Law & Linguistics

Twenty years after its birth, the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association celebrated its legacy at its annual convention in Seattle the weekend before Thanksgiving. Attending the convention was an awe-inspiring and encouraging experience.

The convention was a well-organized and smoothly executed event. The event schedules were full of remarkable CLEs, plenary sessions, and social events for both attorneys and students. Choosing which event and CLEs to attend can be difficult because they were all interesting and fun. Even when the events are not at conflicting times, thought attending all events though tempting would be too exhausting. For eager students who were full of energy, playing on the Xbox at a gaming event sponsored by Microsoft until midnight and waking up early the next morning to volunteer at the registration desk at 7:45 am was well within their capacity.

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Law American, Asian, Association, bar, CLE, Law, lawyers, National, Pacific, Seattle, Student, Xbox

The Summum Pyramid, located in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Being a party to a lawsuit that will be decided by the United States Supreme Court is probably the best way an unknown religion can market itself. Yesterday, not many people knew about Summum, a religion created in 1975. But after tomorrow, more and more people will google “Summum” because tomorrow the religion will come before the Supreme Court to argue its case against Please Grove City.

Summum wants to achieve the same status that Christianity has. It petitioned to the city of Please Grove to allow it to erect a monument commemorating its Seven Aphorisms in the same park where a Ten Commandments monolith was located. The city responded, “Thanks, but No Thanks.” Actually, the city was more diplomatic than that. It rejected Summum’s petition because it was not “directly relate[d] to the history of Pleasant Grove” or “donated by groups with long-standing ties to the Pleasant Grove community.” Summum sued the city for abridging its free speech rights.

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Law city, cult, lawsuit, Pleasant Grove, religion, Seven Aphorism, speech, Summum, Supreme Court

SpeechGuard Homeland Security

My nephew loves the Pendragon Adventure series by DJ MacHale, and being a good aunt, I read the books with him so we could discuss them with each other. Even though I think Bobby Pendragon is by far inferior to Harry Potter, I do admire Bobby’s ability to understand other people’s speech as if it were spoken in his own language, English, and to speak English in a way that other people understand it as if he were speaking their language. (I also admire Jesus’ disciples’ ability “to speak in different tongues” as well, but I guess some people including me find it easier to “believe” fictional characters than real ones.)

Even though normal humans do not have the ability of Bobby or the disciples to communicate with people who do not speak our language, ECTACO had offered us a device that would allow some of us to compensate for our plebeian limitation. This device is called SpeechGuard. It is “[t]he world’s first handheld speech-to-speech multilingual translator.” SpeechGuard, however, is not meant for the general public, but it is specifically designed for professions in these four areas: (1) Law Enforcement; (2) Medical, Fire, and Rescue; (3) Military; and (4) Transportation Security.

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Law, Linguistics different tongues, enforcement agency, interpreter, language, medical, police, rescue, SpeechGuard, translator

Cindy from Central NC and Her Family

This is not another pro-life or pro-choice argument. The purpose of this entry is to warn a woman who is unable to carry her own baby or a gay couple against obtaining a gestational mother for their child. The reason the word “abortion” is part of the title is that the rate abortion greatly diminishes the availability of children for adoption. In turn, this may influence a person’s decision to seek the service of a gestational mother.

Since the mid 1970s, children relinquished for adoption have declined from nearly 9 percent to under 1 percent of births to never-married women. This decline could result from the legalization of abortion, the social acceptance of single mother, or the financial ability of single mothers to support their children. Regardless of the cause, the availability of children for adoption in American has become “virtually nonexistent.”

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Law abortion, adoption, children, family law, gay, litigation, parents, surrogacy

“Because the country needs to save more, taxing savings makes no sense.”

Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist and visiting scholar at the Stern School of Business at NYU, wrote an article in the NY Times in favor of a consumption tax. Mr. Frank suggested that consumption equals income minus savings. In other words, a consumption tax is an income tax that let you deduct savings from your taxable income.

This is a great way to encourage consumers to save. The more money consumers keep in their bank account, the less taxable income there is. So naturally, people would save money to avoid paying higher taxes.

However, certain consumptions are investments. For instance, investors purchase stocks and real estate. Under the consumption tax, these purchases would surely be taxed. But it makes no sense to tax investments either because investments are the force of our economic growth. Would the addition of tax on the investment equates to adding more risk to the investment and therefore deter people from making the investment?

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/business/09frank.html

Tax consumption, income, Tax

When I graduated from high school, a family friend, who did not have much foresight at the time, gave me a thick print dictionary so I could use for college. That dictionary is so thick that I have never removed from the shelf on which I first placed it. Besides, why reach for a heavy dictionary when dictionary.com and m-w.com are at my finger tips?

With the availability of free online dictionaries, the decrease in sales of print dictionary is not surprising. Like any other publication companies, dictionary companies found ways to reach the users online. However, have these companies forgotten about the Canadians?

Oxford University Press laid-off the Canadian’s entire staff (which is only four) because of low demand for print Canadian dictionaries. At the same time, most online dictionaries are written for American English or British English. I googled “Canadian Dictionary” and came up with definitions of “Canadian” rather than a Canadian dictionary. One must wonder whether the Canadians will be able to preserve their non-British, non-American English nuances.

Source: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/532174

Linguistics canadian, dictionaries, dictionary, english, extinction, language