Lanterna Rally

Author: Aaron X. Fellmeth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0197583105

"Maurice and I created this guidebook to assist international lawyers and law students seeking to master, or at least to decipher, the Latin recurrently injected into our profession's already arcane argot. It may seem strange that a reference book-sized niche remains in the twenty-first century given the profusion of legal reference works, but the fact remains that recognizing the need for a guidebook like this one is a little uncomfortable. The use of Latin in international legal writing is supposed to appear natural, if not inevitable. We typically pepper our writings with Latin as if the dead language were cayenne in a jambalaya-the more the better. Yet, at some level we are all aware that we often obscure rather than clarify our meaning when we use it instead of plain English. And when we get the Latin right, which we frequently do, and pronounce the words without butchering them beyond all hope of recognition, which we occasionally do, the practice nonetheless tends to baffle law students and even experienced international lawyers unschooled in the vernacular of Cicero. Aspiring international lawyers may wonder about the ubiquity of Latin in international legal discourse in the first place. It may seem that the esoterism of such a prevalent practice can only be intentional. The official explanation is that much early international law was developed by the Roman Empire, and the much admired Roman civil law has found its way by analogy into public international law wherever a lacuna or ambiguity in the principles of international law arose.1 When combined with the fact that Latin was the scholarly lingua franca of most of Europe during international law's early development, international lawyers have inherited an even better-stocked arsenal of Latin phrases and terms than other lawyers"--