LAWTALK: It’s Not Just for Lawyers Anymore

by Jessica Huseman, Staff Writer 

DECEMBER 21 — Did you know that the phrase “wet foot dry foot” was inspired by a Dr. Suess novel? Or that “black letter law” once had a negative connotation? What about the surprising linguistic origin of “green card”?

Then you need a copy of “Lawtalk.”

“Lawtalk,” an encyclopedia-like book of the history of common legal phrases, is the end result of collaboration between two law professors, one law librarian and a legal lexicographer. The book, which holds the histories of more than 75 legal phrases, hit bookshelves a week ago and has made the Christmas lists of legal minds everywhere.

“We’re really excited about how it’s been received,” said Beth Thornburg, one of the authors of the book and an SMU Dedman School of Law professor who teaches and writes about civil procedure and alternative dispute resolution.

The book received a great review from the American Association of Law Libraries and has been written about in the ABA Journal, but Thornburg is particularly excited that non-lawyers are enjoying it as well.

“It’s fun for me,” she said. “I usually write scholarly articles that are read by other academics. So the idea that regular people will be reading what I write for a change is really exciting.”

On the hope that those not fluent in legalese might pick up a copy, the authors tried to keep the book as approachable as possible. It is entertaining and conversational, and avoids ubiquitous footnotes in favor of endnotes on the advice it made the book less intimidating.

“At one point [the publishers] were afraid the superscript numbers might be too much, so we used as few as possible. Probably one per paragraph,” Thornburg said. “There’s plenty of documentation in there if you want it, but it’s not particularly obtrusive.”

The approachable text is paired with equally interesting entries. One of Thornburg’s favorites is the history of the word “green card” which was first penned by a LA Times journalist in 1962 who did a series of stories on the plight of Mexican migrants. In quoting the migrants, he literally translated tarjeta verde – what Mexicans called the cards – into “green card” and the term stuck.

After sorting out the history of the word, Thornburg was reading Al Dia – a major Spanish newspaper in Dallas – and noticed an interesting tidbit.

“I found that even though the paper was in Spanish, they no longer referred to green cards as tarjetas verde, instead they were using the English term ‘green cards,’” she said.

A call to the editor of the paper revealed that Spanish speakers now most commonly understand the English translation “green card” over the original Spanish phrase. More delving uncovered uses of the English phrase in newspapers in Mexico. So, the term flip-flopped and is now broadly used in English instead of its original Spanish.

The entry on green cards also calls attention to how quickly things can change. The book states that the actual card hasn’t been green for some time, an ironic fact that Thornburg mentioned in a recent interview on Dallas radio station KERA. She was “quite embarrassed” when a listener, who had a green card, called the show to say that the newer green cards are back to being green again.

“When researching the book, we had to continually edit as new information became available and older archives of old books and records were loaded onto the Internet,” she said. “I’m sure that five years from now, as even more goes up on the internet, it will turn out that there are earlier uses of the phrases that even we found.”

The authors searched archives, utilized law libraries and made full use of the Internet, but several snags were hit a long the way.

“For instance, we were researching the term ‘make a federal case of it,’ and searches pulled up thousands of hits,” Thornburg said. “But it turns out that in the 50s, there was a racehorse named Federal Case, and we were just getting a bunch of hits about a horse.”

While some of the research didn’t reveal much, Thornburg was entertained by what it did reveal. The term “wet foot dry foot,” for instance, was coined by an immigration official who used the Dr. Suess books he kept in his office for his children to explain the policy to a reporter.

Or there’s black letter law, which many modern lawyers assume means basic unquestionable law. Turns out, the term was meant to be derogatory and referred to the kind of font used in old, obsolete law books.

“The people who coined that phrase would be quite surprised to know that it now means exactly the opposite,” Thornburg said.

Although the word search wasn’t a full time job, it still took quite a bit of effort over an extended period of time. Thornburg was brought onto the project in 2005 when Wisconsin Law Professor Marc Galanter approached her about it at a conference, but the other authors (Galanter; Fred Shapiro, an associate librarian and lecture on legal research at Yale; and James Clapp, a legal lexicographer and author of “Random House Webster’s Dictionary of the Law”) had already been working on it for five years.

Thornburg took on a large bulk of the writing with Clapp. While still busy as a law professor, she said the research didn’t come as much of an adjustment to her already packed schedule.

“I think people forget that law professors spend much of their time researching,” she said. As a law professor, she was even able to involve her students – who are all thanked in the book – and allow them to do some of the background research.

Now that the book is done, Thornburg said she and her co-authors are just “riding the wave.” She’ll be making a few appearances around Dallas in the near future to sign the book, including one at the SMU Bookstore on Jan. 15, and she’s hoping she’ll be able to continue to watch its increasing progress as she monitors its sales on Amazon.

The book is available for purchase here. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Jessica Huseman is a staff writer for The Texas Lawbook. Her email is jessica.huseman@texaslawbook.net.