Law com reports on a solo practitioner (BE: sole practitioner) attorney whose spellchecker replaced sua sponte with sea sponge.

bq. Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley.
In an opening brief to San Francisco’s 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words “sea sponge” instead of the legal term “sua sponte,” which is Latin for “on its own motion.”

Apparently the slip was noticed by the client (a former Santa Clara County Superior Court judge seeking reversal of his conviction for fixing traffic tickets report of decision here).

bq. The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the “sea sponge duty to instruct.”

In this connection, sua sponte might be von Amts wegen (also ex officio in English), but my Word wants to replace sponte with sponge.

I have encountered this kind of problem in texts to be translated before now.

Many thanks to Isabella, who has an eye for the important news.

No, I’m not wondering how to translate Ludwig der Bärtige – I’ve encountered him often enough before.

Or so I thought. But I was surprised to discover there were two Ludwigs der Bärtige. One was a count in Thuringia in the 11th century (more often Ludwig mit dem Barte?), and the other a duke in Bavaria-Ingolstadt in the 15th century. And good heavens, a third, a Wittelsbach born in 1901.

More cat content can’t harm: here you can apply for three of the numerous Bavarian cats that have been delivered to animal refuges in advance of the expected wave of avian flu. Otherwise just phone the refuges.
We are told on TV that some cat-owners are over-reacting. So they are, but on the other hand, does it help if at least half of the news programmes seem to be concerned with the topic? (Now interspersed with a certain amount of comment on the German soccer team)

I have encountered grober Vorsatz / grob vorsätzlich now for the second time. It’s definitely used, although I’m not sure it’s kosher (and I am not recommending its use). In my context it means Absicht.

|Vorsatz| intent(ion)|
|Arten des Vorsatzes| degrees of intention|
|Absicht (dolus directus ersten Grades)| concrete / specific intention|
|direkter Vorsatz (dolus directus zweiten Grades)| direct intent|
|bedingter Vorsatz (dolus eventualis)| conditional intent|

See section 276 of the German Civil Code. The terms occur mainly in criminal law, but my example was civil:

bq. …wenn der Vermieter den Mangel grob vorsätzlich oder grob fahrlässig zu vertreten hat…

A bit off topic, this. Taiwanese students show how you can exploit the Pizza Hut rule ‘One trip to the salad bar’ (photos).

I wonder what the glycaemic index of those piles of cucumber is?

(Via rebecca’s pocket)

Here’s a bizarre item on Quizilla. I’m afraid I can’t remember where I found it. I particularly liked the pepperoni pizza question:

You are the Rule of Lenity! You interpret

ambiguities in penal statutes in favor of the

accused. You’re a laid-back kind of rule and

concerned with not being too quick to judge.

You’re soft on crime.

Which Canon of Statutory Construction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Btw, I wasn’t at all laid back and lenient about the beer, just about the pizza and the attractive member of the opposite sex.

And here’s what I learnt in the distant past about the interpretation of statutes:
the literal rule (take the obvious meaning if it’s reasonably clear), the golden rule (give words their ordinary meaning unless it would be absurd), the mischief rule (what mischief was the Act designed to cure? interpret in conformity with that aim), the eiusdem generis rule (a list of specific items is to be regarded as exhaustive unless followed by general words).

Alpmann Brockhaus lists some German rules, but I won’t go into those!
grammatische Auslegung, systematische A., historische A., genetische A., teleologische A., erweiternde A., verfassungskonforme A., richtlinienkonforme A. And in the case of wills: erläuternde A., ergänzende A., wohlwollende A.