We all know that back surgery can be painful, but this got rather worse when it reached the typist’s hands:
Plaintiff moves the court for a continuance of the trial for the reason that counsel for the plaintiff is recovering from dick surgery and because of continuing pain is unable to properly represent the plaintiff in a trial. Counsel is unable to sit for long periods of time.
Scroll down for doctor’s note referring to disk herniation.
(Via Legal Juice)
The Chav Nativity – picture and text at Charon QC
Then these three geezers turn up, looking proper bling, wiv crowns on their heads. They’re like ‘Respect, bay-bee Jesus’, an’ say they’re wise men from the East End.
Joe goes: ‘If you’re so wise, wotchoo doin’ wiv this Frankenstein an’ myrrh?
Why dincha just bring gold, Adidas and Burberry?’
A Google image search reveals others.
Professor Heikki E.S. Mattila of the University of Lapland has published a book on comparative legal linguistics that looks interesting and expensive. The amazon.com page lets you look inside and see the full table of contents and an extract. The publisher’s page is fairly long too, so I’ll quote from that here:
Contents
Foreword; Foreword to the Finnish original; Part 1 General Introduction: Legal language and legal linguistics; The concept of legal language; Genres of legal language; Legal linguistics as a discipline; The importance of legal-linguistic knowledge; Structure and content of this book. Part 2 Legal Language as a Language for Special Purposes: Functions of Legal Language: Importance of the theory of communication; Achieving justice; Transmission of legal messages; Strengthening the authority of the law; Strengthening lawyers’ team spirit; Linguistic policy; The cultural task of legal language. Part 3 Characteristics of Legal Language: Precision; Information (over)load; Universality and aloofness; Systemic character; Structure and formalism in legal texts; Frequency of initializations and acronyms; Sentence complexity and diversity of language elements; Archaism and solemnity; Proper use of legal language. Legal Terminology: Legal concepts; Characteristics of legal terminology; Formation of legal terminology. The Major Legal Languages: The Heritage of Legal Latin; The importance of Roman law; History of legal Latin; Latin in modern legal languages; The communication value of legal Latin; Dictionaries of legal Latin. Legal German: History of legal German; Characteristics of legal German; International importance of legal German. Legal French: History of legal French; Characteristics of legal French; International position today. Legal English: The common law system; Development of legal English; Characteristics of legal English; Legal English as a global language. Part 4 Conclusion:Lexical comprehension and research needs;changes in legal-linguistic dominance in the international arena; Terminological interaction between legal languages; Problems of lexical comprehension; The need for jurilinguistic research on legal institutions and concepts; Foreign terms and other expressions; Index.
(Via DORES, which has a new set of references out on publications on language and law)
I mentioned Ken Adams’ book ‘A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting’ and an article by him on translating English language contracts in 2004.
Ken has a website which includes a blog and a list of articles with links to them. His latest blog entry introduces a New Law Review article by himself and Alan S. Kaye on the ambiguity of ‘and’ and ‘or’, one of those things that confuses us translators not only when we’re thinking about beziehungsweise.
Note also interesting discussions in the comments on blog entries.
The German Times is the name of a newspaper launched on January 19th in Berlin:
“We want to accompany Europe’s coalescence, in that we are creating a medium from Germany for all of Europe,” says Editor in Chief Bruno Waltert.
Its circulation is 50,000 and it will be distributed to all 7265 members of the parliaments of the EUs 27 States, as well as national governments, members of the European Parliament, the EU Commission, and Europes prominent businessmen.
It has an English-language editor. And an ‘imprint’.
A combination of a lot of work interspersed with photography walks in between has led to a pile of photos of Fürth and not much else. Since that is not the main purpose of this blog, here are a few things other people have been doing:
Céline reports on Phil Gyford’s beginner’s guide to freelancing with links.
languagehat presents an orthographically defective Financial Times article about the German Idiotenapostroph (known to me as the Deppenapostroph). Good pictures at www.deppenapostroph.de
A video of an elephant seeing itself in a mirror is linked in this New Scientist article (via rebecca’s pocket). Stranger than seeing oneself in a mirror for the first time: these elephants may see themselves once and never again, I suppose.
The Times (Water Cooler) reports on Mark Herrmann, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law, quoting him on the Blackberry:
Whenever a group of people meets, two acts of rudeness now routinely occur. First, people not only receive, but take, and talk on, cellphone calls. Second, Blackberries buzz and people type responsive messages. We did not tolerate this flagrant disrespect in the past century, and we should not tolerate it in this one.
Incredibly, I have heard people say that they wont buy a BlackBerry because BlackBerries make people rude; BlackBerries make people stop paying attention at meetings. I have news for you: Guns dont kill people; people kill people.
I think it’s time someone invented the Raspberry.
Handakte WebLAWg reports that a fourth Act to repeal outdated provisions has been passed in Bavaria. Here it is, and here are some extracts:
29. das Gesetz über die behälterlose unterirdische Speicherung von Gas vom 25. Oktober 1966 (GVBl S. 335, BayRS 750-31-W), zuletzt geändert durch § 18 des Ge-setzes vom 24. Juli 1974 (GVBl S. 354),
30. das Gesetz über den Übergang der bayerischen Wasserstraßen auf das Reich vom 23. September 1921 (BayRS 753-9-4-W),
31. Art. 6 bis 46 des Gesetzes über die Ausübung und Ablösung des Weiderechtes auf fremdem Grund und Boden (BayRS 7817-1-L), geändert durch § 58 des Gesetzes vom 24. April 2001 (GVBl. S. 140),
32. die Verordnung über die Anpflanzung wurzelechter Reben vom 25. August 1966 (BayRS 7821-1-L),
33. das Gesetz über den Hufbeschlag vom 20. Dezember 1940 (BayRS 7824-9-L),
Werner Siebers presents a photo of a Berlin law firm advertising by bicycle.
By the way, I see the firm with the bike ad uses a picture of hands on its site. There are some odd pictures of hands used on the Web in this way, which should perhaps remain anonymous:
