If you’ve been asked to find foreign materials in a jurisdiction you know little or nothing about, GlobaLex (https://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/index.html) provides a number of country-specific resources covering Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Resources include an overview of the country’s legal system, links to legislation and court materials (as available), and are updated regularly.

Among the foreign materials GlobaLex includes a guide to finding U.S. federal materials which provides a very helpful overview to what is freely available for the United States.

— Susannah Tredwell…

They mean the same thing: consisting of three parts or things, three in number, three times an amount.

A treble is also a singer with a soprano voice, often a choirboy, or a musical instrument in a high key.

In the number-related sense, treble and triple can both can be verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs.

Readers of Private Eye may recall the frequent cry of ‘Trebles all round!’ in the ‘Corporation Street’ series (a satire on the BBC), meaning triple measures of spirits.

Treble seems to be more common in Britain – but has a strange persistence in North …

From Saskatchewan, to ask whether it’s court house or courthouse.

Either, really. Or, better, court-house.

The OED uses a hyphen, but its examples of usage (mostly from the US) give all three forms.

The single-word, no-hyphen version is often seen (British Columbia has its Courthouse Libraries), but does suggest an unnatural pronunciation (coor-THOWZE).

Perhaps the best way to go is to talk about the Victoria Avenue Court House in Regina, but to say that the parties settled on the court-house steps.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

Long, long ago, when the interweb was new and I was an articling student, I had to write a conference paper for a partner — one of those pieces that ended up with his name as author and mine in a footnote.

I was doing research in the firm’s library and among my sources were conference papers by other lawyers. At one point, I said to myself, ‘Oh, wait — I’ve read this one before, haven’t I?’ When I checked the pile of binders on the table, I realised I had read the paper before — but it was ostensibly …

Hansard is a very useful tool when trying to determine the intent of an act. Researchers often look at a specific section of an act and what it was intended to achieve. 

However, section numbers can change from when the bill receives First Reading to when it receives Royal Assent, so it is good to confirm what the number was for the section of interest when it was in bill form. This is especially true when reading Hansard for a very long bill. In order to do that, researchers will require a copy of how the bill read for that …

In a recent tweet, John King of CNN cautioned his followers not to ‘misunderestimate the relentless base and focus’ of Trump supporters in their drive towards November.

That word (italicised here for emphasis), attracts red underlining on the screen, signalling an issue, and attracted a raised eyebrow from me.

The mis- prefix is redundant, because you’ve already got under- working to qualify or compromise estimate.

Misunderestimate isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary — but it is in the Wikipedia entry on ‘Bushisms’.

That is, the various ‘unconventional statements, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, and semantic or linguistic …

Small things to watch for and avoid.

Any questions, please contact X
We’ve all seen this, and we all know what it is intended to mean.

Interpreted literally, it means the questions themselves are being directed to contact X.

It should be either If you have any questions, please … or Any questions? Please …

Convicted of eight counts
Properly, on eight counts.

Honour role
Seen in more than one student application letter or CV.

Yikes. It’s honour roll.

Unnecessary question marks
Seen recently in e-mails from partners: Let me know if this makes sense? Please let me …

My sister sent me a fun article about these.

They are sentences that you think are going in one direction but which suddenly seem to go off on a weird tangent that doesn’t quite make sense.

When you read them again, you realise they do make sense but just not in the way you expected.

By way of example: The old man the boat.

Your brain probably tells you at first, ‘Oh, this is about an old man who …’ but then the path diverges and you have to figure out that man is not a noun but an unexpected (and perhaps …

This tip is based on questions posed on the CALL listserv; thanks to John Sadler and Linda Keddy.

According to “How to look for records of … Privy Council since 1386”, a finding aid produced by the United Kingdom National Archives, royal proclamations “are formal announcements made by the King or Queen and vary greatly in nature, from declarations of war or states of emergency, to the summoning or dissolution of Parliament. … [They] were usually issued with the agreement of the Privy Council and can therefore be found in Privy Council papers.”

Unfortunately no site has a …

How would you punctuate the following?

Former Minneapolis Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin and two colleagues J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane have been charged with multiple offences in connection with the death of George Floyd.

No points for saying there should be a comma after Minneapolis; that’s too obvious.

Demerit points for suggesting there should be commas on either side of Derek Chauvin; there are multiple (former) Minneapolis cops, so the commas would be wrong, because they’d suggest Chauvin is the only one in that category.

Points for a comma after colleagues and one after Lane; you …