All News

June 12, 2005
John M. Broder
The New York Times

Jurors have spent five days deliberating criminal charges of child molesting against Michael Jackson and lawyers say the panel may well spend more than two weeks weighing Mr. Jackson's fate, given the length of the three-month trial and the sheer volume of testimony heard.

But some who have been following the case said the complexity of the instructions given by Judge Rodney S. Melville of Santa Barbara Superior Court may also be slowing down the jurors. ...

The instructions, 98 pages of legalese, require the jurors to engage in unnatural mental gymnastics, said Laurie L. Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has been closely following the Jackson case. ...

Ms. Levenson said that the California bar is revising the standard criminal jury instructions used in California courtrooms to make them shorter and easier for jurors to understand. The new criminal instructions are to be issued later this year. ...

Because jury instructions are written by lawyers, they draw on a specialized legal vocabulary that can be confusing, agreed Shari Seidman Diamond, a law professor at Northwestern University who has studied juries and jury instructions extensively and who reviewed the instructions given in this case.

&lqt;Running through these instructions is the use of words that are real words in everyday life that have different legal meanings,&lqt; she said, citing terms like &lqt;attempt&lqt; and &lqt;reasonable&lqt; and &lqt;conspiracy,&lqt; which have specialized meaning in criminal law. &lqt;We know that makes instructions harder to deal with.&lqt; ...

But it is much easier to parrot the text of a legal opinion or a statute in a jury instruction, however dense and incomprehensible it may be, than to paraphrase the same thing in clearer language and risk the wrath of an appellate court, said Peter M. Tiersma, a member of the California Judicial Council's task force on criminal jury instructions and a colleague of Ms. Levenson's at Loyola Law School.

That is how it has been in the past, he said: &lqt;If you changed it, you risked getting it wrong.&lqt;

Full Story: www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12jackson.html
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June 06, 2005
Michael Maiello
Forbes

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a technology company that claimed to have developed a &lqt;future-proof&lqt; product. They must have meant it wouldn't be squashed by some new innovation down the line. But the words &lqt;future-proof&lqt; are misleading (nothing can stop the future) and worse, they are ugly.

Or consider this bit of bad writing from another recent e-mail I received. A self-described business tycoon wanted to sell me on his idea of &lqt;stretching,&lqt; which seems to mean nothing more than &lqt;trying harder.&lqt; The e-mailer wrote: &lqt;Stretch goals inspire and capture people's imaginations. They require that you think out of the box and often take an entirely different approach to solving a problem.&lqt;

Spare me, please.

Also spare Don Watson, author of Death Sentences (Gotham, $20) from all of these weasely, wishy-washy, and worst of all, ugly bits of management-speak that have drifted out of consulting sessions and into the social realm. Students are now considered customers. Recipients of welfare or social services are now clients. Everybody is a stakeholder. Even the Central Intelligence Agency, in its mission statement, refers to having &lqt;customers&lqt; as opposed to having an obligation to the elected representatives it serves. By adopting management-speak, we're now using a language that makes every relationship a commercial one. The day seems to be looming when romance will give way to a search for synergies. ...

In an economy dominated by goofy consultants, who have shoved their buzzwords down the throat of just about anyone who works in an office, Watson seems to be fighting a losing battle. But read Death Sentences, and when you hear somebody talking about &lqt;out of the box&lqt; thinking or calling everything a &lqt;paradigm,&lqt; at least roll your eyes. With a little scorn, and Death Sentences on our shelves, we might be able to shame folks into speaking plain English.

Full Story: www.forbes.com/lifestyle/vehicles/2005/06/06/cz_mm_0606bookreview.html
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June 02, 2005
David Royse
AP

Gov. Jeb Bush, who said he recently looked at his homeowners policy and didn't understand it, signed a bill Wednesday that requires insurers to explain their coverage in plain English.

Bush, who lives in the governor's mansion but still has a house in Miami, complained that the wording on his homeowner's policy was barely comprehensible. ``That isn't English,'' he said.

Bush kicked off the formal start of hurricane season by signing several storm-related bills. One requires that insurers clearly explain what damage is covered by hurricane policies. Another makes it easier for utilities to borrow money to cover losses from storm damage. ...

The insurance bill requires that companies clearly state the deductible amount, lets people choose their deductible percentage, prohibits insurers from dropping customers for at least 90 days after a storm, and requires that the claims process begin within 14 days after the insurer is notified. ...

May 29, 2005
Richard Nilsen
The Arizona Republic

The sign on the gallery wall says the video &lqt;comments on politics, gender and sexuality in Irish culture.&lqt;

The video shows a naked woman floating in a sea of undulating jellyfish.

Haunting? Discomfiting? Yes. But Politics? Irish culture? I don't think so.

Dorothy Cross' Jellyfish Lake is one of several exceptionally beautiful videos in &lqt;Water, Water Everywhere,&lqt; one of the best shows of the season at the Scottsdale Center for Contemporary Art. It is a fascinating and hypnotic video with emotional and intellectual resonances, but the throat-stopping jargon that artists and art professionals use when discussing such art obfuscates rather than illuminates.

It is a problem everywhere in the art world, and the artists are just as guilty as the critics and curators: They seem to believe that if they don't speak in a gobbledygook of cant phrases, they won't be taken seriously in the profession. This is a shame, because there is little that turns off the art going public than brain-freezing jargon. ...

Full Story: www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/ae/articles/0529water0529.html#
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