Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/203

 The Indiscretions of a Juror

177

Law language is a travesty of style. If we journalists took so long-to say things, our space-book would be very fat the ﬁrst week. The next week we should not have any space-book. The

see. . . great damage to his eyesight, earsight and all other kinds of sight whatsoever. . . distress of mind, sleep lessness. . . in the said defendant's passenger coach, automobile, wheel

editor would have secured us a situation

barrow or other conveyance. ..

massaging the oﬂ'ice windows or splitting wood instead of inﬁnitives. What archaic echoes are in mine ears! "Then

0 legal English, abomination of desola tion! To think that masters of style, like Bacon, have been lawyers!

comes the plaintiﬁ'in the above entitled

In conversation, lawyers do speak

action and says that the N00 York,

Naven, Nartford Railway Company is a corporation doing business in East Millville." That is where the plaintiff lives and it is necessary to make it clear that this is the N00 York, Naven,

Nartford Railway Company that goes to East Millville, because there is always some idiot who will think it is the N00 York, Naven, Nartford Rail way that carries Chinamen from Pekin to Canton.

When you see a man in court talking to his wife and his lawyers you may

think that he is in existence. That is a delusion of common sense. The plain tifi's writ annihilates him, makes mince

meat of each particular organ of his once Herculean body, deprives him of

."

to be sure, the English-a poor

grade, but intelligible to the jury. Of all the parasitic classes, lawyers seem to one humble juryman to be

the most pretentious and quaintly hypo critical. Other business men simply do business, get all the proﬁt they can, and except at banquets and on other oratorical occasions never pretend to be anything but business men. Lawyers carry with them a little remnant of professional ostentation. They use words like “justice," “right," "a fair and impartial consideration of the truth." They parade the lofty vocabularies of ethics, philosophy and religion, in their daily job of getting money out of some body else. If they could only see them selves from a juryman's point of view!

reason and every intellectual pleasure;

If they could only know how trans

it kills him, yet kills him not, for its vicious and heartless verbiage leaves

parent is their humbuggery and how

the poor wretch just enough alive to get up on the witness stand and show

would pay any large ﬁrm of lawyers to

the jury how hard it is for him now to

likely-looking juryman, send him to law school and take him into the ﬁrm, in order to have somebody in the office

touch his left ear with his right foot. "And says that on said Fifth of July he was in a car, passenger coach, oil tank or other conveyance of said com

pany. And that he was in the exercise of due care. And that a cinder, paving stone, shingle nail or other obstruction did enter, penetrate or otherwise move

into his eye. And that as a result of the said foreign obstacle entering his said eye and therein lodging as aforesaid he became blind and otherwise unable to

useless their arguments!

I think it

watch the courts, pick out the most

who had once got a glimmer of things from the unprofessional side of the rail. One day we heard that a very promi nent lawyer was coming to court. He had an enormous reputation. His oppo

nent and even the judge treated him with marked respect. Maybe he was skillful, maybe he fetched forth the

testimony he needed with an adroitness which a juryman cannot appreciate