I Just Can’t Face It

In the first year of law school, students pick up many bad writing habits. Perhaps the chief of these is to use previously unfamiliar phrases that have a (specious) lawyerly appearance.

An example is at first blush, which is not commonly used outside the law; and because it’s used so much within it, it ought to be avoided as an over-used cliché. You could just write at first, without the blushing (‘This case seems, at first, to be uncomplicated …’)

On its face has a venerable legal pedigree (at least as far back as 1632, according to the OED), and referred originally to the words as they appeared on the face of a document – but, like the blushing business, it’s a worn-out expression that could happily be dropped.

If the previous two constructions are merely old and tired, the use of facially for on its face is recent, lazy and deplorable. I cross it out in student work-product, and wish I could do the same with the 408,000 occurrences in Canadian blog posts (according to Slaw’s Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine).

Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

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