Delia Venables, in her portal for UK legal resources, reports on The Oxford Standard Citation of Legal Authorities, OSCOLA for short, the nearest equivalent in the UK to the U.S. Blue Book (or ALWD, I might add – see earlier entry).

It was produced by the Oxford Law Faculty in consultation with leading academic law publishers and serves as the style guide for the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal, as well as for theses written in the Law Faculty.

There is a big OSCOLA and a small OSCOLA, both PDF files, 103 pages and 32 pages in length respectively.

Like everything else, these are house style guides. In particular, many British people don’t like to spell using -ize rather than -ise (but I do), as is the Oxford University Press standard. That’s a peripheral issue, however. Here is a quote from the big OSCOLA:

1 Pinpoint References in Statutes
Rules: Abbreviations are only to be used in footnotes. They adopt the
following format:
section s
sections ss
sub-section sub-s
sub-sections sub-ss
paragraph para
schedule sch
part pt
article art
articles arts
There are no full stops after abbreviations.

Harvard Law School has a good summary of books on this topic.

Via Legal Memo-Randum, The Smoking Gun quotes a genuine job application :

bq. Matthew Toll is in his final year at the Tulane University School of Law and, like many fellow students approaching graduation, is seeking an associate’s position paying at least $70,000 per year. The 25-year-old, though, has taken a unique approach to that hunt. Last month, he sent 20-30 law firms his resume and a five-page interview request drafted to resemble a legal filing … Noting that, “I am VERY hungry right now,” Toll promised prospective employers that, “If my mother’s funeral was the day of a key deposition, I would do the eulogy via teleconference after the deposition.”

Here’s the beginning:

bq. Plaintiff, Matthew S. Toll, pursuant to his lifelong dream of practicing law, hereby requests Defendant, Wolff & Samson, PC, to provide Plaintiff with an interview, whether in person, or via telephone, in Response to Plaintiff’s First Request for an Interview.

The Smoking Gun (mentioned here before) has a big collection of genuine but bizarre legal documents.

Is this real? I heard it quoted on TV today and I’m probably the last person to hear it. It’s said to be have been issued as an internal memorandum by the Deutsche Post, to be attached to § 49 of the Allgemeine Dienstanordnung. It distinguishes between Wertsack (sack for valuables) and Wertbeutel (bag for valuables). It’s all over the Internet – I got it from here (I won’t translate it into English):

bq. Der Wertsack ist ein Beutel, der auf Grund seiner besonderen Verwendung im Postbeförderungsdienst nicht Wertbeutel, sondern Wertsack genannt wird, weil sein Inhalt aus mehreren Wertbeuteln besteht, die in den Wertsack nicht verbeutelt, sondern versackt werden. Das ändert aber nichts an der Tatsache, daß die zur Bezeichnung des Wertsackes verwendete Wertbeutelfahne auch bei einem Wertsack mit Wertbeutelfahne bezeichnet wird und nicht mit Wertsackfahne, Wertsackbeutelfahne oder Wertbeutelsackfahne. Sollte sich bei der Inhaltsfeststellung eines Wertsackes herausstellen, daß ein in einen Wertsack versackter Wertbeutel hätte versackt werden müssen, so ist die in Frage kommende Versackstelle unverzüglich zu benachrichtigen. Nach seiner Entleerung wird der Wertsack wieder zu einem Beutel, und er ist auch bei der Beutelzählung nicht als Sack, sonder als Beutel zu zählen. Bei einem im Ladezettel mit dem Vermerk “Wertsack” eingetragenen Beutel handelt es sich jedoch nicht um einen Wertsack, sondern um einen Wertpaketsack, weil ein Wertsack im Ladezettel nicht als solcher bezeichnet wird, sondern lediglich durch den Vermerk “versackt” darauf hingewiesen wird, daß es sich bei dem versackten Wertbeutel um einen Wertsack und nicht um einen ausdrücklich mit “Wertsack” bezeichneten Wertpaketsack handelt. Verwechslungen sind insofern im übrigen ausgeschlossen, als jeder Postangehörige weiß, daß ein mit Wertsack bezeichneter Beutel kein Wertsack, sondern ein Wertpaketsack ist.

Quelle: Kilian, Jurisprudenz zwischen Technik und Kunst; s. aber auch Anmerkung zu “Dienstweihnachtsbäume”

Here’s a link to the equally spurious text Dienstweihnachtsbäume (official Christmas trees) referred to above.

This reminds me of the text of a bill of regulations for hunting and harvesting attorneys. Here are some extracts:

bq. 370.01 Any person with a valid in-state rodent or snake
hunting license may also hunt and harvest attorneys for
recreational and sport (non-commercial) purposes.

370.02 Taking of attorneys with traps or deadfalls is
permitted. The use of United States currency as bait,
however, is prohibited.

…

370.05 It is unlawful to shout, “WHIPLASH”, “AMBULANCE”, or
“FREE SCOTCH” for the purposes of trapping attorneys.

370.06 It is unlawful to hunt attorneys within 100 yards of
BMW, Mercedes or Porsche dealerships, except on Wednesday
afternoon.

I forgot to record this, but Handakte WebLAWg reminds me.

The Department for Constitutional Affairs has a website now. This Department was hastily summoned into life in June, when the Lord Chancellor was temporarily abolished.

I see from the website that ‘People’s Rights’ are wider than ‘Human Rights’ and that some of those rights are the rights of ‘transsexual people’ (rather than ‘transsexuals’).

The site is presumably a reworking of the excellent Lord Chancellor’s Department website, which has now disappeared (unlike the Lord Chancellor).

In connection with a post of languagehat’s on Fraktur (Gothic script), there is a mention of a website on Sütterlin, the old-ish form of German handwriting. It’s Peter Dörling’s site: English Deutsch. The site has some texts to practise reading. There is also a link to download suetter.ttf, a font for Windows.

Mark Liberman of the Language Log takes me to task in the nicest possible way for not expressing myself clearly.

Let me explain ‘unreasonable behaviour’ again. It is a misnomer, a false abbreviation. Here are the facts on which a divorce petition can be based in England and Wales. This is the second:

bq. That the other party to the marriage (the respondent) has:
(b) behaved in such a way that the other party (the petitioner) cannot reasonably be expected to live with the respondent.
Behaviour during the marriage may involve one major incident or a series of acts, the cumulative effect of which is considered to be unreasonable in the eyes of the court.

This is called ‘unreasonable behaviour’ for short, but that’s misleading. The behaviour of the respondent does not have to be found to be unreasonable: what is required is that the behaviour of the respondent is such that the petitioner (this particular petitioner) cannot reasonable be expected to live with the respondent. And a homosexual relationship would fit the definition.

Of course, there is a lot of mudslinging with this b), although the idea is supposed to be that it’s not a question of fault, just a question of proving the marriage has irretrievably broken down.

Language Log:

bq. This is a curious bit of adjectival semantics: a homosexual relationship is “not actually unreasonable [behavior]”, but would be construed as “unreasonable behavior” for the purposes of a divorce case. Is this just because the legal definition is not the ordinary language definition? Or is it because reasonableness is always relative to an evaluator and a situation? Some behavior can seem reasonable to me and not to you, or reasonable in the shower and distinctly eccentric in the grocery store; and the two dimensions interact, so that you and I might have quite different ideas of what is reasonable in a grocery store. Or in a marriage.

It’s not a question of whether it’s reasonable or not, it’s a question of whether it’s tolerable or not (it translates very well into German as unzumutbares Verhalten). The problem is, they needed a short term to refer to it. Perhaps it should have been called ‘unputuppable with behaviour’.

About the title reference to ‘U.S. divorce law’, well, there’s no such thing, but the case itself referred to Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and New Jersey for a different approach, or at least the dissenting opinion did, so I was wondering about the disagreements within the U.S.A. At least, that’s my story.