February 22, 2005

Pachydermatous

I think one of the main reasons I got a good verbal score on my SATs is that I have to look up a word even if I'm only kinda unsure about its meaning. Today, I'm staying home from school because I have the worst headache in recorded history, but I'm still trying to read Criminal Procedure. We're finally getting to consensual searches and I came across a word that struck me as the oddest adjective I've ever seen and convinced me that the man who wrote the passage has to be one of the most fustian, magniloquent legal scholars ever.

"In other words, to the extent that Mendenhall-Royer [a line of cases] in actuality withholds the "seizures" characterization from police-citizen encounters accompanied by only the inherent pressures of such a confrontation, it is doubtless grounded in certain policy considerations rather than a genuine commitment to the notion that the hypothetical "reasonable person" is so pachydermatous as not to be intimidated by police inquiries concerning criminal conduct."

Perhaps because of the sharp pain in my head, this left me thinking "How the hell are such detainees like elephants?" At first I thought he was suggesting that most people never forget their rights and wouldn't be afraid, but it turns out he just meant "thick-skinned." I think he did that just to torture sick law students who dared to read his article.

elephant man.jpg

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Comments

I suspect that the professor's choice of that word led to a great deal of wrangling between him and the law review editors working on his piece. i doubt that most journals would have let that in.

Posted by: holohan at February 23, 2005 01:29 PM
Cementhorizon