Interesting news and cases relating to language and law

The following are some interesting tidbits, mostly from newspapers, that relate to language in the legal system.

    Author identification has been somewhat of a controversial issue among linguists, and it recently became an important issue in a case involving Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.  A certain Paul Ceglia has claimed that he is entitled to half the value of Facebook, based largely on emails that he claims were sent to him by Zuckerberg.  Gerald McMenamin, who has written extensively on this topic, has filed a report in court detailing his forensic stylistic analsyis and concluding that it is probable that Zuckerberg was not the writer of the emails in question.  Other experts, including Ron Butters, who has also done work in the field, question whether any conclusions can be reached on relatively short samples.  See Ben Zimmer, Decoding Your Email Personality, New York Times, July 24, 2011.

    There was once a time when laws had names that expressed what they were meant to accomplish.  Consider the Endangered Species Act or the Civil Rights Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.  For the past decade or so, however, it has become increasingly common for sponsors of bills to turn the names of bills into political statements, sometimes called "attack titles."  It is also common for them to function as acronyms. A bill to repeal the new U.S. health care law was titled the Revoke Excessive Policies that Encroach on American Liberties Act, a.k.a. the REPEAL Act.  Other examples include the Big Oil Welfare Repeal Act, the Reducing Barack Obama's Unsustainable Deficit Act, and the Repealing Ineffective and Incomplete Abstinence-Only Program Funding Act.  In 1997, Representative Pete Stark became concerned about doctors trying to induce patients to agree to pay for additional services when they were in the examination room.  He sponsored a bill called the No Private Contracts to be Negotiated When the Patient is Buck Naked Act, also known as the Stark Naked Act.
    Fortunately, most of these bills were not enacted into law.  In fact, it seems likely that often they were not meant to be taken seriously, as the silly names suggest.  The problem, in other words, is not just highly politicized names, but also highly politicized bills.
    See Richard Simon, Putting Hot Air Up For a Vote, L.A. Times, June 20, 2011, at A1
   

    These days, oral argument in most US appellate courts is not so much lawyers arguing their clients' cases to the judges, but instead could better be described as argument between bench and bar.  A recent study found that the justices on the US Supreme Court asked an average of 133 questions per hour. Like cross-examination at trial, these questions are often not really requests for information, but invitations to debate.  One reason for all these questions (or pseudo-questions) is that at the time of argument, lawyers have laid out their case in extensive briefs, often aided by additional briefs from amici curiae.   Thus questions serve to probe or test an argument made by one of the parties. 
    According to the NY Times article, one justice who has not participated in the verbal interaction with lawyers is Clarence Thomas.  In the past 5 years, he has not asked a single question or made a single comment.  Justice Thomas claims that he maintains his silence out of respect for the lawyers--that he wants to hear their arguments.  Of course, if he read the briefs he would already know what the positions of the parties are.
    Adam Liptak, Clarence Thomas Keeps 5-Year Supreme Court Silence, N.Y. Times, Feb. 12, 2011

    Los Angeles police arrested a Mexican immigrant, Candido Ortiz, and charged him with attempted murder.  He apparently spoke only an indigenous Mexican language, along with some very basic Spanish.  Thus, an interpreter was needed for his preliminary hearing, were a judge would take his plea.  The courts in L.A. have access to interpreters of over 100 languages, but in this case they were stymied.  They began, logically enough, with a Spanish interpreter, who soon realized that Ortiz seemed not to understand much Spanish.  The next hypothesis was that he spoke Zapotec, a Oaxacan language, but that proved incorrect.  He was then identified as a speaker of Mixe, a less common Oaxacan language.  An interpreter of Mixe was flown in from San Francisco, but he spoke Mixe alto, a dialect which Ortiz did not understand.  The next interpreter spoke Mixe bajo, but this was again the wrong dialect.  It turns out he spoke Quetzaltepec Mixe.  Apparently there are no qualified interpreters of this language in the U.S., but a university student who spoke it was found in Mexico.  He interpreted from Mixe into Spanish by telephone, and another interpreter in the courtroom interpreted the Spanish into English, a process called "relay interpreting."  When all else fails, the court interpreter's office sometimes sends someone to an ethnic restaurant in search of speakers of exotic languages.  Prosecutors in the case had a simpler solution: make him speak Spanish.  He's faking it.
    Victoria Kim, How Do You Say 'Plea' in Chuukese?, L.A. Times, Feb. 21, 2009, at A1.

    Along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigrant-rights activists have been placing water bottles in areas where immigrants cross the border, since the area is extremely dry in places and immigrants sometimes die of heat and dehydration.  One such area is a wildlife refuge (the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge), where it is illegal to dump "waste," which might be dangerous to the endangered species living there.  Three men were arrested for placing bottles filled with water in the refuge, which prosecutors claimed was a violation of the statute.  They were convicted at trial, but a federal court of appeals later held that placing water bottles in the refuge did not constitute "dumping waste."  That seems like the correct decision, since a bottle with water in it is not normally "waste."  But it does open the question of whether a border-crosser, having drunk the water, is legally required to carry the bottle to a proper disposal or recycling site.  Leaving behind an empty bottle probably would constitute "dumping waste," in my opinion.  Of course, if such a person were to come to the attention of law enforcement officials, deportation would be a more likely option.
    Carol J. Williams, Conviction in Migrant-water Case Overturned, L.A. Times, Sept. 3, 2010, at AA3.

    A black supervisor at a Tyson Foods chicken plant was twice passed up for promotion and brought a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination.  He presented evidence that the white manager of the plant had the habit of referring to African-Americans as "boys."  The federal court of appeals held that this usage was "nonracial in context."  One would think that a court in Atlanta, of all places, would know a bit more about the historical (and, apparently, current) derogatory use of this word in reference to grown black men.
    Adam Liptak, Appeals Court in Atlanta Again Rejects Racial Discrimination Claim, N.Y. Times, Sept. 6, 2010.

    Jurors in the corruption trial of Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, found him not guilty of almost all charges against him, much to the surprise and dismay of prosecutors, who believed they had an "overwhelming" case against him.  One of the causes of the verdict was the jury instructions, which went on for more than one hundred pages, along with a verdict form "as elaborate as some income tax forms."  It took the jurors several days to figure out what they were supposed to do.  One juror expressed "frustration that we didn't accomplish what we set out to do."   As they say, "garbage in, garbage out."
    Monica Davey & Susan Saulny, Jurors Fault Complexity of the Blagojevich Trial, N.Y. Times, Aug. 21, 2010

    In an article published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers have reported on a study showing that people tend to distrust people who speak with a foreign accent.  This is consistent with other studies that show a "simplicity-sincerity effect"--people tend to find that a statement written in a clear font (one that is easy to read) is more likely true than more obscure fonts.  Even when subjects were told about this effect (i.e., that people have less trust in statements made by nonnative speakers), it persisted.  The study is reminiscent of the "powerless" speech style identified by William O'Barr in his book, Linguistic Evidence.  He likewise found that instructing subjects to ignore the effects of what he called the powerless speech style did little to counteract that effect (pp. 95-96).
    Pamela Paul, An Accent Makes You Less Credible, Study Says, N.Y. Times, August 27, 2010