Sotomayor Defends Gobbledygook

Just between us girls, Sonia, I’m a little disappointed in you. And not just because you lack respect for my right, as a New Yorker, to bear nunchuks.

Actually, it's because you give far too much respect to a lawyer’s right to bear “whereases” and “provided howevers.”

You said that that when you went into private practice and started drafting settlement agreements, you tried to use simple language at first. But then you handed the agreements to your partners in the corporate department - those geniuses who draft contracts all day long - with predictable results:

"I would get back stuff that sometimes I would look at and say, 'What does this gobbledygook mean?' And they would laugh at me and say, 'It has meaning. This is how the courts have interpreted. It's very important to the relationship of the parties that they know what the expectations are in law about their relationship.'"

And you, a supposedly tough girl from the projects, totally wimped out:

"And then I understood why it was important to phrase things in certain ways. And it made me very respectful about the importance of predictability in terms of courts' interpretation of business terms, because that was very, very critical to organizing business relationships in our country."

Sonia, once you’re confirmed, you may want to take this up with Justice Scalia, who said in a speech last year: “I do not believe that legal writing exists...That is to say, I do not believe it exists as a separate genre of writing. Rather, I think legal writing belongs to that large, undifferentiated, unglamorous category of writing known as nonfiction prose.”

Terrified as I am to find myself agreeing with Mr. Scalia, he's right. And conventional legal writing, in all its haughty, incomprehensible splendor, is wrong, like a nun using nunchuks.

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