Lawyers love a good acronym. Like any profession with
jargon, it just starts washing through you. Over the last three years one of my
favorite semantic delights has been finding out that other legalese users make
up the same sorts of short hand for terms of art as I do. When I’m typing notes
for 5 hours straight (backup career as stenographer) I automatically
shorten Probable Cause to PCause Supreme Court of the United States to SCOTUS, etc.
And then I realized loads of other ppl are shortening the same things in the same ways.
As fascinating as that may be for Linguist Me, or
Neurologist Me, or Sociologist Me, what it really is best for is Comedian Me.
I was minding my own business, reading a legal blog, trying to figure out why so many acts that get passed have 180 day
limitations. Seriously, it's like a nervous tick. Why 180 days? It's also the federally mandated number of days in a school year. I want to know where this comes from, and why. It's so arbitrary seeming. Is it week days? working days? Is that how many days Ben Franklin could hold onto a bender? I didn't learn, last night, the answer to this quandry.
Instead, what I noticed
– how great! – is that everyone else shortens Statute of Limitations to SOL in their
notes and heads -- just like me.
A Statute of Limitations is the time limit put on the
ability for plaintiffs (complainers) to make claims for a particular cause of
action (the thing they’re complaining about). I was reading about the Lily
Ledbetter Act, which extends the length of time a person may complain about
inequal pay for equal work. Like all the nervous tick acts, it had been 180
days, then a SCOTUS case shortened that time period, and then this 2009 Act held the limit back to 180 days. IE. whoever finds out they've been short shrifted pay for arbitrary reasons has 180 days to file their complaint for the last received inequal
paycheck.
That is, there is a 180 day Statute of Limitations (SOL) on
making your complaint about this particular injustice.
Reasoning for this is to a) make sure the offending party
doesn’t live unjustly in fear their whole lives for possibly a small slight,
and b) incentivize complainers to be prompt – the US Courts are full of bitchin and if you got the gall stones, you better have the gumption to carry
that full term.
Which reasoning, luckily, also means there’s a pleasant scale
for how long SOLs are in accordance to the injustice committed. EG. Inequal pay
has this particularly short one, tax evasion has 6 years to be found out, and terrorism
has no SOL.
Meaning, the worse a thing you do to another human being,
the more Shit Outta Luck you are in being safe from the law.
