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cida y contorcida, o contorsionada (como algunos dicen) con vueltas y revueltas laberínticas donde el hombre más perspicaz y atento concluye por sentirse extraviado, anulado e impotente. Tan malditísima lengua es no pocas veces producto de deficiencia intelectual y mala educación académica de quienes la utilizan; pero, no con rara frecuencia, obedece a encubierto designio de afán lucrativo; cual es el de enredar y prolongar indefinidamente las pequeñas diferencias de orden legal, pleitos y litigios, que a cada paso surgen entre los hombres, y de esta suerte sacar más sustancioso jugo y todo el rendimiento posible a costa de los infelices litigantes y pleiteantes. Gran verdad encierra aquella maldición gitana: pleitos tengas y los ganes. El abogado Richard Hyland en su monografía titulada: "A Defense of Legal Writing,"32 además de examinar la abundante bibliografía sobre el tema, achaca a diversas causas la pobreza de la expresión escrita. Una de ellas es el abandono de las humanidades y las repercusiones de ello en el pensar conceptuoso. The difficulty lawyers face in learning to write legal argument is that they have little access to training in conceptual thought, either outside the law or within it. At one time, conceptual thinking was learned indirectly, by the reading of good books, but much less of that is done today. By far the most powerful method was instruction in the classics. Through the careful fitting of word-toword and phrase to phrase in translation, the study of Latin and Greek traditionally provided an insight into the intimate relation between form and sense, language and argument. Even more importantly, the classics offered intimacy with a complex structure of rules. In order to parse a Greek verb, the modern reader must analyze its half-dozen constituent elements and place it in one of the most intricate structures of rules and exceptions ever developed. Today, in the wake of the jet airplane, foreign language training employs, almost exclusively, repetition and patterned variation, a technique that yields no insight into the structure either of the foreign language or of one's own. The schools have abandoned humanism and instead stumble to keep pace with technological development. As a result, a reading knowledge of classical Greek is probably as rare in contemporary America as it was in pre32
Richard Hyland, ―A defense of legal Writing‖, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 134, Number 3, March 1986, p. 599, la cita precisa es a las paginas 621-622.