For those of you who don't routinely read the Washington State Bar
News, and yet enjoy trivia about legal publishing, a recent issue has an
article by an attorney who was on the Statute Law Committee when the
Revised Code of Washington was compiled. (John N. Rupp, Legal History:
Incidents of the Birth of R.C.W., Wash. St. B. News, Dec. 1992, at
15-17) (The RCW was first published in 1961.)
Among other things, Rupp discusses the temptation to edit the session
laws -- a temptation that the first group of codifiers succumbed to, alas.
Among other things, they changed "slung shot" (a/k/a "sap" -- a weapon
made by sewing a large lead bullet in the end of a leather sleeve) to
"sling shot" (something else altogether). Rupp and his colleagues went
back through the code and restored the language and the punctuation of the
session laws.
By the way, two of the three original members of the code
commission who set up the whole project were law librarians -- Marian
Gould Gallagher of the University of Washington and Mark H. Wight of the
Washington State Law Library. The third member was the Secretary of the
Judicial Council. (The commissioners set up the project and the outline
of titles; a group of lawyers was then assigned to do the codification,
and they're the ones who edited.)
Mary Whisner, Head of Reference Telephone: (206) 543-6794
Gallagher Law Library FAX: (206) 685-2165
University of Washington Internet: whisner@u.washington.edu
1100 NE Campus Pkwy, JB-20
Seattle, WA 98105
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