A Few Moments to Spare

I have a few minutes, so I thought I would add a few lines today.

I have just started my paralegal studies and have decided that Lawyerese is its own language. Our studies this week have focused on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I read one sentence that had to be the equivalent of 6 sentences in English. I guess that's one reason the law can be so intimidating. It is rare to find anything written in simple terms. But I have also discovered that there is a reason for this. Everything that is written for the field of law has to cover many different contingencies. Otherwise, court cases would abound with technicalities that thwart the efforts to apply justice.

Common, everyday English can be very fluid, and leave a lot of room for interpretation. The law cannot do that. For example, what is murder? It is easy to say that it is one person who purposely kills another. But the law cannot allow for such a wide use of terms. If we left it at that, then we cannot allow for circumstance or state of mind or the like. It would be nice to say that murder is murder, but it just isn't that simple.

That having been said, it sure would be nice if these paralegal textbooks carried more examples, and if the FRCP had a "plain English" translation alongside for rookies. But, they don't, and I have to fight off the desire to run screaming into the night rather than make sense of how to serve a summons.

It's going to be a looooong series of classes. Sure, it will be about 6 months, but it's going to feel long. (I wonder how that would be described in Legalese?)