the wrong font

“Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s words, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways—and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?” -Mark Twain, “Is Shakespeare Dead?“

AS A LANGUAGE NERD, reading court documents probably gives me the same sort of feeling that an art historian gets while examining the intricacies of a Hieronymus Bosch. The punctuation alone is thrilling—a delicate web of brackets, embedded quotes, and parentheses within parentheses (within parentheses). See, e.g.:

(“Absent congressional direction to the contrary, words in statutes are to be construed according to their ordinary, contemporary, common meanings.”) (cleaned up) (citing Kennedy v. Tex. Utils., 179 F.3d 258, 261 (5th Cir. 1999); Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors, Inc., 458 U.S. 564, 571 (1982) (“[N]o more persuasive evidence of the purpose of a statute [exists] than the words by which the legislature undertook to give expression to its wishes.”) (citing United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 310 U.S. 534, 543 (1940)).

And the references! Oliver Wendell Holmes famously proclaimed, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” And it shows: all the e.g’s and [sic]’s and italicized citations—”See, e.g., United States v. Santos, 553 U.S. 507, 511 (2008)”—are a fastidious English professor’s dream.

But the best part of reading these documents is seeing how the legal profession uses—and sometimes abuses—language. For example, in April, a District Court Judge ordered the Trump DOJ to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran prison. The intent of the ruling seemed clear: habeas Garcia’s corpus, and pronto. Did the DOJ comply? Of course not. Instead, they simply took “facilitate” out of context and defined it in ways that fit their own case, all the while implying that they were merely following the judge’s orders.

This is a prime example of vexatious compliance through pettifoggery.

According to Merriam Webster, a “pettifogger” is “one given to quibbling over trifles.” I first heard the term in the 2012 Stephen Spielberg film, Lincoln. In one scene, Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, becomes frustrated with his cabinet members who can’t seem to deliver him the votes he needs to pass the 13th Amendment. He berates them thusly:

And Michael Quinion, in his entry on “pettifogging” at the site, World Wide Words, writes, “In the later middle ages, there was a class of lawyers who earned their livings making a great deal of fuss over minor legal cases. About 1560 they came to be called pettifoggers. They often had limited concern for scruples or conscience and the term was deeply contemptuous.”

As it should be. Especially when lawyers abuse the letter of the law as a way to violate the spirit of the law.