Articles Posted in Lawyers and Law Librarians, News Humor Etc.

[From an article in the March 17, 2008 The National Law Journal by Tony Mauro of the Legal Times]

There’s a video out there you may want to see – a web site called “LawProse Inc” on which 8 of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices speak about answering questions, writing briefs, arguing before the Court, and their own relationships with written words. For instance, Chief Justice Roberts thinks “lengthy citations to Web sites that are now common in briefs are an ‘obscene’ distraction ‘with all those letters strung together.’ ” Also he doesn’t like overly-long briefs, “I have yet to put down a brief and say ‘I wish that had been longer.'” Justice Breyer is bothered by the same thing, “If I see (a brief that is) 50 pages, it can be 50 pages, but I’m already going to groan,” but “If I see 30, I think, well, he thinks he has really got the law on his side because he only took up 30.”

“Justice Kennedy hates it when lawyers turn nouns into verbs by tacking on ‘-ize’ at the end, as in ‘incentivize.’ Such showy, made-up words, he sniffs, are ‘like wearing a very ugly cravat.”

The following was first posted on the InChambers weblog compiled by boppanny@aol.com, May 2008.

[From Mark Levin’s book, “Men in Black”]

“Robert C. Grier (U.S. Supreme Court Justice). Appointed by James Polk in 1846, Grier suffered paralysis in 1867 and thereafter began a slow mental decline. Grier’s case is most troubling because he was the swing vote in one of the more important cases of his era, Hepburn v. Griswold, which struck down the law allowing the federal government to print money. “Grier’s demonstration of mental incapacity during the conference discussion was such that every one of his colleagues acknowledged that action had to be taken.”