The consensus seems to be that it won’t really help, but it certainly can’t hurt. Boggs of the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit: “ May it please the Court may be preferable to whatever intro people would make up-as when people tell me how proud they are to be there, how noble we are, etc. Newman of the 2nd Circuit at New York City points out that “sometimes it’s the only thing a lawyer says that doesn’t get immediately challenged.” NOT A NEGATIVEĮxtemporaneous innovations might often be effusive and embarrassingly so, according to Judge Danny J. It may help some lawyers get started icebreakers have their place.”Įmphasizing the icebreaking function of the phrase, Judge Jon O. When it appears in a brief or motion, which is often, it is a waste of space. Circuit Court of Appeals at Chicago notes that “all the words are simple ones-no law French-and it isn’t archaic.” He adds: “I don’t care whether a lawyer opens an oral argument with this phrase. “What would lawyers say instead? Hi? Good morning-which is the most often-used alternative, as if the court session were any other meeting? What’s shakin’, Chiefie baby?”Ĭhief Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th U.S. “The introduction seems to me simply a historically acceptable way to begin,” Hecht continues. It is not intended to obtain information or communicate the intent of the speaker or if it is, then it frequently is hard to discern in what follows any thought of the speaker about actually pleasing the court. May it please the Court is not a statement, a real question or even a rhetorical question. An essential aspect of legalese, it seems to me, is that it is an inelegant or ineffective manner of communication. He says, “I don’t think it’s legalese, though it is a formalism. Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court conferred with his colleagues, who like the phrase but wouldn’t insist on it. I therefore’-and here I took up a book -‘according to the statute, demand a jury.’ ” Such a scene could hardly be imagined in a modern courtroom. The charge which is brought against him is one affecting him most deeply and which he considers it his duty to submit to a jury. In 1830, a New York lawyer gave this quaint account of his response to a judge’s query (“What is the plea?”): “ ‘ May it please the court,’ replied I, opening out my brief and forming a circle in the crowd by the extension of both my arms to their utmost length, ‘my client is not guilty. Choate, a celebrated Supreme Court advocate in the late 19th century, habitually opened with If the Court please. Curtis, who served as a Supreme Court justice from 1851 to 1857. The great Daniel Webster’s characteristic phrasing was May it please your honors (recorded in both 18). In American courts, May it please the Court was the most common opener throughout the 19th century. In the Salic law there is this clause: ‘If a witch have eaten a man, and she be convicted of it, she shall pay a fine of 8,000 deniers, which make 200 sous in gold.’ May it please the court, then, to sentence my client to pay this fine.” In a gripping courtroom scene in a criminal case, the presiding judge admonishes: “Be brief.” The defense lawyer then states, arrestingly: “Since the prisoner has confessed the crime, I have but a few words to offer. Victor Hugo used the phrase in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)-or rather it appears in the English translation of 1834. So the phrase seems to have been current among advocates in the early 17th century. It can be traced in print back to the playwright Ben Jonson-Shakespeare’s contemporary-who used it in his 1601 comedy The Poetaster (about an atrocious poet) and again in a court scene in his 1606 comedy Volpone or, the Fox. But is that so? Does the phrase really so please the courts that its absence displeases? I put the question to several judges, whose answers generally point to the phrase’s advisability.īut before considering their responses, let’s look at the history of the phrase. It is often said that May it please the Court is an obligatory phrase at the outset of an oral argument-and that any other opener suggests the oral advocate is unknowledgeable or inexperienced.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |