Customer Reviews

The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese

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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.

"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.

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.

Poking more than a bit of fun at the "worrying gap" - the distance between the language of the public and that of the legal profession, 'Legal Lingo' columnist Adam Freedman takes a humorous swing at the "Precision School", which holds that the complexity of legal language flows from the need of lawyers to be super precise. A position that challenges the "Plain English" camp, which advocates that ordinary citizens ought to be able to understand the laws they live under and the contracts they sign.

Demonstrating a wit and humor that may be lost on some legal scholars, Freedman traces the origin for the distinction between "libel" and "slander" while providing an ample supply of one-liners for use during your next meeting with legal counsel. If that is not enough, you may be interested in knowing that the Texas Cattlemen's suit of Oprah Winfrey was done under a "Food Disparagement Law" - statutes meant to protect agricultural products; veggies are a group with especially tender feelings, you know. His discussion of "boilerplate" language notwithstanding, I found the book to be riveting reading. From now on, I will "know all men by these presents," boilerplate is contractual and may require one to accept that there is a 'Sanity Clause'.

Dennis DeWilde, author of
"The Performance Connection"

This book is a funny and expansive look at the origin of legal terms and obscure laws, ranging. Although a fun read, the book seemed to lack focus. At times, it read as an advocacy piece encouraging the legal community to abandon traditional legalese, supported by what is inexplicably called "The Precision School", in favor of simple and widely accessible plain English, supported the "The Plain English School." At other times, the agenda seemed to be purely entertaining or educational. Perhaps all three.

My reaction to this book varied as I was reading it. Parts are laugh-out-loud funny. The author's treatment of sex laws and laws regulating sales of sex toys is as entertaining as any stand-up comedian`s monologue. For example, in describing an Alabama court's 2004 decision that "ordinary vibrators" not designed primarily for genital stimulation are not impermissible sex toys, the author notes that this leaves the door wide open for the "sale of vibrators designed primarily for making cappuccino." He notes that North Dakota's sodomy laws specifically prohibit copulation with a bird, and catalogues the various (and often humorous) terms used to describe impermissible sex acts in throughout the US.

Alternately, sections of the book are a little tedious, with broad-brush descriptions of term after legal term. The author is quite witty, but occasionally the wit teeters on the edge of sarcasm and sophomoric humor. Throughout the book, he uses little snippets of created dialogue that show the humor of a particular usage in a particular setting. Some are funnier than other.

There is much to be learned here. The author tells the stories of the origins of negligence-based tort liability (an engineer named MacAdam, who developed a system for paving), He draws from ages-old legal cases from the US and UK, and isn`t afraid the identify the judge or court responsible..

WHAT I LIKED: Overall the book is funny, full of information, seemingly well-researched, and nicely indexed. I read a lot and often don't notice, or am critical of the font and presentation. The presentation is also very visually appealing. The font, page layout, and paper quality are nice.

WHAT I DIDN'T: Occasionally tedious, references are not cited

Overall, I would recommend this book to collectors of legal trivia or anyone interested in understanding legalese or learning about the origin of legal terms.

So alien and stubborn are lawyers' wording choices that Congress, as the author notes, has introduced dozens of "plain language" bills to regulate them. Such reforms have long been stymied, though, because many lawyers counter-punch that the law is too complicated to reduce to "simple" words.

Rather than rehasing these well-tread debates, the author offers a fun and provocative book here by letting lawyer talk speak for itself. "You decide," he suggests, as he explains with wit and humor the origins of such varied legal terms as bona vacantia, the Rule Against Perpetuities, NIMBY lawsuits, and plea bargain. The result: at certain points during his tour, it's hard not to be charmed by some of this legal language.

Kudos to the book designer as well. For a writing book, this one is unusually appealing to the eye, and bold-facing the explained terms makes for easy reference.

I found this book quite by accident, but it has surely eased some of the fierce confusion I was experiencing with the legal documents I am becoming familiar with in my course of studies to become a paralegal. All of my classes are taught by lawyers, and so not only did this book provide a refreshing review of all that I've learned over the past three years, it made me have the big belly laughs at the same time.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I have bought three copies of this book - one to lend out, and two for my professors.

A slim volume, packed with interest. The chapter on Wills, Wives and Wrecks is worth the price of admission. Are you sure that your will can pass the Fertile Octogenarian Rule?
Adam Freedman has assembled a menagerie of legal expressions, many dating back to Norman French, with very specific meanings forged in thousands of judge's decisions. It's tempting to scorn legalese as a way for lawyers to obscure what they're up to, but the truth is that careful use of legal terms is a vital part of our justice system. This book is well indexed if you just need to consult it in a pinch, but it's so entertaining that you'll want to read every word.
The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese