@legalstyle.co.uk
A web-log on legal style, with a focus on England & Wales. Also home of the ‘In the Privy Council’ podcast and the novelty @tritelaw.bsky.social account. Editor: Mr Elijah Z Granet @ezgra.net. Web: legalstyle.co.uk ; e-mail: editor [at] legalstyle.co.uk
Leopold v. Levin, 259 N.E.2d 250 (Ill. Sup. Ct. 1970).
The film, which is excellent (as is the roman à clef on which it's based by Meyer Levin) featuring Orson Welles reading Clarence Darrow's actual majestic peroration, can be watched in full here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4bf...
In "annals of legal chutzpah," murderer Leopold (of "& Loeb" fame) sued to stop a film à clef (COMPULSION, a fave) about his crime, saying the fictionalized aspects hurt him in the community. Ill. Sup. Ct.: you murdered a kid; there's no fiction about you that worsens your rep.
doctrinally, what happened to Charles I was regicide and the High Court of Justice trying him genuinely did have no authority.
Even with the vagary on how you define the Crown, which is a matter of acknowledged doctrinal inconsistency, I think the answer is clearly firmly no. though as bodies corporate there are public entities that can be criminally liable.
See also Wade, Forsyth, & Ghosh, Administrative Law, 12 edn at 664 (noting that the situation regarding costs in such a proceeding is unclear)
Fascinated to learn that, though not common, it remains possible to bring a common law petition of right as a remedy in contract against the King in situations not covered by the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. Franklin v Attorney General [1974] QB 185, 201, HC per Lawson J.
This makes it annoying for someone who is not a weirdo style obsessive (i.e., not like me) who might not realize there are plenty of references!
The biggest practical point of this is actually distinctly digital, because if you wanted to search a recent Supreme Court opinion for "MS-13" you'd get 0 results because the computer only finds "MS–13".
Usually three hyphens default changed? But never to an en-dash?
so
"This—the law—is bad"
becomes under JT's rules (for Penguin Books and behind the beautiful redesign that makes their paperbacks so wonderful to this day!)
"This – the law – is bad"
I think every non-federal style guide is fairly consistent that en-dash is for range of numbers. One of the few outliers on en-dashes is for that Jan Tschichold's advice in his legendary 1948 guide to typographers to use the en-dash with spaces instead of the em-dash
This came up a lot in visa debates because only by knowing that the federal government approach (mostly via the GPO) is for en-dashes, no one would possibly guess that the visa is H–1B (hyphen) not H-1B (hyphen).
Even worse that visa name references now repealed legislative organizing
On iPhone, press and hold the hyphen and then move right once for en-dash (–) and twice for em-dash (—)
Looked this up out of curiosity and it's fascinating when states (here Ohio and Oregon) insist on terms no other state uses. What other examples are there of a state using a unique name for a common offense, procedure, or law?
Just cite Arkell v Pressdram and be done with it
(google it!)
In keeping with the GPO style guide, the Supreme Court uses an en-dash (–) not a hyphen (-) in MS–13 (so it's not MS-13). It's an odd quirk of federal style
Burger, Warren E. “Wisconsin v. Yoder.” \emph{United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court}, edited by Henry Putzel, Jr., vol. 406, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1973, pp. 207–236. \end{hangparas}
If you want to really annoy a lawyer, just try citing bits from law reports like you would any other book chapter ;)
bsky.app/profile/did:...
The official proclamation of Australia's dissolution is not befitting the great Commonwealth… so I re-typeset it! God save the King of Australia! Pathetic original below
heheh
There's a lot of debate on the best list format for law. Some people like Roman (I,II, III or i, ii, iii), others alpha (a, b, c), others numeric (1, 2, 3). I, however, prefer the bra size method of listing, which I think is the clearest way to tabulate.
Flipping through Family Law textbook, an area that necessarily has a lot of anonymised case. But there are no less than 57 citations with the title ‘Re: A’.
Petition to adopt the @legalstyle.co.uk suggestion of deploying full throated pseudonyms in www.legalstyle.co.uk/2022/12/styl...
A few excerpts from one of my favourite essays (always a delight to return to), L. Sprague de Camp’s “Language for Time Travellers”
'It is trite to say that merely preferring one party's case to that advanced by the other cannot, of itself, give rise to a sustainable claim of apparent bias.' In re Haberlin's Appl'n [2025] NIKB 13, ¶ 33, KBD per Humphreys J.
www.bailii.org/nie/cases/NI...
A great judge, a true wordsmith, and an author any editor would enjoy working with.
I **ADORE** this little article from Green Bag by a federal judge explaining how he first coined a word and then worked to use it in an opinion so it could make it into Black's Law Dictionary greenbag.org/v13n2/v13n2_...
'Every cased is a story'....but this one is unusually convoluted and odd.
Just the beginning of a tale longer and more twisted than Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.
Five paragraphs in and this is looking pretty wild!