Friday, September 07, 2012

Where jurisprudence boldy goes . . .

STAR TREK has been cited by American judges in trials, according to io9's Jessica Mederson, whose article "8 Ways That Judges Have Cited Star Trek From the Bench", is worthy of perusal. I wonder what Erle Stanley Gardner would have thought?

5) The Klingon Dictionary may replace Black's Law Dictionary as the go-to dictionary for legal definitions:

Norwood v. Vance 572 F.3d 626, 630, 637 (9th Cir. 2009)
(The majority opinion)
The district court declined to give the proposed instruction because the meaning of deference would not be "clear to a lay person." But "deference" is not Urdu or Klingon; it is a common English word.

(The dissent)
I must, however, acknowledge that the majority is quite correct in intuiting that, unsurprisingly, there is no Klingon word for "deference." See generally Marc Okrand, The Klingon Dictionary (Star Trek 1992).

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