When a Lawyer Defines Your Rear

We all know that lawyers like to make our lives as miserable as they can make it with the use of all their complicated lexicality....So I would like to share this piece with you....Pay good attention to the definition of our "seat"

Perhaps the best way to sound like a lawyer is to throw in as much legal vocabulary as possible. There are literally thousands of technical terms from which to choose. Words of Latin and French origin are particularly impressive. No one will doubt that you are a real member of the bar if you can convincingly bandy about phrases like expunging a lis pendens or quashing a subpoena duces tecum.

Lawyers may also have strategic reasons for favoring legalese and the obscurity it engenders. For instance, an outfit that rents hang gliders to the public may be legally obligated to warn of the dangers of the sport, but at the same time would not want to discourage potential customers. Or a department store might wish to give out credit on one-sided or even oppressive terms, but might fear that consumers would balk if they realized the truth. Convoluted and incomprehensible legalese is the obvious solution.

Perhaps a more legitimate justification for the longwindedness of the profession derives from its adversarial nature. Virtually any legal document is liable, at some point in its existence, to be picked apart by an opponent eager to exploit a loophole or ambiguity in hopes of wiggling out of an agreement or contesting a will. Legislation is no exception; almost any statute will be subjected to intense scrutiny by lawyers trying to poke holes in it on behalf of their clients. Those who draft such documents must anticipate these attacks. Therefore, they obsessively try to cover every base, plug every loophole, and deal with every remotely possible contingency. The result is ever longer, denser, and more complicated prose.

"Covering all the bases" is no doubt the explanation for a highly contorted definition of buttocks in a Florida ordinance aimed at reducing the amount of exposed flesh in public places. To require dancers to cover their buttocks, without more, would only invite them to skirt the rule by wearing the skimpiest covering possible. The county thus deemed it prudent to define buttocks as precisely as it could:

the area at the rear of the human body (sometimes referred to as the gluteus maximus) which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top of such lines being one-half inch below the top of the vertical cleavage of the nates (i.e., the prominence formed by the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line being one-half inch above the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance (sometimes referred to as the gluteal fold), and between two imaginary lines, one on each side of the body ...

The basic intent of the drafters is clear. The result is far from it.