Here is a problem an EN>DE translator enquired about:

bq. If the decree nisi was pronounced by a *district judge* and the respondent wishes to appeal, he or she must serve notice of appeal and set down the appeal at this court (this court ist ein County Court) within 14 days of the date of the decree nisi.
If the decree nisi was pronounced by a *judge* and the respondent wishes to appeal …………within 4 weeks…….

This is from an English decree nisi. The document is not headed ‘decree nisi’, but why make things easy? It is a confirmation that the parties can have a divorce – get a decree absolute – six weeks later, unless some objection exists (arrangements for the children not made is the most common).

Until a few years ago, the county court had a judge and a registrar. The registrar – one of the many registrars that exist in English law – was called a ‘judicial officer’, a person who was not a judge but had some judicial functions. He or she dealt with interlocutory proceedings and even decided simpler matters. Was sometimes translated into German as Rechtspfleger.

But then registrars were renamed district judges, and given more demanding work too, I think.

Now we have a document saysing ‘If the decree nisi was pronounced by a district judge’ or ‘If the decree nisi was pronounced by a judge’. This is mind-boggling. It seems to imply that the district judge is not a judge – but why call him one, then? It looks as if there has simply been a failure to adapt the form.

It would be OK if instead of judge they wrote ‘circuit judge’, but presumably it isn’t necessarily. It could certainly be a Recorder.

I was asked if it means Amtsrichter. Well, in England, judges aren’t usually assigned to just one court. OK, in the House of Lords and the Court of Appeal they are, but we have High Court judges who may just as well be sitting in the Crown Court.

Perhaps one might write ‘durch einen Rechtspfleger (district judge) … durch einen Richter…’ To put ‘(judge)’ as the English name would also be odd, as it’s a generic.

Of course, we don’t have a district court. Many people assume that if there is a district judge, there must be a district court. And also, there is a second kind of district judge: as well as lay magistrates, England has stipendiary magistrates in big towns. These are qualified lawyers who sit alone. They too have been renamed ‘district judge’.

It was striking that this week, murder trials began in England (at the Old Bailey in London) and in Germany (Eschweiler). In both cases, two children were murdered. In both cases, there were reports in the press for weeks and openly expressed public indignation about the murderers. In both cases, there are two defendants: in England, however, only one of the defendants, Ian Huntley, is being tried for murder – his then girlfriend, Maxine Carr, is charged with assisting an offender and conspiring to do acts with a tendency to pervert the course of public justice.

In the German trial, the defendants have admitted killing the two children. In the English trial, Huntley has admitted that the children died after entering his house.

The English report summarizes the case as introduced by the prosecution. The German report summarizes the indictment, which has a comparable function.

Here are the counts (Anklagepunkte) of the English case, quoted from the Independent:

bq. Count One – Ian Huntley is alone charged with murder. “The particulars are that on a day between August 3, 2002, and August 18, 2002, he murdered Jessica Aimee Chapman.” [left]
Count Two – Ian Huntley is alone charged with murder. ” … on a day between August 3, 2002, and August 18, 2002, he murdered Holly Marie Wells.” [right]
Count Three – Maxine Carr is charged with assisting an offender. “Ian Huntley having committed an arrestable offence, namely the murder of Jessica Chapman, Maxine Carr, between August 3, 2002, and August 18, 2002, knowing or believing the said Ian Huntley had committed the said offence, … she provided false accounts of her whereabouts for Ian Huntley on August 4, 2002, and August 5, 2002, with intent to impede the prosecution of Ian Huntley.”
Count Four – Maxine Carr faces a similar charge of assisting an offender in the case of Holly Wells.
Count Five – Maxine Carr is charged with conspiracy to do acts tending or intended to pervert the course of public justice. “She conspired with Ian Huntley to do acts which had a tendency to pervert the course of public justice in that they agreed they would falsely maintain to police that the said Maxine Carr was in Soham in Cambridgeshire on August 4, 2002, and on August 5, 2002, and therefore they were able to corroborate the account of the said Ian Huntley.”

It was unexpected (to me) in the English report that the girls died immediately or soon after going into Huntley’s house.

The jury were told they would be going to look at the location.

English Crown Court trial: one judge and 12 jurors. German Schwurgericht trial: 3 professional judges and 2 lay judges.

In an entry on June 3rd, I mentioned the McKenzie friend:

The Times Online (and offline) law section today reports that the Legal Aid Practitioners’ Group gave an award to Jeffrey Gordon (69), who was a legal aid solicitor for over 50 years and is one of only 30 men who have completed all 30 London Marathons. He created the idea of the Mackenzie friend / Mackenzie person, someone who helps a party to a court case if that party has no lawyer.

There was some discussion in the comments, and AMM said he had heard Ian Hanger, the original McKenzie friend and a QC in Queensland, talk at a conference in Australia.

Now there is a further comment by Ian Hanger himself, who found this entry:

I am McKenzie’s friend. I came across this site when surfing the net for the name of my old employer Jeffrey Gordon. My version of events is set out in an article by my close friend Justice Richard Chesterman who recently wrote an article about the case published in the Queensland Bar News. It’s a very well written article. If anyone would like it please provide your email address.
Cheers
Ian Hanger QC

Fancy this weblog being discovered by a person whose role has become part of legal terminology! I will find out if I can perhaps put this article in the archives here.

According to Dolomiten-Online, a German-language newspaper in South Tyrol, Italy, a court in Bolzano has decided that the Nuremberg couple Erika and Helmut Simon were the finders of Ötzi, the Iceman, the 5300-year-old corpse found on the Austrian-Italian border on 15 September 1991.

The paper has a complete Ötzi section. And of course, there is an Ötzi museum in Bolzano, where Ötzi has been kept in cold storage since 19998.

The Land South Tyrol (should I be using Italian terminology there?) is going to appeal against the judgment.

Under Italian law, the Simons, if upheld as finders, have a right to 25% of the value of Ötzi (named after the Ötztal Alps where he was found). The actual value is likely to be disputed in further courts, unless there is an out-of-court settlement.

The Nürnberger Nachrichten gives more detail. The government of Bolzano (Bozener Landeshauptmann) will have to pay the Simons’ court costs and lawyers’ fees and expenses, which amount to about 10,000 euros so far. For many years there has been a campaign in South Tyrol presenting the Simons as nasty Germans interested only in money.

Erika Simon and her lawyer in Bolzano, Elohim Rudolph-Ramirez, will be making a carefully drafted statement later in the week.

Transmogriflaw reports from law school in the USA.

bq. My law school has wireless access in all classrooms, and almost everybody takes notes on a laptop. I rarely use the wireless because there is too much going on in class for that distraction, but sometimes my friends and I log into Instant Messenger during class and open a chat room.
We don’t chat. The chat room is reserved for questions like, “Did he say involuntary or voluntary?”, or, “§45 or §90?”, or, “Score! A guest speaker!”

As the rest of the entry shows, Instant Messenger can be very helpful when a student is picked on in the Socratic method.

(We don’t have the Socratic method in England or Germany. The most famous accounts are Scott Turow’s gripping account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L, and the film The Paper Chase).

fieldmethods.net recommends this OneLook Reverse Dictionary.

There are two types of reverse dictionary. One is a list of words starting with the ending. I have one of those in book form (it starts with a and baa, and ends with abuzz and fuzz), but is there none online?

The other is one where you enter the definition and the dictionary gives you the word(s). OneLook is the latter kind. The Reader’s Digest sells one of these, ISBN: 089577951X: quite useful; and there’s also an Oxford Reverse Dictionary, ISBN: 0192801139, which I don’t know.

I entered ‘lawyers’ and got the following list (I was less happy with the results for ‘person who does oral translation’):

1. attorney 2. lawyerly 3. lawyering 4. barristers 5. solicitor
6. barrister 7. counselor 8. pettifogger 9. bar 10. shyster
11. counsel 12. leguleian 13. ambulance chaser 14. prosecutor 15. counsellor
16. public defender 17. conveyancer 18. prosecuting attorney 19. prosecuting officer 20. client 21. paralegal 22. mouthpiece 23. shingle 24. consultation 25. abraham lincoln 26. lincoln 27. advocate 28. counselor-at-law 29. defense attorney 30. defense lawyer 31. divorce lawyer 32. defense
33. prosecution 34. attorney-at-law 35. breviate 36. trial attorney
37. trial lawyer 38. lawyerbush 39. retainer 40. scrivener
41. hays 42. chamber 43. squire 44. retain 45. honest 46. disbar
47. briefless 48. legal cap 49. cant 50. belli 51. birkenhead 52. clarence darrow
53. cohn 54. cohns 55. demurrer 56. jurist 57. lawer 58. nomiatrist 59. pleader
60. defence 61. law firm 62. privilege 63. retainers 64. criminal lawyer
65. jeofail 66. loophole 67. shapiro 68. templar 69. attorney-client privilege
70. attorney-client relation 71. defend 72. devil 73. feme 74. lawyer-client relation 75. practice 76. sergeant 77. writer 78. legal assistant 79. preaudience
80. unless 81. alben barkley 82. alben william barkley 83. arthur garfield hays
84. barkley 85. clarence seward darrow 86. darrow 87. disbarment
88. francis scott key 89. hoover 90. j. edgar hoover 91. john edgar hoover
92. mouth 93. verdict 94. canter & siegel 95. fee splitting 96. boswell
97. bryan 98. dulles 99. pettifog 100. pro bono