A Dead Language Helps Keep Law Alive

When I was in high school, I studied Latin for four years, never realizing that it would be a help to me when I later studied law. If you follow the Ohio Supreme Court on our website, you may occasionally encounter phrases that come from this “dead language.” Here are just a few examples:

• amicus curiae = “friend of the court,” a person or entity who is not party to a court case ut who petitions the court or is requested by the court to file a brief because of a special interest in the subject of the case.
• et al. = “and others,” an abbreviation usually used after the first  name, “Smith et al. v. Jones, et al.” used when there are many parties on one side of the case or another. 
• ex post facto = “after the fact,” referring  to a law that makes punishable an act that was not illegal at the time it was committed.
• habeas corpus = “you have the body,” a petition by a prisoner challenging an illegal commitment and seeking a writ that will order release from custody. 
• nolle prosequi = “unwilling to proceed,” a decision by a prosecutor to dismiss a criminal case.
• per curiam = ”through the court,” an opinion of the court not signed by a particular justice as an author.
• pro se = “for oneself,” meaning a person is acting on his or her own behalf without a lawyer.
• res judicata = “a matter judged,” an issue that already has been settled by judicial decision.
• stare decisis = “to stand by that which is decided,” principle that precedent is to be followed in later cases.

Even though some would abolish all Latin in court documents, calling for “plain English,” certain phrases are well-established in the American legal system and will continue to be used within the profession by lawyers and judges as a kind of “shorthand” to describe legal concepts and principles. Latin still lives.

Supreme Court Lecture Featured Book About Priest’s Murder in 1921

During the Supreme Court of Ohio’s third Forum on the Law lecture on April 27, an Ohio State University law professor told of how her family’s history and the U.S. history of laws banning interracial marriage led her to write a remarkable book about a 1921 revenge killing of a priest and the resulting trial in Birmingham, Ala.

Sharon Davies, the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Distinguished Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, discussed her book “Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America” before a crowd of 200 people in the Supreme Court courtroom.

Davies explained that she came to write the book after becoming interested in U.S. laws banning interracial marriage and procreation in part because of her own personal story of being the daughter of parents who were forced to travel to New York to be married because their union was still illegal in South Carolina.

“It was not until I was 7 years old that these laws were ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court,” she said. “We were considered the evidence of a crime.”

In the book, Davies recounts how Methodist minister Edwin Stephenson murdered Fr. James Coyle on the front porch of the Catholic rectory in August 1921, shortly after learning Coyle performed the marriage ceremony between Stephenson’s 18-year-old daughter and a Puerto Rican.

Here's the video from the event.