LaVidaRoja wrote:This discussion reminds me of a lawyer joke:
Person to person:
"I give you this apple."
Lawyer to person:
"I give, bequeath, surrender, cede and forever deed to you this apple, etc. etc."
The lawyer's portion went on for a long paragraph. I realized (even before I went to law school) that the lawyer's position was correct.
If my mother gave me an apple, and I gave it to a homeless bum, or threw it at a car, or fed it to a pig, my mother would have been all over me: "I didn't give you an apple just to have you waste it!!" The legal language shows CLEARLY that the donor is giving the item and any and all rights associated with it.
Lay people do not understand that there is a very good reason for the sometimes intricate language of law. If I give you an apple, I really DON'T have any reason to comment on what you do with it.
I remember my law professors telling me that a lot of that "lawyer gobbledygook" came about for three reasons. One was to trigger the application of certain statutes, as in the old "I give, grant, bargain, sell and convey to X and his heirs..."; and this was often motivated by the fact that the King wanted his cut of taxes on the transaction, or by the fact that, for example, granting land to X without the "and his heirs" clause would give him only a "life estate" in the land. Another notorious example is the "I give, devise and bequeath" clause in wills.
Another had to do with the fact that, in old England, the nobles spoke French while the common people spoke English, so the writ writers would use clauses like "force and effect" (one with a Latin antecedent, and one with an Anglo-Saxon antecedent) so that the meaning of the document would be unambiguous.
Finally, those who wrote writs and legal documents were usually paid by the word. Anyone care to guess how motivated they were to keep their writings clear and concise?
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture." -- Pastor Ray Mummert, Dover, PA, during an attempt to introduce creationism -- er, "intelligent design", into the Dover Public Schools