According to Dolomiten-Online, a German-language newspaper in South Tyrol, Italy, a court in Bolzano has decided that the Nuremberg couple Erika and Helmut Simon were the finders of Ötzi, the Iceman, the 5300-year-old corpse found on the Austrian-Italian border on 15 September 1991.

The paper has a complete Ötzi section. And of course, there is an Ötzi museum in Bolzano, where Ötzi has been kept in cold storage since 19998.

The Land South Tyrol (should I be using Italian terminology there?) is going to appeal against the judgment.

Under Italian law, the Simons, if upheld as finders, have a right to 25% of the value of Ötzi (named after the Ötztal Alps where he was found). The actual value is likely to be disputed in further courts, unless there is an out-of-court settlement.

The Nürnberger Nachrichten gives more detail. The government of Bolzano (Bozener Landeshauptmann) will have to pay the Simons’ court costs and lawyers’ fees and expenses, which amount to about 10,000 euros so far. For many years there has been a campaign in South Tyrol presenting the Simons as nasty Germans interested only in money.

Erika Simon and her lawyer in Bolzano, Elohim Rudolph-Ramirez, will be making a carefully drafted statement later in the week.

Transmogriflaw reports from law school in the USA.

bq. My law school has wireless access in all classrooms, and almost everybody takes notes on a laptop. I rarely use the wireless because there is too much going on in class for that distraction, but sometimes my friends and I log into Instant Messenger during class and open a chat room.
We don’t chat. The chat room is reserved for questions like, “Did he say involuntary or voluntary?”, or, “§45 or §90?”, or, “Score! A guest speaker!”

As the rest of the entry shows, Instant Messenger can be very helpful when a student is picked on in the Socratic method.

(We don’t have the Socratic method in England or Germany. The most famous accounts are Scott Turow’s gripping account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L, and the film The Paper Chase).

fieldmethods.net recommends this OneLook Reverse Dictionary.

There are two types of reverse dictionary. One is a list of words starting with the ending. I have one of those in book form (it starts with a and baa, and ends with abuzz and fuzz), but is there none online?

The other is one where you enter the definition and the dictionary gives you the word(s). OneLook is the latter kind. The Reader’s Digest sells one of these, ISBN: 089577951X: quite useful; and there’s also an Oxford Reverse Dictionary, ISBN: 0192801139, which I don’t know.

I entered ‘lawyers’ and got the following list (I was less happy with the results for ‘person who does oral translation’):

1. attorney 2. lawyerly 3. lawyering 4. barristers 5. solicitor
6. barrister 7. counselor 8. pettifogger 9. bar 10. shyster
11. counsel 12. leguleian 13. ambulance chaser 14. prosecutor 15. counsellor
16. public defender 17. conveyancer 18. prosecuting attorney 19. prosecuting officer 20. client 21. paralegal 22. mouthpiece 23. shingle 24. consultation 25. abraham lincoln 26. lincoln 27. advocate 28. counselor-at-law 29. defense attorney 30. defense lawyer 31. divorce lawyer 32. defense
33. prosecution 34. attorney-at-law 35. breviate 36. trial attorney
37. trial lawyer 38. lawyerbush 39. retainer 40. scrivener
41. hays 42. chamber 43. squire 44. retain 45. honest 46. disbar
47. briefless 48. legal cap 49. cant 50. belli 51. birkenhead 52. clarence darrow
53. cohn 54. cohns 55. demurrer 56. jurist 57. lawer 58. nomiatrist 59. pleader
60. defence 61. law firm 62. privilege 63. retainers 64. criminal lawyer
65. jeofail 66. loophole 67. shapiro 68. templar 69. attorney-client privilege
70. attorney-client relation 71. defend 72. devil 73. feme 74. lawyer-client relation 75. practice 76. sergeant 77. writer 78. legal assistant 79. preaudience
80. unless 81. alben barkley 82. alben william barkley 83. arthur garfield hays
84. barkley 85. clarence seward darrow 86. darrow 87. disbarment
88. francis scott key 89. hoover 90. j. edgar hoover 91. john edgar hoover
92. mouth 93. verdict 94. canter & siegel 95. fee splitting 96. boswell
97. bryan 98. dulles 99. pettifog 100. pro bono

In an earlier entry, I mentioned the way novels are adapted for the American or British market.

There’s a reference to this in the interview with Neil Gaiman on Slashdot (Gaiman is British but lives in the USA). One of the questions is:

6) As a Brit living in the US I feel very aware of… –
….how you tailor your writing to which side of the Atlantic your intended audience is on. When I read Neverwhere it was the US edition and clearly contained language and explanations that would seem a little inappropriate to readers in the UK. Do you carry out your own ‘translations’ of your books? What differences do you see between American and British audiences to which you need to adapt? And how involved are you in the translations to other languages and hence cultures?

Here’s the beginning of the answer:

I try to stay on top of the US and the UK editions of books (sometimes I fail). Neverwhere needed quite some work for the US readership, which I did 98% of, and the other 2% was done without my knowledge. (For example — I kept the word “flat” for where Richard lived, in my US version. It’s not a universally common US word, but it’s comprehensible. The US editors unilaterally decided to change the word to “apartment” and did a universal find-and-replace, and in the bound galleys that were sent to reviewers there were people who believed the Earth was apartment and people started to say things apartmently.)

There is some more, including an acknowledgement of the importance of translators.

The ABA website links to an article in the November issue of the ABA Journal, about the lack of qualified interpreters for immigrants, entitled (what else?) Lost in Translation.

bq. These cases will multiply as immigrants continue to pour into the United States, says Chicago public defender Marijane Hemza-Placek. She represents Omar Aguirre, who was wrongfully convicted and spent five years in prison for the murder of a Chicago furniture-store owner. His conviction was based largely on a confession, now in doubt, that was elicited by a police officer who acted as a Spanish-speaking interpreter, says Hemza-Placek, who works in the felony division of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. …

bq. But unfortunately, Hemza-Placek says, there is a common misconception that simply being bilingual is enough to qualify someone as an interpreter. Certification varies widely among the states, within a jurisdiction and even from judge to judge.

bq. In some instances, anyone from a clerk to an officer is drafted to interpret a confession, and they “more or less guesstimate” what the suspect is saying, Hemza-Placek says. These stand-ins often have unexplored biases, and more often they lack the requisite skills.

There is a separate article on ‘Interpreting your Interpreter’, with advice on how to tell if an interpreter is qualified and competent.

In 1938, Homes and Gardens published an article on Hitler’s home Haus Wachenfeld in the Bavarian alps. This article was available on the Internet this summer, and now that copyright problems have been removed, there is an article in the Guardian by Simon Waldman on how he discovered it and the reactions to his publishing it on the Web.

The original article can also be seen on the Guardian site.

bq. The curtains are of printed linen, or fine damask in the softer shades. Herr Hitler is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect. He is constantly enlarging the place, building on new guest-annexes, and arranging in these his favourite antiques – chiefly German furniture of the eighteenth century, for which agents in Munich are on the look out.

There is also a version of the article together with a transcript on the Wyman Institute site.