In Language Log, Mark Liberman and Chris Potts have been discussing this kind of sentence in the New Yorker:

“I would hope that, based on the President’s judicial nominations so far, you will see him appoint Justices more in line with a conservative judicial philosophy,” Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel to the American Center for Law and Justice, an advocacy group funded the Reverend Pat Robertson, says.
(Jeffrey Toobin. Advice and dissent. The New Yorker, May 26, 2003 (p. 48, column 1))

The peculiarity is the use of ‘Jay Sekulow … says’, rather than ‘says Jay Sekulow’.

In the latest entry, Liberman compares the distance between subject and verb here with that mocked by Mark Twain in ‘The Awful German Language’. He thinks (and I tend to agree) it causes more trouble for the reader than the German pattern does.

Here’s an example from Mark Twain:

“But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met,” etc., etc. [1]
1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet.
That is from The Old Mamselle’s Secret, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Michael Heng on AdvobLAWg defines konsolidiertes Gesetz. (This follows a comment by Der Schockwellenreiter ‘consolidated Act (whatever that means)’. Here’s the German – an English summary follows

bq. Gesetze werden im Bundesgesetzblatt veröffentlicht. Handelt es sich bei der Veröffentlichung um eine Änderung eines bestehenden Gesetzes, so werden nur die Änderungen abgedruckt, nicht aber das (gesamte) Gesetz in seiner neuen Fassung. Beispiel:
“Das Urheberrechtsgesetz […] wird wie folgt geändert: 1. Dem § 5 wird folgender Absatz 3 angefügt: […]” (vgl. aktuell das Gesetz zur Regelung des Urheberrechts in der Informationsgesellschaft, Bundesgesetzblatt Nr. 46 vom 12. September 2003 (S. 1774-1788) als PDF-Datei).
Der Volltext des Gesetzes in der geänderten Fassung entsteht dadurch, dass sich jemand die Arbeit macht und die Gesetzesänderungsanweisungen in die letzte aktuelle Fassung des Gesetzestextes einarbeitet. So entsteht die sog. “konsolidierte Fassung” des geänderten Gesetzes.

Statutes are published in the Federal Law Gazette. If an Act is amended, only the amendments are published, not the whole text, e.g.:

“The Copyright Act […] is amended as follows: 1. Section 5 is given the following subsection 3: […]”

The full text of the amended Act is prepared by someone who does the work of incorporating the amendments into the old Act. The result is the ‘consolidated version’.

This is a bit different from the English consolidated Act, which is a new Act collecting more than one earlier Act. As the Oxford Dictionary of Law (5th ed. – I haven’t got the 6th yet) says:

bq. consolidating statute: A statute that repeals and re-enacts existing statutes relting to a particular subject. Its purpose is to state their combined effect and so simplify the presentation of the law. It does not aim to alter the law únless it is stated in its long title to be a consolidation with amendments. … Compare codifying statute.

So the German term refers to working amendments into an old text, and the English one to collating various usually unamended statutes.

Raul Yzaguirre, President of the National Council of La Raza, testified to a U.S. Senate committee on language problems for minority-language speakers in the 2000 presidential election. Inter alia, he quotes a report on problems of Chinese speakers in New York City:

bq. Inaccurate translations. The Chinese translation for “Democrat” and “Republican” were reversed. Paper ballots requested by absentee voters also contained mistakes in the Chinese-language instructions.

bq. Lack of Chinese interpreters. At polling sites across the city, particularly those places with dense Asian populations, there were insufficient numbers of interpreters to serve Chinese-speaking voters.

bq. Chinese characters on the ballot too small to read. Obviously, the fundamental purpose of language translations is undermined when the characters are unreadable on the machine ballot.

(from Trevor, in followthebaldie, in Catalan)

The Onion reports that a new worm disabled the Internet on Monday and Tuesday and people were forced to work.

bq. “This is terrible,” said Miami resident Ron Lewison, an employee at Gladstone Finance and an Amazon.com Top 500 Reviewer. “For two days, I’ve been denied access to the vital information I need to go about my workday. In the absence of that information, I’ve been forced to go about my job.”

To quote Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, ‘The scary thing is, we all know it’s true’.

LATER NOTE: This edition is the 2002 edition with a new cover. Moreover, the quotes from the TES and TLS given on the original cover are now both ascribed to the TES. Conclusion: a waste of money!

There is a 2003 edition of Elizabeth Martin’s Oxford Dictionary of Law. This is a relatively small paperback, price £9.99. In its first edition it was called Concise Oxford Dictionary of Law, but later they dropped the ‘concise’. As there’s no British equivalent to Black’s (USA, especially Garner’s 7th ed.) or Creifelds (Germany), I prefer this. There are other dictionaries of the same size, such as Mozley and Whitely or Curzon, which tend to have more and briefer entries. I should make a special reference to Chambers, because that has a surprisingly large number of entries on Scottish law.

Uexküll, Wörterbuch der Patent- und Markenpraxis DE>ENGrant and Cutler are said to be selling it for £92.85).