Also remember ordinary writing has an advantage legal writing does not - the presumption of interpretation in good faith. Any legal document has to be written with the presumption that some asshole, not always another lawyer , will try and find a loophole, a way to interpret it to demand more than was intended and to deliver less in return. You have to find ways of saying things that are tough to distort in this way. One of the methods is use standard phrases that have decades or even centuries of precedent as to how they should be interpreted. There is a reason besides saving work to use legal boilerplate: if a phrase or a clause or whatever has survived actual legal tests, a sensible lawyer will choose it over a better sounding phrase.
And as a non-lawyer who has to deal with contacts, that is exactly what I want a lawyer to do. I'd rather a contract give me exactly the protections I'm looking for than than have the wit and clarity of an opinion by Judge Learned Hand. The same logic applies, I'm sure in criminal law too. Again I'm not saying there is not plenty of room for improvement - some obscure phrases are just habit and poor writing. But fundamentally legal writing is either a sword or a shield. That functionality has to take precedent over clarity and beauty.
(Obviously, in this case, by "legal writing" I refer to actual contracts, writs, briefs, written motions, and other writings either submitted to courts or intended to stand up in court if necessary. Writings ABOUT the law that have no legal force themselves, such as articles in a law journal, are another story.)
Incidentally, saving labor is not an illegitimate goal either. Legal labor is expensive. Wasting it is not beneficial to society as whole, and certainly no kindness to clients.
On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Bill O'Connor <billyoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> writes:
>
>> Where do lawyers get the term "as such"? I've seen it used as in the
>> sentence below fairly often. It seems a short-cut for something but
>> it just looks wrong to me:
>>
>>
>>
>>> His father left his family when the defendant was in fourth grade.
>>> As such, he left school to perform menial jobs to support his
>>> family.
>
> It looks wrong to me, too. I could see, "The defendant was abandoned by
> his father while in the fourth grade. As such...", where "such" would
> be a substitute for "abandoned".
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