FOLLOWING IS A FORWARD OF AN "ANONYOMOUS" MESSAGE FROM "RES IPSA"
<forward of anonymous message>
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To Paragraphos Or Not?
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Recently, the topic of para-
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graph numbering for legal citaions has been
discussed. So, if you are tired of the issue, too bad.
A recent article neglected to mention a major cultural issue --
that paging is also the term used to contact lawyers with beepers. If we
give up paging, laywers will become confused. After all, Motorola never
used the word "paragraphing" to contact someone, and if you "paragraphed"
a lawyer to tell him that the judge had set the trial date and the lawyer
missed the trial because he stoped using paging, then, there would be
drastic malpractice consequences. I consulted with Motorola, and asked
them if they would object to start using the word "pargraphing" -- they
said that a billion dollar American paging industry would be at risk, but
would not speak on the record. I called a friend at West who confirmed
that they had no agreements with Motorola.
According to the dictionary, the word "page" derives from the Latin
"pagina" which is in turn related to the Latin word "pangere", to
fasten. On the other hand, the word "paragraph" derives from the Greek
"paragraphos", "to write beside". Now, we all know that American law is
rooted in Rom-
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an law, and, it would be very confusing, if not un-American,
if we were at this late date, after centuries of using the Latin "pagina",
to revert to the Greek "paragraphos", when Greek law, if there was any,
was based upon polytheism, rather than the monotheism that is the
root of our culture, so, using paragraph numbers also threatens the roots
of our religious tradition. Indeed, the introduction of paragraph
numbers in the bible was actually a Hellenic intrusion which at this late
date we do not need to introduce in the law - it is bad enough that this
Hellenic perversion has led to fundamentalist rigid interpretation of
bibilical passages.
Also, I called Bill Gates at Microsoft and asked about whether Microsoft
had received a license from West to use memory paging in MS-DOS. I
received a call back saying that this raised sensitive issues, but that
Microsoft used a different size page. Gates also told me that
Microsoft had filed a patent on all paragraph numbering macros and
programs and that the program covers the incrementing "FOR NEXT" function
that he had invented in Microsoft Basic, and that any program that
automatically inserted paragraph numbers would violate the patent. He
said that an exclusive license had been provided to West for this
technology. I called my friends at West, and they said they had no
immediate plans to license this to others, and noted that they had only
obtained this license to protect their prior patent in "INCREMENT", an
assembly language fucntion. They also say that they could not find the
agreement.
Gates said that it was okay to use the paragraph numbering feature in Word,
but, that one could not use it for commercial purposes or to publish case
law. "If we wanted to paragraph, we would have called it "Paragraph", not
Word" He also mentioned some problems with Pagemaker ... and , that he
was buying up CD-ROM rights for the new movie the Pagekeeper that would
be marketed directly to the top 500 law firms, in a package deal with
Encarta. "After
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Leonardo, the World." [In an interesting side comment,
Gates remarked that Leonardo invented the helicopter, and that a special
provision of GATT would permit Microsoft to file a retroactive patent on
the helicopter!!!].
Sources from the antitrust division secretly told me that they looked
into rumours of the West agreement when they investigated Microsoft, and
Microsoft could not find the West-Microsoft agreement either.
As to the malpractice issue of waiver, I phoned a leading law professor
in ethics, J.H., who wishes to not comment officialy, but noted that
there could also be Rule 11 problems. He suggested that to avoid the
waiver problem, the really expert lawyers just avoided pin-point
citation to even a particular page. He recommended citing at the case
level only ... to preserve one's rights to change a legal theory later.
That way, one does not even have to read the case. Better yet would be
to cite to say a headnote category, because they go both ways and one
could preserve any issue on appeal. He said that in private discussions
with legal malpractice insurance companies, he had been advised that they
were seriously considering pulling out of providing legal malpractice
coverage if paragraph numbering was used in decisions. They feel that
most lawyers would be confused and would not be able to tell the
difference between an opinion and a statute, and, that the reeducating
process would take a generation, and they just did not want to take the
risk. And, for the layperson, it would be an even greater disaster, for
they might start reading law and point out issues that their lawyers had
missed because they were paragraph numbered, so this would raise the
spectre of clients suing the less adaptable lawyers.
So, it is quite clear and logical that paragraph numbering opinons would
be an unmitigated disaster that would shake the roots of our law as we
know it and of our society, leading to unintended consequences and
perhaps even raising issues about the separation of church and state, and
raising technical issues that even Bill Gates cannot resolve, or would
resolve.
Signed
<anonyomous "RES IPSA PARODY" >
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