English law reports are very commonly cited. The traditional citations are from the printed reports, the All England Law Reports and the Law Reports. Times Law Reports can also be quoted in court (they’re written and signed by a barrister). And all these reports refer to the paper publication.

Now so many judgments are published on the Internet, a form of citation called neutral citation has been introduced. The Bodleian Library explains it.

and there is a practice direction too:

(these two texts are very similar).

A “neutral citation standard” is a means of citing court judgments without reference to specific publishers, databases or report series.

Here are the abbreviations used for various courts:

bq. Chancery Division EWHC number (Ch)
Patents Court: EWHC number (Pat)
Queen’s Bench Division EWHC number (QB)
Administrative Court EWHC number (Admin)
Commercial Court EWHC number (Comm)
Admiralty Court EWHC number (Admlty)
Technology & Construction Court EWHC number (TCC)
Family Division EWHC number (Fam)

For example, [2002] EWHC 123 (Fam); or [2002] EWHC 124 (QB); or [2002] EWHC 125 (Ch).
(from practice direction)

Neutral citation has been introduced in other common-law countries too.

US site defines vendor-neutral and medium-neutral citation systems.

German case reports are not so strictly reported, since Germany does not have a case-law system. They are often cited by the periodical they appeared in. But each judgment has its file number, and that is the number usually given when a judgment appears on the Web.

Following up on my entry on spaces between words, languagehat quoted another review of the book.

That review suggests reading Paul Saenger’s book on spaces between words together with Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect. An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993). I managed to find a review of that on the Internet too. Among other things, the book discusses the importance of marking up text for intonation – this is the value of the inverted question mark used in Spanish, introduced by the Royal Spanish Academy in the 18th century.

I am very taken with the word punct, the precursor of the full stop (U.S. period) originally used to separate words. The OED has it, with a number of meanings, all obsolete.

Yet again I manage to get a free biro just by crossing the road to get the paper. The exciting question for tomorrow’s elections to the Bavarian parliament is whether the CSU will get two-thirds of the seats. The CSU starts them young by handing out balloons. The SPD candidate – on the right – is an Amtsgericht judge, just to keep this entry slightly relevant to law.

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Meanwhile, taz already has the results:

bq. Stoiber erringt klaren Sieg
CSU holt 59 Prozent und regiert künftig mit Zweidrittelmehrheit in Bayern. SPD-Spitzenkandidat Maget schließt nach
20-Prozent-Desaster Rücktritt nicht aus. Grüne wieder dritte Kraft. FDP nicht im Landtag. Merkel: “Niederlage für Schröder”

including this evening’s lottery numbers and tomorrow’s football results (Bayern München – Leverkusen 0:12 … or was that last week?)

bq. nach der in dieser Höhe doch überraschenden 0:12-Niederlage der Münchner Bayern am Samstag gegen Bayer Leverkusen hat die Sorge um Oliver Kahns “rätselhafte Augenkrankheit” (Bild) zugenommen.
…Dennoch geht Netzers empörende Analyse (“Der Blinde!”) erneut zu weit.

In more than one entry I’ve commented on the reluctance of the German courts to include spaces in a keystroke count. One reason given was that spaces have no meaning.

Colin of Blogalization , in a comment to one of these entries, gave a link to a review of Paul Saenger’s book Space between Words. The review mentions the shapes of words, and also the Latin scripta continua.

bq. The scripta continua of the ancient Roman world, that is writing letter after letter without spaces, which is also what children tend to do, certainly did not make for easy comprehension. … What Saenger refer to as the aerated manuscript–spaces between letters that do not correspond to units of meaning, could scarcely be considered progress toward easier comprehension.

bq. The inscriptions by 7th-century Irish monks at Jouarre … have interpuncts between words, clearly an attempt to reduce ambiguity of meaning. In a culture where (unlike in Italy, southern France, and Spain) Latin was truly a foreign language the addition of spaces and points for clarity occurred in a general movement to improve comprehension.

Saenger argues that spaces between words, silent reading, and ease of comprehension all happened at roughly the same time. The monks may have used spaces after seeing Syriac manuscripts, he says in the interview mentioned below.

I found an interview with Saenger, in which he says that writing without spaces was the natural representation of speech, which has no audible spaces, and that languages that exist only in oral form have no word for ‘word’.

The International Association of Forensic Linguists, of which I am a member, describes itself as follows:

bq. The International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL) is an organization which primarily consists of linguists whose work involves them in the law. Narrowly defined, this means linguistic evidence in court (authorship attribution, disputed confessions etc.), but in fact the association aims to bring together those working on any aspects of language and the law (see the non-IAFL list on the Birmingham FL Home Page). While full membership is open to linguists, the association welcomes others, particularly members of the legal profession, as student members.

There is a lot of interest in courtroom language, which can be useful, although probably more for interpreters than translators. The site has a categorized bibliography and a link to the Journal, with synopses of articles. The Webster site has links too.

Ruth Morris has written about translation problems in court (I didn’t realize she started off by studying French and German at Bradford and becoming an EC interpreter). Her website is still under construction (since 1997, it appears!) but has a short biography and links to two interesting articles: Interpreters and the legal process and Justice for non-English speakers. She has also published a book, with the magistrate Joan Colin, called Interpreters and the Legal Process (ISBN 1 872 870 28 7).

Incidentally, John Gibbons published a book called Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System in 2002 – I know nothing about it!

This is not intended to be an exhaustive entry, but I will finish by mentioning Peter Tiersma‘s very readable and useful book Legal Language, now available in paperback. He’s also written a Frisian Reference Grammar – there are sound examples on his website, including the famous one:

bûter, brea, en griene tsiis, wa’t dat net sizze kin is gjin oprjochte Fries
“butter, bread, and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is no upright Frisian”

I remember when I was studying German at London University hearing a lecture on the topic ‘Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Friese’.

Tiersma too has a page of language and law links.

Audiolex analyse tape recordings. And here is a copy of their newsletter Forensically Speaking – don’t know if this 2000 one was the first and last. They quote some unexpected uses of forensic linguistics:

bq. + a sheepdog, identified by its bark (a very old New Zealand case)
+ investigations into glottalalia (speaking in tongues) and a “medieval ghost” who sent messages via computer
+ a trademark case in which the differing pronunciations (American and Australian) of the word “mobile” became an issue
+ does “Yes” mean “Yes, I agree that what you are asking me is correct” or “Yes I understand you” or “Yes I understand you are asking me a question” or “No, but it would not be polite or respectful of me to say so”?
+ determining the order in which gunshots were fired
+ in the determination of Australian aboriginal land rights claims, based on their traditional relationship with the land, as indicated by the language they speak
insights into relationships provided in some languages by the use of honorifics and formal/informal distinctions
+ study of aircraft “black box” recordings
+ in a dialect of English where “kill” may simply mean “hit”, when a suspect says “I killed him”, to what is he actually confessing?

I was chugging along towards the end of a translation of a decision of the Cologne Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court of Appeal) when I hit on a new word to me: Partikularinsolvenzverfahren (territorial insolvency proceedings). This could be a Word of the Day, I thought to myself. It isn’t a difficult one because it comes straight from an EU regulation. It means insolvency proceedings relating to a specified territory that can be held parallel to the main insolvency proceedings.

But not long afterwards, I was broadsided by something much weirder (to me): als Minus enthalten. Here’s the passage:

bq. Einer Stellungnahme des Senats zu diesem Meinungsstreit bedarf es an dieser Stelle jedoch nicht, da der Schuldner einen Hilfsantrag auf Eröffnung eines isolierten Partikular-insolvenzverfahrens über sein inländisches Vermögen nicht gestellt hat. Er kann auch nicht als in dem Antrag der Schuldnerin als Minus mit enthalten angesehen werden, da wegen der Verschiedenheit beider Verfahrensgegenstände nicht ohne weiteres davon ausgegangen werden kann, dass der Antragsteller die Durchführung eines isolierten Partikularinsolvenzverfahrens anstrebt für den Fall, dass sein Antrag auf Eröffnung eines Gesamtinsolvenzverfahrens zurückgewiesen wird.

(OLG Köln 2 W 82/01, April 23, 2001; bold by me. SchuldnerIN is a mistake in the original, of course: this was a man, a sole trader)

A bit of Googling revealed several examples in legal texts. I concluded it was similar to the situation in English criminal law of a lesser included offence. For example, if you indict someone for murder, they can always be convicted of manslaughter, a lesser included offence, whereas in other cases, two or three possible offences have to be charged separately, because they are not included. I therefore decided to translate it as lesser included petition:

bq. Nor can such a petition be seen as having been included in the petition as a lesser included petition, since the subjects of the two proceedings differ and it cannot therefore be automatically assumed that the petitioner wishes separate territorial insolvency proceedings to be held if his petition for the commencement of main insolvency proceedings is dismissed.

The only source I could think of for more information on this was a student’s book on criminal law, but I haven’t succeeded in tracing it in the index of anything I have on substantive or procedural criminal law. Thank goodness for Internet search engines: they give enough examples to construct a definition from. I like my attempt because it is both legal terminology and comprehensible, but am open to further suggestions.