POESY AND THE LAW.

Auckland Star, Volume L, Issue 221, 17 September 1919, Page 11

POESY AND THE LAW.

RHYMES TOR YOUNG K.CS. TOETICAL POSSIBILITIES. Should embryo barristers learn to read poetry? Mr. Tole thinks it would make them better speakers if they did, and ■Tudge Chapman agrees with him. judging from a little interlude in the Supreme Court the other day. One would have thought the legal atmosphere would have been about as congenial to the poetic Muse as a hard frost to a crop of Pukekohe*3 early potatoes. If, however, our budding X.C.'s take seriously this hint to wander in the pleasant paths of rhyme they will have an admirable excuse for sandwiching a little Tennyson in between Coleridge and Blackstone. One can imagine him applying to himself those lines of Ben Jonson:—

"Troth, if I lire. I trill new dress the law In sprightly Poesy's iabiliments."

So long -ac they don t "try to Brown-' ingnise the ancient profession they might do worse than brush some of the cobwebs off the musty jargon without ■which no self-respecting lawyer would allow a document to leave hie "office. But these barb-wire entanglements behind whk-h the professions entrench themselves are hard to get through. We must wait for some brainy and intrepid individual to invent the verbal equivalent of the "'tank." Anything else would be useless. It is an old saving that you can drive a coach and four through an -Act of Parliament. But you can't knock it down; it closes up like a quickset hedge. "Why -can't we have simple language in law? Why can't you sell property with as little fuss as selling a crate of cheese? If poetry would make lawyers write like ordinary people, for all means let us have poetry in the curriculum at the law schools, and we would even agree to making the poetLiureatesiip hereditary in the profession. It is an old but true story about the nun who had his will made by a famous firm of lawyers, and when he died the firm had to take it into Court to decide what was really the meaning of wiiat they had written. M»=t people have been befogged by the hypnotising cloud of words in which the. legal fraternity wrap np a tiny little naked fact, but the oppression of legal jargon is of so long standing that people have become inured. It reminds one of the coin and trinket sewn- head-dress of the women of the Bedouin Arabs. It scales about nine pounds, but so used are tJhe desert beauties to its weight that they get a headache when they accidentally leave it off. Say you want to sell or even let a place, you give the legal gentlenran a slip with five or six lines on it, and some days later you receive a broad sheet big enough to paper a wall, couched in language which leave? the ordinary person as clear as mud. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred try to look wise if the author of the affaiT is in th e room, struggle with its soporific obscurity, have a "gas-over" sort of feeling, and then sign meekly at the end where the clerk points with his pen. Legal jargon could not be more obscure, go why not try the poetical