SOL

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.