Word: layman
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...intimidating?a combination guaranteed to breed bitter resentment. "Lawyers have become secular priests," says Fred Button, a White House aide in the Kennedy Administration and now a successful Washington, D.C., attorney. They are, agrees Berkeley Law Dean Sanford Kadish, masters of "a mysterious art form to which the layman is not privy, with mumbo jumbo going on." The heart of the art, of course, is the impenetrable language that lawyers use, sometimes at great length (a direct outgrowth of the English practice of paying lawyers by the word for their briefs, which were, as a result, rarely brief...
Still, the mumbo jumbo can intimidate and irritate the layman. Further resentment stems from the ability of excellent lawyers to muddle and obfuscate. Says Button: "Lawyers are paid to complicate, to keep a dispute alive, to make everything technical." The Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling, for example, once delayed for twelve years a Food and Brug Administration ruling on the labeling of peanut butter jars. Said one Covington lawyer: "Certainly, there's something suspicious about a 24,000-page hearing transcript and close to 75,000 pages of documents on a case involving peanut butter." As Humorist Art Buchwald...
...disaster. The board put Carr on leave until May 1979, when his term officially expires. This week Carr becomes a research fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, and in the next academic year a visiting lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. His interim replacement: Egyptian Coptic Layman Sarwat G. Shehata, 39, a quiet management expert, who is already at work mending the many fences that Carr shattered...
...purpose is to provide accurate, readable and useful information for the layman," Dr. Stephen E. Goldfinger, associate dean of Continuing Education at the Medical School, said yesterday...
...talking about the lectures the Med School on "Cytoplasm and Enzymes Within Revolutionary Cells" and the like; lecturers of this ilk tend to obscure their political leanings as well as they do their general train of thought. What I'm talking about is your standard, intended-for-the-layman, issue-oriented lecture, by someone who can draw crowds...