Cooney on Passive Voice Phrasing, Linguistic Ambiguity. and the Board Game "Clue" @WMUCooleyLaw ‏

Mark Cooney, Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, has published Give a Clue (A Linguistic Whodunit) at 96 Michigan Bar Journal 60 (June 2017). Here is the abstract.

This column cites and quotes a number of cases in which ambiguity caused by passive-voice phrasing determined the outcome or hindered a court's interpretation of a statute or pleading. The column presents this material within the context of a mock British murder mystery, complete with thinly veiled references to characters from the popular board game Clue. It's a short humor piece with a serious message to lawyers: passive voice is a substantive issue in the law, not merely a matter of style.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

What Else You Can Do With a Law Degree

What else can you do with a law degree? Check out Comedians at Law, the website of a bunch of recovering lawyers, licensed to make you laugh. (Or try to. Getting up in front of an audience is tough, tougher than teaching). Podcasts here. Speaking of--what is the noun of venery for a bunch of lawyers? A lawsuit of attorneys? A license of lawyers? A jury of mouthpieces? Richard Eisel suggests a "brief of attorneys" and "a gavel of judges."

Speaking of other uses for a law degree, if you still haven't checked out Bloomberg Law's Stealth Lawyers series here, it's still going strong (if the link doesn't work, try searching YouTube for "Bloomberg Law Stealth Lawyers", without the quotation marks). Dare I note(quite modestly) that Bloomberg also credits my research in a video in this series called "History's Stealth Lawyers"? Check it out here.