Legal News

The Linguistic Talents of Judge Bruce Selya

By Dan Slater

It’s not often that a former judicial clerk breaks silence to dish on his old boss. After all, Ed Lazarus, a former Harry Blackmun clerk, caught some flack when he published his Supreme Court tell-all. We don’t have anything that salacious for you today. But we’re practically crapulous with joy to see that, in this week’s National Law Journal, Frederick Brodie has penned a rodomontade asseverating the talents of First Circuit Judge Bruce Selya, Brodie’s former boss. Brodie, now a litigation partner at Pillsbury Winthrop, has compiled a salmagundi of Selya’s legendary vocabulary words, most of which are, to say the least, ultracrepidarian to our pedestrian knowledge.

In a “Guide to Selyaisms,” Brodie writes that Judge Selya, who has authored more than 1,250 federal opinions, is well-known for working into his opinions selections from his “arcane vocabulary, which has provoked frequent head scratching by counsel.”

Law Blog readers, here are some of Selya’s best head-scratchers, courtesy of Brodie. See if you can work one into a brief, a memo, an email, or even better, a client conversation.

• Defenestration. Don’t walk past an open window if Selya is inside writing an opinion: He is liable to defenestrate anything and everything. Items thrown out the window in Selya opinions include speedy trial claims, punitive damages awards, arbitral awards, claims of co-fiduciary liability and laws that unduly favor in-state interests. The latter, Selya has noted, “routinely will be defenestrated under the dormant commerce clause.”
• Philotheoparoptesism. Philotheoparoptesism refers to the practice of disposing of heretics by burning them or boiling them in oil. Another judge challenged Selya to include this word in a decision, which resulted in its sole reported usage (in secular courts, at least). For the record, Selya declined to consign a misguided prosecutor “to the juridical equivalent of philotheoparoptesism.”
• Repastinate. To repastinate means to plow the same ground a second time. When considering appeals that raise previously decided issues, Selya and his colleagues have come down firmly and repeatedly on the side of “no repastination.”
• Sockdolager. A sockdolager is a final, decisive blow. Selya’s published opinions deliver almost 60 sockdolagers, which is more “sock” than one finds in the decisions of the rest of the federal judiciary.
• Thaumaturgical. The 1st Circuit takes a dim view of magical arguments, or what in one opinion Selya called “thaumaturgical feat[s] of rhetorical prestidigitation.”

Law Blog readers, what do you think? Does Selya’s love of five-dollar words make for fun reading? Or just headaches?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 04, 2008 (boomark / email).