Word: serbonian
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Both are referring, with unconcealed dread and awe, to the lawyer's equivalent of the Serbonian bog in Milton's Paradise Lost, "where armies whole have sunk." Most lawyers call it simply the "Big Case": the massive, sprawling suit that involves huge stakes, provides employment for legions of attorneys and drones on for years. The quintessential Big Case is U.S. vs. International Business Machines Corp., an antitrust suit by the Government charging the company with monopolizing the computer industry. Before the parties went to trial, they deluged each other with 30 million pages of documents. The actual trial...
...TIME reported the title of my address at the American Bar Association Convention in New York as "Sex and the Single Premium" and characterized it as a "get-'em-in-the-tent" title [Aug. 21]. Actually, the full title of my scholarly lecture was "Up from the Serbonian Bog, or Sex and the Single Premium," appealing only to those interested in the intricacies of Insurance...
...reverted to that characteristic of Republicans of the late nineteenth century. Not the eighteenth century, as the ignorant said: that was the age of the Adamses, of Jefferson and Madison, of Franklin and Hamilton. No, the late nineteenth century: the era when political thought was mired in the Serbonian bog of manifest destiny, untrammelled acquisitiveness and the bloody shirt...
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