The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese [Hardcover]

Adam Freedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2007

The Eats, Shoots & Leaves of legalese, this witty narrative journey through the letter of the law offers something for language lovers and legal eagles alike

 

This clever, user-friendly discourse exposes the simple laws lurking behind decorative, unnecessary, and confusing legal language. For better or for worse, the instruction manual for today's world is written by lawyers. Everyone needs to understand this manual--but lawyers persist in writing it in language no one can possibly decipher.

Why accuse someone of making "material misstatements of fact," when you could just call them a liar? What's the point of a "last" will and testament if, presumably, every will is your last? Did you know that "law" derives from a Norse term meaning "that which is laid down"? So tell your boss to stop laying down the law--it already is.

The debate over Plain vs. Precision English rages on in courtrooms, boardrooms, and, yes, even bedrooms. Here, Adam Freedman explores the origins of legalese, interprets archaic phrasing (witnesseth!), explains obscure and oddly named laws, and disputes the notion that lawyers are any smarter than the rest of us when judged solely on their briefs. (A brief, by the way, is never so.)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freedman, who translates legal jargon into English for an investment bank and writes the Legal Lingo column for the New York Law Journal, offers a cornucopia of hilarious, offbeat and downright bizarre examples of simple concepts contorted into words that defy understanding, often retaining centuries-old lingo like Further affiant sayeth naught (which means: this is the end of the affidavit). Freedman is as much reformer as humorist, and he ably demonstrates that legal documents can be written in understandable prose. He also skewers the contingent of lawyers and academics who resist such changes in the name of precision and lampoons flaws in the legal system, such as judges' refusal to explain instructions to jurors who are mystified by phrases such as Circumstantial evidence is evidence that, if found to be true, proves a fact from which an inference of the existence of another fact may be drawn. Occasionally the three-jokes-a-page approach is more cute than clever, but this lighthearted farrago of the follies of the law is sure to amuse and to convince readers that legal language can be made plain. (Sept. 4)
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Review

“If you ever wanted to go to law school but thought it would be painful and dull, you were right. Fortunately, Adam Freedman's wit and insight will give you in an afternoon what you need to navigate a lawyered-up world—and more laughs than you'd find in class, too.”—Kermit Roosevelt, Professor, University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of In the Shadow of the Law

 

"The Party of the First Part is a terrific achievement—a hugely entertaining book about a subject that is normally anything but.  Against all odds, it makes legal language come to life.  It's the kind of book I wish I'd read before law school, and the perfect read for non-lawyers who wonder what they're missing."—Jeremy Blachman, author of Anonymous Lawyer

 

"A lighthearted but lucid explanation of legalese."—William Safire, The New York Times

“A gem of a book: bright, lucid, and compelling. I found myself laughing out loud, and wondering why lawyers can’t just eat their torts and go home.”—Cameron Stracher, author of Double Billing and publisher of the New York Law School Law Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805082239
• ISBN-13: 978-0805082234
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,091,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Law > Law Practice > Writing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious and Eye-Opening, December 2, 2007

By 

Literary Lawyer (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese (Hardcover)

A book about legalese? I was skeptical, but this book grabbed me from the start. As a lawyer and an English major, I've always wanted to know where legal language took a wrong turn. As Freedman explains, legalese got to where it is today by taking lots and lots of wrong turns. Like the legal tendency toward redundancy: "will and testament" "fit and proper" "breaking and entering." These phrases developed after the Norman Conquest when lawyers and clients switched back and forth between Anglo-Saxon and French (in each case, one word is Anglo-Saxon and the other is French). Not only is the book informative, but it's also laugh-out-loud funny, especially when Freedman describes the bizarre resistance of lawyers to using "plain English" in place of their cherished legalese.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a perfect world this book would be required reading, May 17, 2008

By 

S. Saunders (Rocky Mountains USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese (Hardcover)

"The Party of the First Part" is an erudite, hilarious tour through 21st Century American legalese. Alan Freedman leads us through the ankle-grabbing underbrush of redundancy, dead phrases, faux Latin, and mindless obfuscation into which every reader - and writer - of legal documents eventually must stagger.

Freedman is a sure-footed guide who knows the territory. Time and again, he yanks up a hoary word or phrase and shows us its tangled roots.

Sometimes we find, clutching a root with a deathgrip, an advocate of the so-called "Precision School" of legal drafting. These lawyers and profs fear that awful chaos would result if lawyers quit using ancient Anglo/French/Latin phrases, in favor of words used by 21st Century Americans in everyday life. Chaos? Well gosh, people might have to *sue* if they can't agree what a word or phrase written in 21st Century English means. Uh-huh, thinks I: as if they aren't already suing by the thousands over the meaning of Roman-numeraled legal documents bristling with boilerplate clunkers such as "witnesseth," "hereinabove," "aforementioned," "covenant and agree," and "hereunto."

This book should be required reading for every law student, law professor, judge and lawyer in the United States. It encourages those among us who want to write clearly when drafting legal documents. I hope it will at least give pause for thought to our colleagues who never met a hundred-word clause in the passive voice, that they didn't like.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Legaleazy, January 29, 2008

By 

Publius (Utopia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese (Hardcover)

Mr. Freedman's "The Party of the First Part" is a much more humorous review of Law School. Freedman covers Torts, Contracts, Criminal Law, Wills, Trusts, Estates and a multitude of other subjects that can even confuse some of the most academically gifted among us. I for one spent Law School in a haze because I felt like I was not getting the big picture. However, when I realized that the `law' does not have a big picture, I felt much more relaxed. Our Anglo-Saxon, Franco-Norman, Old English influenced law, as Mr. Freedman demonstrates, is a series of compromises and half-measures and it has always been that way. `Legalese' can be used as both a sword and a shield. For instance, Wills can be written in a way that makes sense to people, without any mention of the words "rest" "residue" or "remainder." But since these sounds good and lawyerly, it keeps showing up in Wills and Testaments. (Testament also being a redundancy too as Mr. Freedman demonstrates.) Thus, the odds of challenging a plain English Will and winning is much greater then one that packs more and more legalese in. Since legalese protects not only the lawyer and the client, legalese can also be used as a sword. For instance, why hire a lawyer if you could understand the documents that you are reading and signing? I encourage anyone to read this book to get a humorous side to a very dry topic.