Welcome to the slaughterhouse

Way back in the day, when Attractive Nuisance was a mere welp of an undergrad, her favorite English professor mentioned that one of his friends taught writing at a nearby law school, likening that vocation to "practicing veterinary medicine at a slaughterhouse." A-Nu chortled derisively along with the rest of the class, blissfully unaware that she herself was headed (albeit by a rather circuitous route) for the jurisprudential butcher shop.

One might think that three years at a top ten law school, a stint clerking for a federal appellate judge, and far too long in legal practice might have accustomed A-Nu to the linguistic carnage she encounters on a daily basis. But one would be sorely mistaken. Remarkably, A-Nu retains her ability to take offense at an ambiguous pronoun, to grind her teeth over a misplaced modifier, and to rant inarticulately whenever some hapless soul uses the expression "between the three of us" in her presence.

These petty syntactical crimes, however, pale in comparison to what A-Nu views as the ongoing linguistic genocide perpetrated by the legal profession. She refers, of course, to the immense corpus of legal writing that, while not actually in violation of any technical rule of grammar, is nonetheless wordy, rambling, repetitive, incomprehensible, badly organized, nauseatingly rife with Latin, unnecessarily convoluted, too damn long, and/or just unbelievably fucking dull.

Never one to be parsimonious when allocating blame, A-Nu notes that law students, lawyers, and professors all have blood on their hands from daily injuries caused to the English language. But the identity of the chief culprits is clear: after all, it's judges who spew out the pages upon appalling pages of tortured linguistic detritus that the law students must study, the lawyers must cite, and the professors must . . . well, must do whatever it is, exactly, that professors do when they read a case. It's judges, therefore, are responsible for the current sorry state of legal writing, and it's judges who have to step up and take responsibility for mopping up the slaughterhouse floor.

In A-Nu's (admittedly biased) view, the need for a blog about judicial writing is clear, and Word of the Court aims to fill that void by illuminating the good, the bad, and the ugly in written judicial decisions. A-Nu plans to give kudos where deserved, and criticism (both constructive and harsh) where warranted. So welcome to the slaughterhouse: A-Nu looks forward to serving as your veterinarian.