As a lawyer who spent his career in preparing and trying cases as a prosecuting and defense attorney, one of my jobs was to translate legalese into plain English for jurors. This is quite a challenge for someone who had only the vaguest notion of what "malice" was until needing to work with it in his first murder case.
First you have to study the concept, then you have to put it into your own words, and then you have to explain it to someone who, like the jurors, hadn't attended law school, a normal person or civilian we call these, such as your spouse.
"Honey," would you mind listening for a minute while I explain malice for this trial I'm working on, please?" and there goes dinner.
If I could explain it so Marie got it, I could explain it to a jury. If I couldn't, then I didn't understand it myself.
My son Rob mentioned that Richard Feynman has a similar thought in explaining the ever mysterious quantum physics. Feynman and a colleague would discuss some counter-intuitive topic that seemed to have time running backwards or space inside out at length only to conclude that because neither could explain what they had in mind sufficient for the other to understand, two bright guys, that they must not understand it themselves.
What brings this to mind is that California has been working to translate its jury instructions, some of which I can repeat almost verbatim, into plain English, which could put a trial lawyers out of business. What are we going to do if the mystery is taken out of the law and juries start to understand what they're doing?
See Bob Egelko's article, below:
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