date

8 March 1807 Judicial Justice
8 March 1807

Judicial Justice

Letter V

I. Shapes?

I. Misdecision

These jurisprudential scientific words and phrases, are they of no use? the employment made of them, is it to be numbered among the abuses and grievances with which the field of law is at present loaded and defiled? By no means. There are many of them that are of indispensable use. They perform each of them, on each occasion in which it comes to be repeated, the function of perhaps several whole lines of words: viz: the collection of words necessary for translating the import of them respectively into words in general use.

By these adbridged forms of expression, discourses are held with ease, such as otherwise if held at all, could not be held without extreme difficulty. Grammarians understand, all who have occasion to write or speak occasionally feel - the difficulty and embarrassment that attends the use of a compound nominative or accusative, still more that of a compound genitive case: a word composed of a whole line of words, of which to convey the import clearly the last ought to have the sign of the genitive case, - the 's - annext to it: which sign on account of the awkwardness of the location is now commonly left out, the awkwardness in some measure masked, but at the expence of clearness. In jurisprudence this difficulty would be continually recurring and with indefinitely increased force, were it not for the use of these necessary abbreviations - this intellectual short-hand.

The algebraist when he finds himself oppressed by the endless symbolical line of letters by which his composite quantity stands expressed, substitutes a single letter to the whole series, and thus finds himself at his ease. What would be his embarrassment, if precluded from the use of so necessary a resource?
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