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March 01, 2006

Sea Sponges

From Law.com comes a humorous look at why one shouldn't rely on find-and-replace when when writing briefs and motions. 

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» Check the Spell-Check: from The Volokh Conspiracy
This is really funny. My favorite line from the brief: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense." Indeed. T... [Read More]

Comments

I once caught a published federal appellate court opinion with the phrase "tortuous interference" because Word Perfect (the judiciary's choice of word processor) automatically "fixes" the phrase "tortious interference."

I promptly alerted How Appealing, who had some fun with it, but then I kind of felt bad for the clerk who probably ended up getting blamed.

I bet if you run that phrase through Westlaw you'd find quite a few occurrences of it.

There is more than one court decision, and many legal briefs, that substitute "tortuous" for "tortious" because of the limited vocabulary of standard spell-check programs.

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