Posted by Eugene Volokh:
e e cummings Goes to Court:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_14-2009_06_20.shtml#1245257795
[1]Craigslist's Motion to Dismiss in [2]Gibson v. Craigslist, Inc.
struck me as quite good. But I noticed a particular usage choice that
I thought might have been unwise, and I wanted to think what others
thought of it.
Craigslist appears to consistently identify itself as craiglist,
uncapitalized, and the motion does the same, with paragraphs such as:
craigslist has great sympathy for the situation and injuries of the
plaintiff alleged by the Complaint. craigslist condemns gun
violence and the illegal purchase and sale of firearms. Users who
post advertisements on the craigslist website are required to
accept terms of use that expressly prohibit advertisements for the
sale of illegal goods and for the sale of weapons, including
firearms.
But that strikes me as quite jarring to the reader. Having a business
name be uncapitalized in the middle of the sentence ("on the
craigslist website") is odd enough, but having the first word of a
sentence uncapitalized ("craigslist has great sympathy," "craigslist
condemns") is even more unusual and therefore likely to be distracting
and annoying.
Of course, I'm sure a judge or a law clerk won't deliberately rule
against Craigslist for unusual capitalization. But my sense is that
this sort of departure from otherwise rigid linguistic norms is likely
to put some readers in a slightly worse mood, and make them slightly
less receptive to the substantive argument (if only because they're
distracted from it by the capitalization choice).
Nor can one say that somehow this capitalization choice is required in
English to accurately reproduce the company's name (which is why, for
instance, we'd use 3M to refer to 3M even though names that start with
numbers are highly unusual in English). Even if that might justify
leaving "craigslist" uncapitalized in the middle of a sentence (which
I doubt), it provides no explanation for having "craigslist" be
uncapitalized as the first word of a sentence. After all, normal
English words that are generally uncapitalized are capitalized at the
start of a sentence; why should "craigslist" be any different?
My sense is that when in court, you should do as the judges do. Law is
generally a methodologically and procedurally conservative field, and
judges are more likely to be annoyed than pleased by flashes of
nonconformity, whether they consist of the lawyer's personal grooming
choices (say, mohawks) or of the company's choice to depart from
English usage conventions, especially ones as consistent as
capitalization at the start of sentences. And would craigslist, or
craig, or any of the rest of the craigslist crew, really be so
offended if the lawyer wrote Craigslist instead?
But perhaps I'm wrong, and perhaps no judge or clerk would be even
slightly and subconsciously soured on the motion by this sort of usage
choice. So I'd like to know what you folks think about it.
References
1.
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2008cv07735/331721/7/
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_14-2009_06_20.shtml#1245256918
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