Under the new Civil Procedure Rules in England and Wales, claims are allocated to ‘management tracks’: the small claims track, the fast track, and the multi-track. Normally, claims under £5,000 go to the first, between £5,000 and £15,000 to the second and over £15,000 to the third – but there is more to it than that. The multi-track is so-called because the court can deal with cases of widely differing values and complexity.

It is a bit foolhardy of me to attempt to translate these terms into German. It has come into my mind again because I have just read about a case management track in Maryland (via The Volokh Conspiracy).

So is ‘case management track’ a standard term, meaning a particular route or course taken through a court or some other context? I found a legal technology show where the different strands were called tracks. Is there a synonym for that? Is it a term in social work?

Well, I haven’t solved it but am nearer to understanding it. I found a law firm, Bevan Ashford, with a nice description of English civil procedure in German:

bq. Ist die Klageerwiderung bei Gericht eingereicht, sendet das Gericht beiden Seiten besondere Fragebögen zu (Allocation Questionnaires) und setzt eine Frist für deren Rücksendung an das Gericht. “Allocation” bedeutet, dass der Richter den Rechtsstreit zunächst einer bestimmten Verfahrensart zuweist. Sobald das Gericht den ausgefüllten Fragebogen erhält, oder wenn die gesetzte Frist verstrichen ist, weist es den Fall folgenden möglichen Verfahrensarten zu:

bq. dem “Small Claims Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert bis £ 5.000,00);
dem “Fast Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert von £ 5.000,00 bis £ 15.000,00); oder
dem “Multi-Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert über £ 15.000,00 oder für Fälle von besonderer Komplexität).

I like the Verfahrensarten here.

The following message/mail is frequently seen in mailing lists or email. At least it gives the correct title of the book (Dave Barry is constantly being quoted with no attribution), although the author is missing and the details confused (the book wasn’t published by court reporters, but the examples were taken down by them):

bq. This is from a book called Disorder in the Court. The book is about things
people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published
by court reporters. Here is one of the exchanges I like best:
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the
autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law
somewhere.

I have the book Disorderly Conduct. Verbatim excerpts from actual court cases selected by Rodney R. Jones, Charles M. Sevilla and Gerald F. Uelmen, with illustrations by Lee Lorenz, 1987, ISBN 0 393 30597 X
I used to read bits to students, so I recognized them when they were quoted on the Internet without attribution.
Charles Sevilla wrote a later book, Disorder in the Court
At www.amazon.com it’s possible to ‘look inside’ books nowadays. Continue reading →

openbrackets has an entry giving statistics on how often translators are characters in films. She cites the Internet Movie Database.

Here are a very few of the entries:

Leonardo da Vinci: 16
Interpreters: 215
Translators: 136
Serial killers named Bob: 1

You do the search by selecting ‘Characters’ in the pull-down search field and entering ‘translator’ in the second search field. It gives 99 men and 37 women. I wouldn’t trust the database to distinguish accurately between translators and interpreters, however.

The Austrian RDB (Rechtsdatenbank) website has links to a number of databases and journals (via Handakte WebLAWg). Its main aim seems to be offering access, at a price, to a large number of journals, collections of cases and other resources (if you need fewer than 50 documents a month, there is still a setup cost of 243 euros and a cost of 4,13 for each RDB document search).

Free of charge: a magazine with a number of interesting articles, including one on Justitia 2003, the latest round in a competition for Austria’s best legal websites. Tax firm Szabo & Partner (with English and Hungarian versions – at a glance, the PDF documents are in better English than the sentences on the website), tax adviser Thomas Brandner, Ernst & Young Austria and the private investigation firm Bernhard Maier (with English and Greek versions – the English is not MT and is comprehensible) are some of the winners, as is the Bundeskanzleramt /Federal Chancellery site.