Via The Guardian and Slate, a law professor analyses (verse 2 of) 99 Problems, a 2004 song by Jay-Z, from the point of view of criminal law: Caleb Mason, Saint Louis University School of Law, Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps.

1. The year is ‘94 and in my trunk is raw
2. In my rearview mirror is the motherfucking law
3. I got two choices y’all, pull over the car or
4. Bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
5. Now I ain’t trying to see no highway chase with jake
6. Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
7. So I . . . pull over to the side of the road
8. And I Heard “Son do you know what I’m stopping you for?”
9. “Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low?
10. Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know
11. Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?”

99 Problems is a song by Jay-Z1. It’s a good song. It was a big hit in 2004. I’m writing about it now because it’s time we added it to the canon of criminal procedure pedagogy. In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers. And as it turns out, I’m not late to the game after all: Jay-Z recently published a well-received volume of criticism and commentary that includes his own marginal notes on Verse 2 of 99 Problems.

LATER NOTE: I don’t read much US criminal law so I had to look up suppression claim – suppression of evidence (Unterdrücken von Beweismaterial?). The article is helpful to drug dealers, who need to know in exactly which circumstances evidence produced in the search of a car can be suppressed by the court because the search was unlawful, and to police, who need to know that it’s best if the K-9 unit – vehicle with drug-sniffing dogs – is already there when the vehicle is stopped.

I know the purpose of a weblog is to spread sunshine and light rather than criticizing other people’s work. But I must comment on a German criminal law weblog’s suggestion of learning English criminal-law terminology.

Here’s what I wrote on Beleidigung in 2003:

In English and U.S. law, defamation is nearly always a tort, not a crime. It consists, loosely speaking, in communicating to a third party some fact about the victim that tends to lower his or her reputation among right-thinking people. If the fact is true, that is a complete defence. Thus, three people are needed. One form, libel, is in permanent form (often writing), and the other, slander, is not.
In German law, there is also defamation, and the word Diffamierung can be used. The two forms of defamation differ in seriousness, but both can be either permanent or impermanent, in speech or in writing. To distinguish them, therefore, libel and slander won’t do.
These two offences (üble Nachrede and Verleumdung) are part of a group of offences headed Beleidigung. These offences also include insult, for which only two people are needed, and a form of assault – if you indicate your disrespect for someone by spitting in their face, this is also covered, and I am calling it assault, although the problem with that is that the English reader may not realize its connection to insult. There are a couple of other offences, such as insulting the dead.

How, then, to translate the heading Beleidigung? I used to ask my students this question with the example of a list of crime statistics. My answer would have been Insult, assault and defamation.

Now, in the crime statistics summary, I find Insult, assault and battery. That is very good, but what has happened to the defamation? It has completely disappeared.

In the Federal Ministry of Justice’s translation of the Criminal Code (via German Law Archive), the heading for the group of offences is the misleading Insult, üble Nachrede is translated as malicious gossip (whereas it can be in writing or oral) and Verleumdung as defamation (which applies equally to both terms).

Now from strafrechtsblogger: Ihr wollt es doch auch! Englisch für Strafrechtler

and Ihr wollt es doch auch! Englisch für Strafrechtler II

recommending English equivalents for meetings with English-speaking clients.

I wondered what the source was – the translations of Criminal Code headings don’t correspond to the ‘official’ Bohlander translation or to that on the German Law Archive website, nor to the ancient US army translation I used to use. But apparently they come from a Bundespolizei document:

Die Übersetzungen stammen übrigens von einem Merkblatt der Bundespolizei und sind offenbar ausländer(straf)rechtlich besonders relevant.

Can anyone find that online? A quick look at www.bundespolizei.de did not produce it.

But the real problem is that German, English and U.S. (various) criminal law systems differ and you can’t just take one English term and treat it as if it meant the same as the original German.

Something terrible happened to the English language at the Venice architecture biennale last week (29th August 2012).

The German pavilion had an event entitled Reuse the Public.

This is from a PDF on the event:

Unter der Moderation von Brigitte Holz, Architektin und Stadtplanerin BDA, Freischlad + Holz, Darmstadt/Berlin und Prof. Dr. Riklef Rambow, Fachgebiet Architekturkommunikation, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, stellten sich drei Vertreter verschiedener Projekte dem “reuse the public”.

Nach einem Grußwort des Generalkommissars Muck Petzet und der Eröffnung durch Michael Frielinghaus, Präsident des BDA, Friedberg, sprachen die Gesprächsgäste über ihre Projekte und traten in den Dialog zwischen Ort, Deutschem Beitrag und Thema “Reuse the public”.

I have come to the conclusion that they were playing with the term ‘public reuse’, which works. You can talk about the public reuse of land or buildings. But not about reusing the public. It sounds like using something again when you shouldn’t. Did it not occur to them to consult a native speaker?

There was a Fürth contribution about the Neue Mitte, the lobbying group that first formed to combat the ‘sale’ of a public street to a new shopping centre, but they weren’t responsible for this murder of the English language.

I understand that English words may enter German and then be treated in a new way. But this was an international event where English speakers were also expected to understand it.

On the subject of Denglish, next Saturday is the Tag der Deutschen Sprache so the Verein Deutsche Sprache should be having fun. Here’s an article (in German) on the problems.

Am Samstag (8. September) ruft der Verein Deutsche Sprache zum zwölften Mal den Tag der deutschen Sprache aus. Die Fronten bleiben verhärtet. Schwierig sei der Einzug des Englischen vor allem dann, wenn die deutsche Sprachgemeinschaft gar nicht erst auf die Idee kommt, deutsche Begriffe für etwas Neues zu suchen, weil sie das Englische für moderner und lebendiger hält, sagt Holger Klatte vom Verein Deutsche Sprache in Dortmund. “Für Shitstorm könnte man auch sehr gut Empörungswelle sagen”, findet der Sprachwissenschaftler.

So richtig passt das aber eben nicht, urteilte die Jury des Anglizismus 2011. “Sprachgemeinschaften entlehnen keine Wörter für etwas, für das sie schon ein Wort haben”, sagt Stefanowitsch. Der Shitstorm zum Beispiel ist ein ganz spezieller Sturm der Entrüstung, der sich im Internet immer mehr hochschaukelt, besonders in den sozialen Plattformen.