LawTermFinder is a database of terms used in Australian Family Law:

This LawTermFinder homepage gives access to an online termbank of words and phrases frequently used in Australian Family Law. Its compilation is a joint project between the Attorney General’s Department and Macquarie University’s TermFinder group, in the Centre for Language Sciences. Legal consultants to the project are from Macquarie Law School, the ANU College of Law, and a specialist family law practice in Sydney, Dettmann Longworth Lawyers.

The termbank’s pages give you accessible definitions of terms used in family law and in mediation services. There are examples of each term in use, taken from recognised sources. Where possible, diagrams are shown of clusters of terms whose meanings are interconnected. There are linked audio-recordings of the definitions, and links to legal documents for those seeking more information.

You can enter terms and get definitions, example sentences and related terminology, sometimes with further links both internal and external. I tried best interests, contact, and mediation.

contact

(family law)

Listen: click to listen

Grammar: noun
plural: contacts
Definition: a legal arrangement by which a child can communicate and spend time with the parent they do not live with
Example:
1. The Court should endeavour to ensure that any case with orders providing for supervised contact in a Children’s Contact Service is relisted as soon as possible before an appropriate judicial officer.

2. Recently, there has been increasing emphasis on the need to recognise the costs of contact of non-resident parents who have ongoing and regular contact with their children.
Related Compound: contact arrangements, contact parent, contact visit, supervised contact, contact order
Usage Note: The term “contact” as used in the 1995 amendments was replaced by “time with” in the 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act.

Via From Words to Deeds

Qualetra stands for Quality in Legal Translation!

This is from the Eulita site, where there is more, including a preliminary programme:

QUALETRA: Launch conference
Thursday 4 April 2013, 9.30 h to 18.00h

London Metropolitan University,
84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ

QUALETRA – Quality in Legal Translation
JUST/2011-2012/JPEN/AG2975

The aim of the Qualetra launch conference is to get an update of the current situation of legal translation in Europe, and to bring together all relevant stakeholders together to discuss the content of the project. The conference is open to practitioners and trainers of legal translation. The registration fee is €50. The number of conference participants is limited to 120. Early registration is therefore recommended. The deadline for registration is 1 March 2013.

The language of the conference is English, interpreting into French will be provided.

After the conference, the proceedings will be published online on this website.

This is a note to myself on a word I just came across for the first time: totality. I think it means the same as the German Gesamtstrafe: you form a complete criminal sentence which is less than its components. This is an oversimplification, just a note.

From the excellent UK Criminal Law Blog, Four men jailed for ‘fatal crash for cash’ plot:

As there were some pleas and some trials, it is not as simple as working out each sentence in isolation. For example, one may think you add the right sentence for causing death by dangerous driving to the right sentence for conspiracy to commit fraud, and (where appropriate) add on the right sentence (minus a discount for the plea) for perverting the course of justice.

However, there is a principle called totality which requires a sentence to be moderated, taking in to account the overall criminality. For example, where a burglar pleads to 25 burglaries, and each burglary is worth 12 months, the correct sentence is plainly not 25 years.

What judges usually do is take a view of the case as a whole; what sentence properly reflects all the offences?

A Google search (totality Gesamtstrafe) revealed them both on the same page of a book about international criminal law, at marginal no. 636 of Völkerstrafrecht
by Gerhard Werle, Florian Jeßberger.

I hope these people haven’t mixed in any beef.

Parliamentary counsel, also known as parliamentary draftsmen, draft bills for legislation. The latest Drafting Guidance (December 2011) can be downloaded from this page as a PDF file. It’s 84 pages long and deals with many language points. Have a look at the table of contents!

The reading list at the end has two of my favourite books: Butt and Castle on Drafting and Thornton on Legislative Drafting. It also has four weblinks to similar materials in Australia, Canada and the UK.

This useful link comes from a colleague (thanks, Siriol) via Daphne Perry, a lawyer who is the UK representative of Clarity. At the Clarity website, which I must have mentioned at some time in the past nearly ten years of this blog’s life, you can see earlier copies of their journal. A large number of arguments for and against shall and must are given. The conclusion is that shall is used less than it used to be, and some of the current uses in legislation may be where a statute has been amended and the drafters did not want to change the usage where the original used shall.

In relation to translation: one reason to avoid shall which Daphne Perry mentioned is that she heard several Arab lawyers say they were told always to translate ‘shall’ into Arabic as expressing an obligation – but of course, it is used in several other ways too. (I have less of a problem translating into English and using ‘shall’ only to express an obligation).

Particularly interesting on the perennial debate about using ‘shall’ or ‘must’ is a 2008 paper by the Drafting Techniques Groups at parliamentary counsel, another PDF file: Shall. It discusses the non-legal use of shall too. I am not keen on the use of the term ‘simple future’, although I know what they mean. There is reference to the Scottish and Irish reverse the English usage of I/we shall – you/he/she/they will,

E.g. the drowning Scotsman who was left to his fate because he cried “I will drown and no one shall save me!”

but I was surprised to read

But the first person “shall” lingers on in questions like “Shall I make a cup of tea?”

That usage is not ‘simple future’, but modal. But my Northern Irish colleague would understand it as ‘simple future’!

Incidentally, googling for “drafting techniques group” also brings up other papers, for instance on gender-neutral language.

At chinalawtranslate.com a website has been set up to enable crowdsourced translation of legal texts from Chinese to English and vice versa. The system used is the wonderfully named Transposh. Apparently this is a system that WordPress bloggers can use to get their blog translated both automatically and by their users.

The site is new – the forum is pretty empty but may become interesting.

Via Chinese Law Prof Blog