ABSTRACT
When the layman speaks derisively of lawyers' language he is usually met with a patroriizing smile and is told that the practice of the law necessitates a special technique of speech which may seem to the uninitiate to be indirect but which lawyers have discovered to be vitally necessary to the effective handling of legal concepts. Perhaps both the lay criticism and the professional answer are, after their respective fashions, correct. Let us note one or two stock instances of the sort of judicial utterance that provokes public scorn:
In 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Act making illegal "every contract or combination . . . in restraint of trade or commerce." In a series of cases, heard during the years 1896 to 1904, the United States Supreme Court was urged to construe tins statute as prohibiting merely those contracts which "unreasonably" restrained trade. But the Court repeatedly and steadfastly refused to apply this socalled "rule of reason." Congress, it held, had made unlawful every contract in restraint of trade and not merely those which created an unreasonable restraint. "The plain and ordinary meaning of such language," said the Supreme Court, "is not limited to that kind of restraint of trade, but all contracts are included in such language and no exception or limitation can be added without placing in the Act that which has been omitted by Congress."
