‘INDICT A HAM SANDWICH’ AND OTHER LEGAL LINGO
If you tend to sprinkle legal lingo through your casual conversations, there’s a fun new book called Lawtalk that will rescue you when someone asks, “Where did that come from?” Authors include Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro and University of Wisconsin’s Marc Galanter. Who was the smarty-pants model for the phrase “Philadelphia lawyer”? Colonial attorney Andrew Hamilton, who successfully defended publisher John Peter Zenger in 1735, the book reveals. “The law is a ass” was first uttered by Mr. Bumble in Dickens’ Oliver Twist. And the damning observation that prosecutors are so powerful that they could “indict a ham sandwich”? That was the creation of onetime New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler, who later was on the receiving end of federal indictments for extortion. The book notes that Wachtler, who is Jewish, later regretted that he did not use “corned beef sandwich” instead. — Tony Mauro
