Names and sources omitted to protect the guilty.

1. The legal system in Germany is continental law, and the legal system in Britain is Anglo-Saxon law.

2. Common Law ist Gewohnheitsrecht.

3. Common law is not written law.

4. The United Kingdom has no constitution.

5. Der Engländer ist eher Impressionist. Dies zeigt nicht nur eine unterschiedliche Sprachkultur,sondern lässt Rückschlüsse auf eine andere Denkweise zu, die es einem Deutschen beispielsweise ermöglicht, zwischen Mord und Totschlag zu unterscheiden, während sich der Engländer in seiner unvollendeten, ungenauen Welt zu Hause fühlt.

6. Das Common Law [ist] als das allgemeine Recht im Commonwealth entstanden …, das im Gegensatz zu den regionalen Rechtsordnungen der Mitgliedsländer des Commonwealth den gemeinsamen Grundstock von Rechtsregeln aufstellen sollte, der dazu bestimmt war, das ganze Gebilde zusammenzuhalten.

7. Eine Besonderheit der englischen Rechtssprache ist die Zeit in Verträgen und Gesetzen. Beide werden, obwohl der Leser die Texte im Präsens rezipiert, in der Zukunft verfasst. Der Schreiber englischer juristischer Texte verfasst die Texte von einem Standpunkt aus, von dem alles, was passieren könnte, in der Zukunft liegt, und verwendet somit das Futur.

8. Auffällig und für deutsche Ohren ein wenig befremdlich klingt die bei Entscheidungen des House of Lords in dieser Anschlussformel immer noch benutzte Anredeform „my noble and learned friend Lord …“. Dass es sich dabei nicht allein um eine zu bloßer Konvention erstarrte Höflichkeitsfloskel handelt, sondern um einen Ausdruck der tatsächlichen Wertschätzung des Fachkollegen, bezeugt der ganz generell festzustellende respektvolle Umgangston.

Numerous blogs, mailing lists and newspapers are indulging in rather obvious April Fool’s Day items. Here’s the Urban Word of the Day:

I pity the fool
In Mr. T-glish, a rhetoric comment equivalent to the English “I’d best not find out who it was.”
I pity the fool who scratched my car.

That’s just a genuine term chosen for the day. But somehow I know that the Nuremberg pets’ home is not looking for a family to take the polar bear cub Knut – let’s face it, unlike Fürth, Nuremberg was never part of Prussia.

However, the announcement that E-Bay wants to buy the ProZ website appeared on March 31st, although I’m not sure where. As a translator in Canada says under the ProZ entry: Wow! What a news – i am speachless…

And I suspect that the story at RollOnFriday about a lawyer who failed to proofread his profile properly is also true.

(Thanks to Chris)

LATER NOTE: There was a fairly complex report near the end of Gardeners’ Question Time (can be listened to online all week) on government proposals to have an MOT test for petrol-fuelled lawnmowers, with an MP who was very much against it.

BabyBarista is the weblog of a probably fictitious trainee barrister. It’s probably written by a barrister, though. It has been running since 2 October 2006:

Twelve months living in close proximity before they decide whether to take you on or not. A sort of upper class reality show in microcosm where every one of your foibles will be analysed, where a blackball system exists such that if you annoy one person, you’re out. As with Big Brother, you’re playing to the lowest common denominator. Attempting to be as inoffensive as possible in the sound knowledge that it won’t be the votes for that get you in but the lack of votes against.

(via Delia Venables)

There are a lot of links to similar weblogs.

This reminded me that I recently read Harry Mount, My Brief Career – The trials of a young lawyer. That is an account of a year as a pupil barrister. The barristers and chambers are anonymised, the characters are composites but the incidents based on things that really happened.

This was a really well-written, readable book. The author decided that being a barrister was not for him and is now a journalist. I think it might be of interest to someone thinking of being a barrister. Still, there were a few negative points. The book was really short and it looked as if the pages were a bit underfilled, and in view of this, some of the topics were developed at disproportionate length, for instance the description of the kind of language used by building workers outside the chambers windows as compared with the way the barristers communicated with each other. Then the book suddenly and without preparation trotted out the partly incorrect facts of some of the cases in English law best known to students. And finally, one of the author’s main points, that the law is not exciting in practice (he wanted to have a libel practice like George Carman), but this is dealt with rather superficially. All in all, the contents are rather like a collection of stories a person might tell to friends at the pub to get a quick laugh. But there were some lovely details, especially about the kind of clothes barristers are expected to wear in that particular chambers.

One of the amazon.co.uk reviews was particularly interesting:

In some sets of Chancery chambers, age-old practices such as the Chambers Tea (at which pupils are, Mount reports, not allowed to speak) do persist. He frequently tells us that he can summon no enthusiasm for the dry, somewhat complex legal problems he’s dealing with, and the difficulties he experiences in solving them show that he doesn’t actually possess the talent to practice that sort of law. But it could all have been so different. Pupil barristers in chambers which specialise in criminal law spend a lot more time out at court both on their own and with other barristers. They deal with real people and not dry legal issues. Their pupil-masters are likely to be about half the age of Mount’s, and overall I should be surprised if they identified even one of the anecdotes in this book with their own experience.

Taken two days ago. I might have written more, for instance something about legal translation, but my provider has been down. Here’s a view from the office window, also from Wednesday: