Bryan Garner A Dictionary Of Modern Legal Usage
Libano Parkes
In this edition, Garner thoroughly updated his award-winning work. More than double the length and coverage of the original, this expanded GDLU offers definitive advice on legal style and usage. Garner drew on his unrivaled experience as a legal editor to refine his positions on legal usage and to add a wealth of new material.
As much a style guide as a law dictionary, GDLU provides concrete answers and practical solutions to linguistic questions and stylistic dilemmas that commonly confront the legal writer. Easy-to-follow guidelines and illustrations steer readers away from grammatical blunders and linguistic pitfalls. The text contains thousands of quotations from judges and prominent legal minds, along with engaging essays that explore the many issues that modern legal writers routinely face.
Bryan Andrew Garner (born November 17, 1958) is an American legal scholar and lexicographer. He has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style[1] such as Garner's Modern English Usage for a general audience, and others for legal professionals.[2][3] Garner also wrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008) and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012). He is the founder and president of LawProse Inc.[4]
He is the founder and chair of the board for the American Friends of Dr. Johnson's House,[7] a nonprofit organization supporting the house museum in London that was the former home of Samuel Johnson, the author of the first authoritative Dictionary of the English Language.
Garner was born on November 17, 1958,[8] in Lubbock, Texas,[9] and raised in Canyon, Texas. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he published excerpts from his senior thesis, notably "Shakespeare's Latinate Neologisms"[10] and "Latin-Saxon Hybrids in Shakespeare and the Bible".[11][12][13][14][15][16]
After receiving his Juris Doctor degree in 1984, he clerked for Judge Thomas M. Reavley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before he joined the Dallas firm of Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal. He then returned to the University of Texas School of Law and was named director of the Texas/Oxford Center for Legal Lexicography.[citation needed]
Garner has taught at the University of Texas School of Law, the UC Berkeley School of Law, Texas Tech University School of Law, and Texas A&M University School of Law. He has been awarded three honorary doctorates from Stetson, La Verne, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He serves on the Board of Advisers of The Green Bag.[19]
As a student at the University of Texas School of Law in 1981, Garner began noticing odd usages in lawbooks, many of them dating back to Shakespeare. They became the source material for his first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (1987).[20] Since 1990, his work has focused on teaching the legal profession clear writing techniques.[citation needed]
In books, articles,[21][22][23][24][25] and lectures, Garner has tried to reform the way bibliographic references are "interlarded" (interwoven) in the midst of textual analysis. He argues for putting citations in footnotes and notes that in-text information that is important but non-bibliographic. He opposes references such as "457 U.S. 423, 432, 102 S.Ct. 2515, 2521, 89 L.Ed.2d 744, 747" as interruptions in the middle of a line. However, such interruptions in judges' opinions and in lawyers' briefs have remained the norm. Some courts and advocates around the country have begun adopting Garner's recommended style of footnoted citations, and a degree of internal strife has resulted within some organizations. For example, one appellate judge in Louisiana refused to join in a colleague's opinions written in the new format.[26]
Garner says that one of the main reasons for the reform is to make legal writing more comprehensible to readers who lack a legal education. That has attracted opposition, most notably from Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit,[27] and from his co-author, Justice Antonin Scalia.[28]
Since 1992, Garner has contributed numerous revisions to the field of procedural rules, when he began revising all amendments to the sets of Federal Rules (Civil, Appellate, Evidence, Bankruptcy, and Criminal) for the Judicial Conference of the United States.[citation needed]
Garner and Justice Scalia wrote Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008). Garner maintains a legal consulting practice, focusing on issues in statutory construction and contractual interpretation.[citation needed]
Garner's books on English usage include Garner's Modern English Usage. This dictionary was the subject of David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, originally published in the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 2003, Garner contributed a chapter on grammar and usage to the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, and later editions have retained it.[citation needed]
In 1995, Garner became the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary. He created a panel of international legal experts to improve the specialized vocabulary in the book. Garner and the panel rewrote and expanded the dictionary's lexicographic information.[29]
Legal dictionaries provide definitions of legal terminology and words in their legal sense or use. They typically provide a short definition with reference to cases and other legal sources for authority, and frequently give examples of word usage in various legal situations. Black's Law Dictionary is the leading legal dictionary in the United States. Legal dictionaries can be found in print and online sources.
Free legal dictionaries are available online, but online access to recent editions of pre-eminent legal dictionaries is typically restricted to subscription legal research databases. The subscription resources marked with a padlock are available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.
West Publishing Co.'s Words and Phrases is a multivolume research tool, similar to a legal dictionary in that it includes legal definitions of words. However, Words and Phrases also includes multiple entries indicating how the term or the word has been defined by the courts. An electronic version of the resource is available on Westlaw (see link below).
The subscription resource marked with a padlock is available to researchers on-site at the Library of Congress. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library.
In the hands of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the tradition of public service in law enforcement has gone from "One riot one Ranger" to "one search warrant one regional press officer, six assistants, and a television crew."
*593 The owner of two private methadone clinics sued an agent for converting a limited, court-authorized intrusion to seize records into a spectacle of invasion by bringing a commercial television crew with her. Including wholly extraneous outsiders in a search unreasonably exceeds the legal scope of the warrant, violating the owner's rights under the Constitution.
Tommy E. Swate, a medical doctor, treated drug addicts at his two Houston methadone clinics. In the spring of 1992, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) suspended Swate's registration that allowed him to dispense drugs.
Teresa Hayth Pack (Pack), a DEA agent, obtained show cause orders to search the clinics on four separate occasions. She went to each clinic once to seize records of drug distribution. Pack went to each clinic again on separate occasions to seize specific documents and the methadone. Pack's search for and seizure of drug distribution records were authorized by warrants directed to "Teresa L. Hayth and any other authorized investigator or agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States Department of Justice." (She has since married and uses the surname Pack.) Her search for and seizure of methadone were authorized by warrants direct to DEA "special agents and diversion investigators."
When Pack searched the Park Place clinic to seize its methadone she was accompanied by DEA officers John Moseman, Dawn Nunley, Tom Lentini, Wendell Campbell, James Lytle, and City of Houston police officers. She also brought a crew from Channel 26 and allowed them to enter the clinic. Clinic employees tried to prevent the crew from filming the search, but Pack told them that the news people could stay.
The next month, Pack arrived at the Pinedale clinic to seize its methadone with DEA officers John Moseman, Rodney Waller, Tom Lentini, Roger Guevara, Robert Piaz, and City of Houston police officers. She brought a crew from the television show 60 Minutes. Pack demanded to be admitted to the clinic and then let the television crew enter the clinic and film the search.
In both of the methadone seizures, Tom Lentini, the DEA's public relations officer, had notified the news media and given them permission to join the search teams. The DEA officers and the crew met before the raid and drove to the clinics together.
Pack's first defense is that the show cause order is not a warrant. Pack searched the clinics and seized documents and drugs under the authority of the order. If the order is not a search warrant, Pack had no business being there.
Search warrants are instances of the class of instruments known as writs. The original meaning of "writ" is synonymous with "a writing" in modern usage. Writs are written notice of some action by a court; they are written and delivered by the clerk to the responsible officer. They include summons, arrest, subpoena, habeas corpus, and injunction. Writs can flow between courts as in the cases of certiorari, error, and mandamus.
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