Legal-writing quiz 6

5. The Legal Writing Institute, a national organization for legal writing, analysis, and research, was founded in 1984. Until 2002, the same group of legal-writing faculty served as hosts for the Institute—even though they moved from one law school to another. Name the two law schools.

Answer: University of Puget Sound and Seattle University (Congratulations to SAM)

6. Law professor James White offered this critique of the plain-English movement in his book, Heracles' Bow:

The success of any movement to translate legal speech into Plain English will be severely limited. For if one replaces a Legal Word with an Ordinary English Word, the sense of increased normalcy will be momentary at best: the legal culture will go immediately to work, and the Ordinary Word will begin to lose its shape, its resiliency, and its familiarity, and become, despite all the efforts of the writer, a Legal Word after all.

White’s comments reflect a common misunderstanding about the Plain English movement. What is it?