http://www.amazon.com/Suggestion-Death-Marianne-Wesson/dp/0671035592

Elizabeth Warren at HLS reputedly begins each semester of her contracts class by — literally before saying anything else — asking some poor 1L, “What is an assumpsit?”

Of course, that means that a constructive comment is not a helpful one, but one you didn’t make, and are deemed to have made anyway.

I scratched my head over the writ of trespass for a long time, particularly trespass on the case. As opposed to trespass quaere clausum fregit, which was always perfectly clear to me.

I hope this has been constructive.

On a related note, “probate,” “probative,” and “probation” all mean seemingly completely different things. Are the concepts related in some way I don’t see?

(As an aside, it’s always irked me that MS Word doesn’t recognize the existence of the word “dispositive.”)

All the economics jargon

Under Illinois law, little of what we file during motion practice is recognized as a pleading. This technicality tends to become an issue when we file an objection and/or motion to strike the motion of a weak opponent.

Oy veh. The lexicon of state court practice can really be a nightmare. Most of my practice experience was in Pennsylvania, where the rules of civil procedure seem to have been written by Charles Dickens as background material for Bleak House. The clerk is the “prothonotary”; a 12(b)(6)-type motion is a “preliminary objection”; and there’s something called a “praecipe for a rule to show cause”, the precise meaning of which still eludes me.

I would also throw onto the list the distinctions between legal/jurisprudential/juristic/jural. And “cause of action,” which a lot of people conflate (!) with “action.” “Epistemological” gets thrown around a fair amount too.