I have a bone to pick with the bar for admitting lawyers who just don’t know English grammar. As a practitioner and adjunct professor at a law school, I see fewer and fewer attorneys capable of writing English sentences of any complexity, and the prospect of improvement is dim. I suspect that very few of our lawyers and law students today would pass an old junior high school grammar exam. This is frightening and unacceptable. It can also be easily remedied.
There are many reasons for this decline in literacy in our profession. One is the increased diversity of our professionals. There is no such creature as a typical lawyer, anymore. Once dominated by white males who had studied the social disciplines, the field is now populated by attorneys from every demographic category. Where lawyers were once almost all born or educated in America, today we come from everywhere. Many are from homes where foreign languages or local dialects were spoken.
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