occasionally accused / subject / target / person of interest. I think it may be more common in victim support services, maybe ?
In the light of concerns about the Ben Butler case in June 2016, this post by Sarah Phillimore attempts to explain the law that will apply in the family courts when a child has been hurt and there are a number of adults who could have done it – the so called ‘pool of perpetrators’.
In Re B (Children: Uncertain Perpetrator) [2019] EWCA Civ 575, [2019] 2 FLR 211 (“Re B: 2019″), Peter Jackson LJ clarified the proper approach in respect of uncertain perpetrator cases and the concept of a pool of perpetrators.
A person who perpetrates something, esp. a crime or evil deed.
Estemed as menquellers and perpetratours of most wicked factes.
, Actes & Monumentes (revised edition) vol. I. 110/2
…
The actor or absolute perpetrator of the crime.
, Commentaries on Laws of England vol. IV. iii. 341796…What is often said..of other crimes..if the perpetrator be sufficiently illustrious, it becomes a virtue.
, Book-hunter (1863) 1831951Harington was the Queen’s godson—clever,..naughty, a light~weight, perpetrator of puns and practical jokes.
, English Past 241995
He wanted the perpetrators captured and executed.
, Op-center xx. 100
Terrence R. Carney, of the University of South Africa, has published Linguistics for Legal Translation (thanks to Juliette Scott in her From Words to Deeds blog). The book can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF.
The book is intended not for scholars of linguistics but for legal practitioners.
The focus is statutory interpretation, though constitutional interpreters and interpreters of contracts might also gain from this text. Furthermore, I wrote the book specifically for those who must clarify lexical semantic and pragmatic meaning contested in case law, but who have no official training in linguistics or language studies. More precisely, the book aims at providing a resource for those who attempt forensic lexicological investigations in order to resolve legal disputes.
The book has a particular interest in the use of dicionaries and legal corpora. It is rather strange to read case reports where judges alight on a particular dictionary – whether monolingual or bilingual – and treat it as gospel. So one may hope that some of them come across this book and have time to read it.
Boris Johnson called the House of Commons Privileges Committee a kangaroo court. In fact, the term seems to be frequently used. It wasn’t part of my vocabulary and I wondered what it had to do with kangaroos. Apparently the origin is not certain, but it may have to do with leaping over the official route of something, or of an impromptu court moving from place to place.
Here is the Oxford English Dictionary on the term:
kangaroo court n. originally U.S. an improperly constituted court having no legal standing, e.g. one held by strikers, mutineers, prisoners, etc.
I have mentioned the book Englisch als Vertragssprache by Triebel and Vogenauer before. I have now found a detailed description by Annika Kunstmann in German in Zieltexter.de:
Das Buch „Englisch als Vertragssprache“ von Dr. Volker Triebel und Prof. Stefan Vogenauer, erschienen 2018 im Verlag C. H. Beck, München, beschäftigt sich mit englischsprachigen Verträgen und der Erkenntnis, dass solche gerade bei Geltung deutschen Rechts zu mehr Missverständnissen, Fehlerquellen und Fallstricken führen können, als dies bei deutschen Vertragstexten der Fall ist.
There is more.
Zieltexter.de is an online publication by ADÜ Nord, following the closure of the print Infoblatt. I missed Richard Schneider’s announcement at uepo.de.
Even lawyers do not like legal language according to this article.
I found the reference through a colleague who subscribes to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (thanks, Marisa!) and quoted this, from 31.05.2023:
Warum so kompliziert?
Von Sibylle Anderl
Wer Texte von Anwälten liest, ist hinterher selten schlauer. Die Motivation dahinter haben nun US-Forscher entschlüsselt.
Wie naiv die Vorstellung ist, menschliche Sprache diene stets dem möglichst reibungsfreien Austausch von Informationen zwischen Sender und Empfänger, illustriert wohl kaum etwas besser als die Ausdrucksweise von Juristen. Das Missverständnis, dem Leser solle im juristischen Schriftverkehr Verständnis ermöglicht werden, ist meist nach wenigen Worten vom Tisch. Die Gründe dafür sind gut erforscht: Der Trick liegt in der Kombination von Schachtelsätzen mit unüblichen Fachtermini. …
The article referred to appeared in PNAS: Even lawyers do not like legalese (paywall but I paid the $10). Here’s the abstract:
Across modern civilization, societal norms and rules are established and communicated largely in the form of written laws. Despite their prevalence and importance, legal documents have long been widely acknowledged to be difficult to understand for those who are required to comply with them (i.e., everyone). Why? Across two preregistered experiments, we evaluated five hypotheses for why lawyers write in a complex manner. Experiment 1 revealed that lawyers, like laypeople, were less able to recall and comprehend legal content drafted in a complex “legalese” register than content of equivalent meaning drafted in a simplified register. Experiment 2 revealed that lawyers rated simplified contracts as equally enforceable as legalese contracts, and rated simplified contracts as preferable to legalese contracts on several dimensions–including overall quality, appropriateness of style, and likelihood of being signed by a client. These results suggest that lawyers who write in a convoluted manner do so as a matter of convenience and tradition as opposed to an outright preference and that simplifying legal documents would be both tractable and beneficial for lawyers and nonlawyers alike.
The text types referred to are contracts and statutes (judgments and correspondence are my favourites though).
I wondered what the German Schachtelsätze referred to specifically. It seems the villain is the centre-embedded clause (“leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies”), which I hadn’t heard of but does seem similar to the convoluted German sentences.
The authors cited five hypotheses as to why lawyers write in a more complex manner than they themselves would prefer:
1. Curse of knowledge hypothesis – curse of knowledge is assuming other people know as much as you do and so failing to explain enough.
2. Copy-and-paste hypothesis – when you are putting a contract together, you use archaic clauses by copying them rather than amending or adapting them. I suppose that cut and paste predates word processing.
From Wikipedia:
The term “cut and paste” comes from the traditional practice in manuscript-editings whereby people would cut paragraphs from a page with scissors and paste them onto another page. This practice remained standard into the 1980s. Stationery stores sold “editing scissors” with blades long enough to cut an 8½”-wide page. The advent of photocopiers made the practice easier and more flexible.
I hadn’t heard of editing scissors, an exciting term.
3. In-Group signalling hypothesis: signalling to other lawyers that you’re part of the tribe, sounding more “lawyerly”.
4. It’s just business hypothesis: writing in a convoluted way to preserve your monopoly on legal services and justify your fees.
5. Complexity of information hypothesis: thinking that law is so complex that only complex language can do justice to it.
Most of these hypotheses are debunked in the article, but the copy-and-paste idea seems to stand up.It’s a problem for translators since you are translating for someone who doesn’t really understand what they wrote.
Here is an example of contract language in tradition legalese (left) and simpler language (right), highlighting the differences:
No participant saw those paired versions – the traditional and simpler versions did not match. There are details of how the study was recruited for and conducted. See the article for these. For example, in one experiment, 60% of participants identified as male, 38% as non-White. Lawyers were further categorized, for example 50% were coded as “fancy” lawyers, meaning that they either graduated from a top-25 law school according to US News and World report or worked at a top-200 law firm according to American Lawyer magazine.
Here is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in action in 2023. (Brick Court Chambers just call it The Privy Council).
A horrifying story.
The Privy Council has today quashed the conviction of Mr Vinson Ariste for armed robbery on the ground that the confession on which the conviction was based should never have been admitted into evidence and rendered the conviction unsafe.
Mr Ariste was 20 years old in 2010, when the robbery happened. He looked much better before his police confession than after. In 2012 he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on the basis of this confession. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Bahamas Court of Appeal, and thereafter to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which has now quashed the conviction. He was in prison for 12 years.
Paul Bowen KC, Emma Mockford and Jagoda Klimowicz acted pro bono on behalf of the Appellant, instructed by Simons Muirhead Burton / the Death Penalty Project.
Here is the trial.
I notice that the appellant is Mr Vinson Ariste and the respondent is The King.
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) is the court of final appeal for the UK overseas territories and Crown dependencies. It also serves those Commonwealth countries that have retained the appeal to His Majesty in Council or, in the case of republics, to the Judicial Committee. The judges are usually the justices of the Supreme Court. The Bahamas is an independent country, and member of the Commonwealth, which has decided to retain the Queen, now King Charles III, as head of state.
This leaves the question of what is the Privy Council itself? A question much asked when Penny Mordaunt appeared as a swordbearer at the coronation, in her capacity as Lord President of the Privy Council. Anyone who wants details of that can find it on the web.
A useful diagram from Legal Cheek and the University of Law.