As I said to someone else, all of the good stuff here is my colleagues, including @ctfitzpatrick.bsky.social (who just joined bluesky). I had proposed some material, but apparently ECF does not yet support scratch-and-sniff.
Out of a thousand petty lawsuits from a petty demagogue I can't help but feel this one, specifically, might be the pettiest. Pathetic, contemptible behavior that would get someone socially ostracized in a society that truly loves its own principles of freedom.
Good grief. Even if she lied, lies are not fraud. Trump lies all day, every day, so clearly he doesn’t think lies are fraud. Also, Trump won Iowa, so he cannot prove anything bad happened to him as a result of the poll. He is just trying to bully anyone who disagrees with him into silence.
Do things like this - phrases from popular culture etc - commonly get included in legal documents? I'm a professor of orthopedic surgery and would NEVER be allowed to include anything so colorful in a peer-reviewed scientific manuscript. It's really pretty amazing.
Occasionally by parties, rarely by judges. When judges do, its usually because a party has tested the patience of the judge with their conduct and claims.
Generally, legal writing is less stiff and allows moments of whimsy that scientific writing does not. Oh, and we don't use passive voice.
That's brilliant. As I teach my residents and graduate students to write scientifically, I tell them to sound as boring as possible, get rid of all adjectives and adverbs and keep everything to subject-verb structure only. Oh, what fun.
Sorry about the passive voice quip, my wife's a doctor, so naturally I edit and read a lot of the papers she peer reviews. In the history of medicine, I don't think a doctor has ever performed a procedure. They just seem to happen to patients.
Yes -- there are often existing cases you can cite that already quote it. Another example is citing the Texas Supreme Court citing the Big Lebowski (Kinney v. Barnes, 443 S.W.3d 87, 91 n.7 (Tex. 2014)):
I used Alexander Pope as an effective epigraph in a First Amendment case. I was up against unhinged Republic of Texas pro se litigants so pierian springs were appropriate. It was quite an adventure with a third year bar card.
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Generally, legal writing is less stiff and allows moments of whimsy that scientific writing does not. Oh, and we don't use passive voice.
You do tend to see a fair bit of Shakespeare quotes, especially from Hamlet
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