WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

words and the long looping sentences that turn the trick. Spoken or written with a
straight face, as they always are, they give an appearance of deep and serious
thought regardless of the fact that they may be, in essence, utterly meaningless.
Moreover, as has been mentioned previously, the lawyers themselves, almost
without exception, are just as thoroughly taken in by the ponderous pomposity of
legal language as are the laymen. They actually believe and will stoutly maintain
that those great big wonderful ideas – to the initiated. If you can’t talk Greek, they
say, in effect, to the non-lawyers, then you really can’t expect to understand us when
we talk Greek. But don’t for a second suppose that we don’t understand each other,
perfectly and precisely.
The catch is, of course, that the lawyers are not talking Greek – or Russian or
Sanskrit either. They are talking, in a fashion, English. Moreover they are talking
about matters – business matters, government matters, personal matters – which any
non-lawyer is quite capable of comprehending. Furthermore, if they were talking
Greek, they could presumably translate it accurately and intelligibly into a familiar
tongue without spoiling or losing any of the sense. But they can’t – or won’t –
translate the jargon of The Law into plain workaday English. The communication of
legal ideas, it appears, cannot be trusted to any conveyance but the lawyers’ private
patois. Which is, unfortunately, all too true.
For The Law, as you may have heard before, is entirely made up of abstract
general principles. None of those principles has any real or necessary relation to the
solid substance of human affairs. All of them are so ambiguous and many of them
are so contradictory that it is literally impossible to find a definite and sure solution
(regardless of whether it might be a good solution or a bad solution) to the simplest,
smallest practical problem anywhere in the mass of principles that compose The
Law. And the sole reason why that fact is not generally appreciated by either
lawyers or non-lawyers is that the principles are phrased in a language which is not
only bafflingly incomprehensible in its own right but which is composed of words
that have no real or necessary relation to the solid substance of human affairs either.
Thus the whole abracadabra of The Law swings around a sort of circular
paradox. Legal language – in statutes, documents, court opinions – makes use of
strange unfamiliar words because those words tie up to the abstract principles of
which The Law is composed. Except in reference to those principles the words, as
used, mean even less than nothing. But the principles themselves are utterly
unintelligible except in terms of the legal words in which they are phrased. Neither
words nor principles have any direct relation to tangible, earthly things. Like
Alphonse and Gaston, they can do no more than keep bowing back and forth to each
other.
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