Handakte WebLAWg reports on Journascience, a portal, in German, on crime and criminology. The site has a nice German-German glossary and a good links section – links for the USA, UK and France are included.

It’s been really noisy here all day, with music and a loudspeaker droning on. I had to go out and what did I see? A tent and stand labelled Bayern’s new bank (at first I thought it meant Bavaria’s new bank).

This is the Hypovereinsbank offering a savings bank card with interest rates linked to the performance of the FC Bayern football team. With every tenth home goal in the Bundesliga, the interest rate rises by 0.1% until the end of the season, and if the team win the cup, as it were, you will get 5% Zinsaufschlag (interest markup?) in the calendar month following the win.

I just hope the people who say the children outside are loud in summer make a few complaints about this din!

bq. Die Bayern gehen auf Torejagd und Sie profitieren davon
Mit der FC Bayern SparKarte freuen Sie sich über alle Heimtreffer der Bayern doppelt. Der Zinssatz steigt mit jedem 10. Bundesliga-Heimtor um 0,1% p.a. bis zum Saisonende.
Und wenn die Bayern zum 19. Mal Deutscher Meister werden, bekommen Sie 5% p.a. Zinsaufschlag im nächsten Kalendermonat nach der Meisterschaft.

Bettina of Nicht-alle-Tage-Buch describes a comic for young people to appear in January, from the EU parliament, on the topic of water pollution (with picture of a strip). It can be ordered free of charge here. That’s in German. The brochure is 40 pages long and called Trübe Wasser (in English Troubled Waters).

Here is a BBC News article on the subject (January 2003). So this is old news in English. MEP Roger Helmer quotes himself:

bq. Commenting on the launch, East Midlands Euro-MP Roger Helmer said:
“It seems that the European Parliament has found its natural level with the publication of this comic book, stuffed full of self-congratulatory claptrap and Euro-propaganda. Civil servants in the parliament have clearly failed in their duty of political neutrality. I will be demanding to know who authorised this initiative, and how much of our tax-payers’ money has been squandered on it”.

Of course, Belgium has a great history of comic art: Suske en Wiske, Tintin, and apparently even the Smurfs.

LATER NOTE: I misread that: the comic is said to be already available in 11 languages and Bettina has already received her copy.

In the Times Online law section (every Tuesday, subscription should be free – it was when I joined), one column is called ‘Your Shout’. Here, people from the College of Law, the solicitors’ college for training for exams, answer questions. Now I have been to the College of Law twice, six months at Chester and six at Lancaster Gate – this was in the old days when the courses were shorter – and there were some good people there. But their understanding of etymology seems a bit weak!

(Actually, if you go to the law section and click on the Your Shout title in the left-hand margin, you do get a list of all the old ones, but November 11th is not up there yet).

On November 11th (I haven’t got the link but it will be in the archive, which costs money to use), someone asked what the difference is between unlawful and illegal. The answer, quite correct, was that they mean the same thing. The writer went on to say, however, that this was a case of two interchangeable words, resulting from the fact that before 1731, French was the language of the law. Later, the old French terms were used alongside the English. Unlawful is an English word, whereas illegal is a French one.

bq. Many legal documents, particularly old deeds, wills and trusts, retain the habit of doubling up terminology in phrases such as “beneficial and equitable” ownership, “goods and chattels” and “give and devise”. In each case the first word derives from English, the second from French, but they mean the same thing.

Just a minute – these examples are doublets. Who says ‘unlawful and illegal’, and where is the Anglo-Saxon? Law looks like French loi to me, and legal looks Latin. I also have grave doubts about ‘beneficial and equitable’ as representing ‘English’ (do they mean Anglo-Saxon?) and French.

There are many doublets in legal usage, and they aren’t all combinations of synonyms. Some of them actually mean two different things. And ‘unlawful and illegal’ is not one of them. As long-term German Internet users might write,

bq. This column is always happy to “translate” any incomprehensible terminology that readers find in their legal documents.

Yes, well…Any suggestions? This could be fun.

The letters column this week continued the amusement. There was one suggestion that illegal means criminal and unlawful means contrary to civil law or administrative regulation. I understand the feeling, but I don’t think there is a difference. However, the distribution of the terms is probably different. Another letter I didn’t understand:

bq. When reading law desultorily (and ultimately unsuccessfully) at Cambridge in the late Sixties, I was taught that “unlawful” means “unsanctioned by law” and would apply to adultery, for example, so that not everything unlawful is “illegal” in its dictionary sense of “against the law”, that is, an offence.

There seems to be a feeling that unlawful is a bit weaker than illegal. I am not going to get to the bottom of these terms now, but let me give one example. In English contract law, one of the topics is contracts that are ‘illegal’, either by statute or at common law. These are a very disparate bunch. There are contracts to commit a crime, which are criminal themselves. Then there are contracts in restraint of trade (wettbewerbsbeschränkende Absprache), which may be illegal because they are against public policy, but some of which are absolutely legal.

It may well be that I would use the word unlawful in less serious cases and illegal in more serious ones, but they are indeed synonyms, I think.

Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, says illegal, illicit and unlawful are fundamentally synonymous, although illicit has moral overtones.

bq. Illegal is not synonymous with criminal, although some writers mistakenly assume that it is. (See undocumented alien.) Anything against the law – even the civil law – is, technically speaking, ‘illegal.’ See illegal contract, nonlegal & unlawful.

This is beginning to remind me of a New Yorker cartoon with the caption ‘It’s lawyerly, all right. But it’s not legal.’

An article in Tagesspiegel (in German) reports on a law firm that has an office in Karstadt, Hermannplatz, Berlin. You can get legal advice there for 1 euro a minute, in full public view unless you specifically request advice behind closed doors. However, the 1 euro price doesn’t give you binding legal advice – you have to pay a minimum of 50 euros for that.

The firm is called “Resch & Gut” (sounds like those German supermarket names such as Attraktiv & Preiswert (attractive & inexpensive) or bank names like Sparda (save there)). They describe themselves as the first German firm offering “well-qualified, inexpensive and quickly accessible legal advice in supermarkets, department stores, shopping centres, post centres and pedestrian arcades”. There are two branches in Berlin, but the woman in charge, Carolin Müller-Dieckert, is in Hamburg, and has already started a number of these branches. (Via Schockwellenreiter).

If you are already looking for Christmas presents, you could consider a Wolpertinger. This is a very small one seen in a local hunting and shooting shop:

There is a gallery here.

Fortunately, Wolpertingers are said to live in the Bavarian Alps, which are quite some way away. Here is an account in English.