Got a call from a client who's struggling to fill out the client worksheets listing assets and claims, etc. in preparation for a personal bankruptcy. "What does this question mean -- list all real property? I think all my property is real, isn't it?"
That used to drive me crazy too, but like a lot of things in law I just got used to it and I'd even forgotten how silly it is to distinguish between "real" property and "personal" property. As though those descriptive adjectives mean ANYTHING whatsoever to lay people. Both the adjective "real" and the adjective "personal" have street meanings so far removed from their legal meanings that it is unnecessarily obfuscatory to continue to use them. But we march along throwing around those terms as though they make perfect sense.
"Real property is your house or any land you own. Personal property is your stuff, anything that you could take with you if you moved," I explained, kicking myself for having not thought about telling her that before I sent her home with the forms. "There's no reason that you should have known it -- just dumb legal terms." Nothing about personal property is any less "real" than real property. And nothing about real estate is any less "personal" than personal property.
It's just another way in which we lawyers make the regular people who want to use our services feel dumb when there's no reason they should.
It's the "shaman syndrome." If we don't cloak what we're doing with magic language, then ordinary people will figure out that we lawyers aren't really magic. Pretty soon they'll start writing their own deeds with words like, "My old house at 123 Maple Street now belongs to you." Then what'll we do? Join the clergy?
Posted by: Beldar | February 18, 2004 at 04:43 PM