The winners of the 2003 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest have been announced. IN my case, via The Shifted Librarian, but obviously via via via… The contest is run by San Jose State University

Bulwer-Lytton wrote the words ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, now usually associated with Snoopy in Peanuts.

Here’s one of the winners:

bq. Winner: Detective
Detective Inspector Mike Norman slipped six fingers into his overcoat pocket, five of them clad in a latex glove and attached to his palm, while the sixth was wrapped in a plastic evidence bag and apparently belonged to the kidnapped pianist Ricardo Moore, or, as it now seemed likely, the kidnapped ex-pianist Ricardo Moore.
Alan Campbell
Edinburgh, Scotland

2002 results, 2001 results.

It was suggested I might say what differences were mentioned at last Saturday’s seminar between legal English in England and Wales and in the USA. So this is just a short list, because there weren’t so many things.

Problems: translators into English living in Germany often translate into English that is going to be read in more than one jurisdiction / country
So if I know the verb undertake will confuse people in the USA, I will use agree , which is OK for both BE and AmE

|U.S.A.|England and Wales|

|Names of parties: (The) Buyer / (The) Seller|The Buyer / The Seller|

|Dates: 7.12.2003|12.7.2003|

Translators should write the month out as a word, e.g. 12 July 2003.

|stipulate|undertake|

(the meaning may be different, but each is used in one country only
Some difference in the meaning of the word covenant?
I think the Americans refer to an entire agreement clause and to warranties and representations – I think we have the phenomenon but use slightly different vocabulary to refer to it.
U.S.: forum and venue, forum shopping
class action
best efforts, at arm’s length

|use of serial comma|OUP uses it and it is permitted in BE, but not many people know that!|

And when you write out a figure in words, apparently the Americans don’t write in words, but just:

|325,000 only (three hundred…)|325,000 (in words: three hundred…)|

It would never have occurred to me that the Americans don’t write ‘in words’!

It was mentioned that the word appearer exists in Australia to refer to the persons appearing before a notary (die Erschienenen). I found it on the Web only in Louisiana, though, which makes sense because they have a partly civil-law system and would have notarial contracts. See, for example, this New Orleans site giving Types of Notarial Acts – the word appearer comes up frequently.

Via the Corporate Law Blog, a judge summing up e-filing times:

bq. …Corp Law Blog offers the following order, dated July 1, 2003, entered by Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation:

bq. Pursuant to the modified scheduling order, the parties in this case had until June 25, 2003 to file summary judgment motions. Any electronic document may be e-filed until midnight on the due date. In a scandalous affront to this court’s deadlines, Microsoft did not file its summary judgment motion until 12:04:27 a.m. on June 26, 2003, with some supporting documents trickling in as late as 1:11:15 a.m. I don’t know this personally because I was home sleeping, but that’s what the court’s computer docketing program says, so I’ll accept it as true. Continue reading →

There’s an article in USA Today that gives some detail about Microsoft’s attempts to keep the City of Munich as a customer and why Munich chose Linux. Via Slashdot.

Here is a bizarre and untranslatable term: the Ortsgericht in Hessen (I think we write Hessen in English now, and no longer Hesse?) I think Saturday was the second time I’d heard of it. It consists of a number of unpaid persons, a bit like lay magistrates, who do exciting things like certifying signatures on holographic wills (I didn’t think that was necessary). Romain has ‘local court’ as a translation, but that doesn’t seem right, as it isn’t a court.

But Lister and Veth (see June 7th entry) do not let me down:

bq. local special court in Hessen (staffed by lay judges and with jurisdiction over certain unlitigated private law matters)

Creifelds defines it too, as a special court with a narrow range of tasks in non-contentious jursidiction. They only exist in Hessen now. Members are the Ortsgerichtsvorsteher and Ortsgerichtsschöffen. Here are some (in German): Habichtswald, Pfungstadt, and a more general description, with links to the statute and the fee scale.

A consultation paper on a supreme court for the UK has been published as a PDF file.

At last we see what was meant by ‘a supreme court’.

From the executive summary:

bq. The paper sets out the Government’s proposal to remove the jurisdiction of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and transfer it to a new Supreme Court. This would be a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom, and would be quite separate from the England and Wales or Scottish or Northern Ireland courts. The present Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (the 12 full-time Law Lords) would form the initial members of the new Court. They would cease, while members of the Court, to be able to sit and vote in the House of Lords. There is no proposal to create a Supreme Court on the US model with the power to overturn legislation. Nor is there any proposal to create a specific constitutional court, or one whose primary role would be to give preliminary rulings on difficult points of law.

There is also the question of whether the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council should be transferred to this new court, which the government would prefer.

Discussion will centre on how appointments are to be made, what title the judges should have, whether there should be experienced part-time judges helping out (as they do now), and how to ensure there are enough representatives of Scotland and Northern Ireland.