CREATORS: Lawyer Babble: The Fight to Strike Legalese

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 16, 2025

What is legalese? The New Oxford Dictionary defines it as "the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand."

Why would a professional write a document that is intentionally difficult to understand? A lawyer, who else, might argue that legalese provides precision and creates formality. Technical language is intended to define rights and obligations without room for misinterpretation.

Legalese has long been condemned from every quarter, including the U.S Supreme Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was once asked what characterized good legal writing. He declared, "(b)eyond pure literacy, avoid legalese." He suggested, "A good test is, if you used the word at a cocktail party, would people look at you funny?"

However, Scalia was the same guy who wrote in his dissent of the decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act that the majority opinion was "legalistic argle-bargle." Not sure that argle-bargle would pass the cocktail party test. Argle-bargle means "imbroglio," excuse me it means "fight."

Legalese has been an increasing object of derision. During World War II, Maury Maverick, a U.S. Congressman from Texas and chairman of the U.S. Smaller War Plants Corporation, wrote a memo banning "gobbledygook language." Maverick's word has been accepted into the American lexicon. Merriam-Webster defines gobbledygook as "speech or writing that is complicated and difficult to understand."

To put legalese into context, here is what the blog "Words to Deeds" believes the children's rhyme Jack and Jill would sound like if written by lawyers: "The party of the second part hereinafter known as Jill ... Ascended or caused to be ascended an elevation of undetermined height and degree of slope, hereinafter referred to as 'hill.'"

What is the big deal about legalese? Nobody reads their mortgage or their credit card agreements. If an individual has a contract to read or understand, they bring it to a lawyer. Is legalese about precision or job security for lawyers?

The greater concern is that obtuse language extends beyond contracts and agreements, right to the heart of liberty and freedom. A defendant charged with a crime is entitled to a lawyer - a competent one. The accused is also entitled to a jury of his or her peers and here is where it gets tricky.

Before a jury retires to deliberate the fate of the accused, the judge provides those jurors with instructions to assist in their decision-making. Unfortunately, those instructions are legalistic and often difficult to understand.

A report published in The Trial Expert, a publication of the American Society of Trial Consultants, found, "the reading levels of instructions are frequently at or above the twelfth grade, a result that is inconsistent with the average reading level of the American adult."

The report continued, "Considering that less than fifty percent of adults possess the basic skills and knowledge necessary to read and comprehend moderately difficult reading passages, it's not likely they are able to synthesize the complex language present in jury instructions."

That is a mouthful, but simply put, one in two jurors is confused by the language used to help them decide the fate of a fellow citizen.

Megan McAlpin, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, told Jack Hamann of The Writer, "I think there's a desire to sound smart. But you sound smarter if you can take something complex and make it clear to anybody.' Albert Einstein, a pretty smart guy, once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Trump is about to pay himself, with taxpayer dollars, $230 million over FBI raid

Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him — one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, reported The Watch. He’s going to pay himself $230 million.

So Trump — who didn’t spend a minute behind bars — about to swindle about 50 percent more than the total amount of money paid to the 97 innocent people who were incarcerated for more than 1,200 years in Texas. Or about 12 percent more than the total paid last year to 957 victims of police brutality in New York City.

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Trump Administration white washes history of abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement

Recently at the Philadelphia auditorium a group of invited guest were present for the  unveiling of coins designed to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. They provided a traditional, even simple, take on the American journey, with Pilgrims and founding fathers and a stovepipe hat tip to the Gettysburg Address.

Left unmentioned amid the event’s fife-and-drum pageantry was that these coins also represented a rejection of a different set of designs — meant to commemorate certain other inspiring chapters of the nation’s history, including abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, reported The New York Times.

An event largely unnoticed by anyone other than coin enthusiasts, then, wound up reflecting the national struggle over how the American story is told, as the Trump administration seeks to frame any focus on the knottier moments in the nation’s arc as “wokeness.”

The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is authorized by law to make final decisions about coin designs, including these 250th anniversary coins — a dime, a half-dollar and five quarters — which are both collectible and legal tender. But his choices ignored the more diverse recommendations for the quarters by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, a bipartisan group mandated by Congress to review the U.S. Mint’s proposed designs for American coins.

To commemorate the abolition of slavery, the committee had recommended an image of Frederick Douglass on the obverse and shackled and unshackled hands on the reverse. To honor women’s suffrage, a World War I-era protester carrying a “Votes for Women” flag. And to evoke the civil rights movement, a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, books in hand, helping to desegregate the New Orleans school system in 1960.

Mr. Bessent opted instead for the more general, and much whiter. For the Mayflower Compact, a Pilgrim couple staring into the distance. For the Revolutionary War, a profile of Washington. For the Declaration of Independence, a profile of Thomas Jefferson. For the Constitution, a profile of James Madison. And for the Gettysburg Address, a profile of Lincoln on the obverse, and on the reverse, a pair of interlocking hands. No shackles.

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Release White House legal memos supporting 'drug' boat strikes

Perhaps not surprisingly, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and senior military leaders have faced the worst of the political uproar from the Trump administration’s boat strikes off the coasts of Central and South America. The campaign has produced at least 87 deaths and one of the few episodes of bipartisan pushback in Trump’s second term following the revelation that the U.S. military conducted a “double tap” strike on an alleged drug boat that intentionally killed two survivors of an earlier strike.

But very serious questions about the legality of the effort in its entirety — even setting aside the double tap strike — should be directed at the Trump administration’s top lawyers, reported Politico. In particular, there is a dubious, but still classified, memo that was reportedly produced over the summer by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that signs off on the campaign and asserts that everyone in the chain of command is entitled to criminal immunity because the United States is said to be engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels. (A DOJ spokesperson said, “These operations were ordered consistent with the law of armed conflict.”)

You can add this episode to the list of issues that have produced a series of sharp and unprecedented divisions among even conservative lawyers, scholars and judges as they grapple with a president who, in the last 11 months alone, has pushed the boundaries of executive power further than any president in our lifetimes. The rifts have emerged on a variety of fronts, with some on the right opposed to Trump’s judicial nominations, his “emergency” tariffs, his deployment of the National Guard and his decision to ignore Congress’ TikTok ban.

The OLC’s memo on the boat strikes appears to reflect a particularly aggressive interpretation of the laws of war that goes further — and relies on more questionable analysis — than some of the most highly controversial legal positions taken by administrations over the last half century.

One obvious point of comparison is the set of memos that President George W. Bush’s OLC produced concerning the treatment of military detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al Qaeda — otherwise known to many as the “torture memos” because they authorized extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation. But for a variety of reasons, and regardless of where you might have come down in that case, the OLC’s conclusion on Trump’s boat strikes appears less defensible and even more worthy of serious public scrutiny.

“I don’t think there’s an armed attack” against the U.S. by the drug cartels, John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, told me.

Yoo’s skepticism is especially notable. That’s because he was famously one of the drafters of those post-9/11 memos while working at the OLC in the Bush administration and, despite considerable criticism of his analysis, has never changed his position. Even for him, the Trump administration’s arguments are hard to accept.

“They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system,” Yoo said, drawing a distinction between al Qaeda and drug traffickers who may be based in Venezuela. “They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”

If that is correct, then the boat strikes constitute murder under federal law and are also illegal under international law. Trump may be immune from criminal prosecution in the U.S. thanks to the Supreme Court, but everyone else involved, in theory at least, faces the risk of federal prosecution in a future administration unless Trump at some point grants some or all of them a pardon.

For all of the Trump administration’s bravado, getting legal signoff for the boat strikes may not have been as simple as it now appears. Multiple media outlets have reported that proponents of the strikes were forced to push aside or ignore government lawyers who concluded that the military campaign is unlawful or otherwise questioned its legality.

One lawyer who was unlikely to question the administration’s legal analysis and conclusions: T. Elliot Gaiser, the 36-year-old currently running OLC, whose loyalty to Trump appears to be one of his principal qualifications.

According to testimony provided to the Jan. 6 select committee, Gaiser worked on the effort by Trump to overturn the 2020 election. Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany testified, among other things, that Gaiser helped develop some of the arguments that Trump made to support his false claim that he won the state of Pennsylvania in 2020. Gaiser also told McEnany at one point that Vice President Mike Pence had the legal authority to refuse to recognize electors from certain states during the Jan. 6 certification — a claim that, fortunately for the country, Pence and his advisers adamantly rejected.

Before becoming the head of OLC, Gaiser had never worked as a lawyer in the Justice Department or anywhere else in the federal government. Most recently, he had been Ohio’s solicitor general, and he previously clerked for some of the staunchest conservative judges in the country: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Judge Neomi Rao of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Judge Edith H. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. As Yoo put it to me, that may provide the “kind of background that you would hire” at OLC, but it is not the sort of resume that should put you in charge of the entire office. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Gaiser “completely unqualified” for his role before he was ultimately confirmed on a party-line vote.

The OLC’s memo is not public, but according to news reports and accounts from lawmakers who have seen it, the office appears to have uncritically adopted a series of factual claims advanced by the White House that are highly contestable — and in some cases borderline nonsensical — in order to justify the strikes. Indeed, the administration itself seems to understand that, given a new report from the New York Times that the U.S. military has tried not to take survivors of the strikes into custody in order to avoid having to legally justify the campaign in the courts.

Most notably, the OLC appears to have concluded that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels because they are using their profits to fund violence and extortion in our country. But as other legal and foreign policy analysts have noted, this makes little sense because there is no meaningful or credible evidence that these cartels are using their profits to promote organized violence in the U.S.

The idea that they are intentionally trying to kill Americans is also hard to take seriously, since active drug users provide the demand that ultimately keeps drug cartels in business, and you have to actually be alive in order to use drugs. On top of that, experts have noted that fentanyl, which has driven a rise in drug overdoses in recent years, largely comes from Mexico, which has apparently not been subjected to this military campaign.

The OLC’s memo also reportedly argues that the targets of the strikes are the drug shipments themselves — not the people delivering drugs — on the apparent theory that the drug sales are used to fund the cartels’ supposed hostilities against Americans. There is no apparent precedent for a theory like this, which could easily be adapted in a future administration to pursue objectives that many Republicans would hate.

“This is the thing I think conservatives should worry about,” Yoo told me. “Could a future President AOC say, ‘Oh my gosh, we are at war with the fossil fuel companies. They are inflicting masses of harm on the United States. It might be cumulative, but they’re doing it on purpose.’”

“You just make the same exact arguments,” he said. “That’s the danger you have once you start saying anything that hurts Americans could be an act of war.”

The American public should be able to see the administration’s legal analysis, including the OLC’s memo, so that they can judge the rationale for themselves, know who is actually producing it and — critically — see how far-reaching the logic is.

The idea that it needs to remain classified in its entirety makes little sense. The most sensitive part of the analysis would be the supposed factual summary, but although the government often goes to great lengths to protect intelligence sources and methods, the only method that appears to be at issue here — blowing up the boats without providing evidence or due process to the alleged traffickers — has been publicly touted by the White House itself in the form of endless self-congratulatory remarks and the release of some of the videos of the strikes. On top of that, the administration has already made the analysis available to some members of Congress, and the administration can redact anything that might actually reveal sensitive intelligence or operational details to the public.

At best, it appears that the Trump administration’s military crusade is proceeding based on severely deficient — and perhaps even disingenuous — analysis by administration officials who have relied on their own self-serving, logically dubious and hotly contested factual assertions in order to justify the use of lethal force to kill alleged, low-level drug traffickers who otherwise make just hundreds of dollars a day on these runs.

Some of the administration’s defenders have argued that the Trump administration’s approach draws support from former President Barack Obama’s use of drone strikes against alleged terrorists. One obvious flaw in that analysis is that Congress had at least passed an authorization for the use of military force in the wake of 9/11. Although some prominent legal analysts questioned whether the Obama administration had exceeded the scope of that authorization, Congress has certainly not provided any authorization whatsoever for military force against drug traffickers or the government of Venezuela — which, in fact, appears to be the Trump administration’s real target.

“The only way the strikes have any legal plausibility,” Yoo argued during our discussion, “is if we’re at war with Venezuela and the drug cartels are something like what we saw in Afghanistan after 2001 with the Taliban and al Qaeda being so intertwined together that the drug cartels are essentially acting as an auxiliary of the armed forces or intelligence services of Venezuela.”

“For some reason,” he continued, “the administration doesn’t want to say that’s what they’re doing, and they won’t legally justify it.”

But between the boat strikes and other actions by the White House — including Trump’s announcement that the airspace above and around Venezuela should be considered closed — it appears as though the Trump administration would like to start a war with Venezuela. As a practical matter, it may already have done so, albeit without any congressional authorization and without even bothering to make a case to the American public for it.

If the Trump administration is confident that its actions are lawful — as top officials have repeatedly claimed — they should have no problem releasing the OLC’s analysis.

Whether that happens or not, congressional investigators who are probing the administration’s actions should focus closely on the role of the government’s lawyers and the basis for the claims that they are making to support the White House’s ongoing military campaign.

If the Trump administration does not release the OLC’s analysis and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, the next president should release all of the relevant legal analysis and conduct an investigation into the work of Trump’s lawyers, just as the Obama administration did in the aftermath of the Bush presidency.

These memos concern matters — of life and death, of war and peace — of the highest legal and political order. They should not be secret.

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Tennessee executes man for 1988 rape and murder

 The 46th Execution of 2025

Tennessee executed Harold Wayne Nichols by lethal injection on December 11, 2025 in Nashville for the 1988 rape and murder of Karen Pulley, a 20-year-old student at Chattanooga State University, reported The Associated Press.

Nichols, 64, had confessed to killing Pulley as well as raping several other women in the Chattanooga area. Although he expressed remorse at trial, he admitted he would have continued his violent behavior had he not been arrested. He was sentenced to death in 1990.

“To the people I’ve harmed, I’m sorry,” Nichols said in his final statement. Before Nichols died, a spiritual adviser spoke to him and recited the Lord’s Prayer. They both became emotional and Nichols nodded as the adviser talked, witnesses said.

Media witnesses reported that a sheet was pulled up to just above Nichols’ waist and he was strapped to a gurney with a long tube running to an IV insertion site on the inside of his elbow. There was a spot of blood near the injection site. At one point he took a very heavy breath and his whole torso rose up. He then took a series of short, huffing breaths that witnesses said sounded like snorting or snoring. Nichols’ face turned red and he groaned. His breathing then appeared to slow, then stop, and his face became purple before he was pronounced dead, witnesses said.

Nichols’ attorneys unsuccessfully sought to have his sentence commuted to life in prison, citing the fact that he took responsibility for his crimes and pleaded guilty. His clemency petition stated “he would be the first person to be executed for a crime he pleaded guilty to since Tennessee re-enacted the death penalty in 1978.”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a stay of the execution on Thursday.

In a recent interview, Pulley’s sister, Lisette Monroe, said the wait for Nichols’ execution has been “37 years of hell.” She described her sister as “gentle, sweet and innocent,” and said she hopes that after the execution she’ll be able to focus on the happy memories of Pulley instead of her murder.

Jeff Monroe, Lisette Monroe’s husband and Pulley’s brother-in-law, said the family “was destroyed by evil” the night she was killed.

“Taking a life is serious and we take no pleasure in it,” he said during a news conference following the execution. “However, the victims, and there were many, were carefully stalked and attacked. The crimes, and there were many, were deliberate, violent, and horrific.”

Pulley, who was 20 when she was killed, had just finished Bible school and was attending college in Chattanooga to become a paralegal, Jeff Monroe said.

“Karen was bubbly, happy, selfless, and looking forward to the life before her,” he said.

Nichols has seen two previous execution dates come and go. The state earlier planned to execute him in August 2020, but Nichols was given a reprieve due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Nichols had selected to die in the electric chair — a choice allowed in Tennessee for inmates who were convicted of crimes before January 1999.

Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol in 2020 used three different drugs in series, a process that inmates’ attorneys claimed was riddled with problems. Their concerns were shown to have merit in 2022, when Gov. Bill Lee paused executions, including a second execution date for Nichols. An independent review of the state’s lethal injection process found that none of the drugs prepared for the seven inmates executed in Tennessee since 2018 had been properly tested.

The Tennessee Department of Correction issued a new execution protocol in last December that utilizes the single drug pentobarbital. Attorneys for several death row inmates have sued over the new rules, but a trial in that case is not scheduled until April. Nichols declined to chose an execution method this time, so his execution will be by lethal injection by default.

His attorney Stephen Ferrell explained in an email that “the Tennessee Department of Correction has not provided enough information about Tennessee’s lethal execution protocol for our client to make an informed decision about how the state will end his life.”

Nichols’ attorneys on Monday won a court ruling granting access to records from two earlier executions using the new method, but the state has not yet released the records and says it will appeal. During Tennessee’s last execution in August, Byron Black said he was “hurting so bad” in his final moments. The state has offered no explanation for what might have caused the pain.

Many states have had difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs as anti-death penalty activists have put pressure on drug companies and other suppliers. Between the shortages and legal challenges over botched executions, some states have moved to alternative methods of execution including a firing squad in South Carolina and nitrogen gas in Alabama.

Including Nichols, a total of 46 men have died by court-ordered execution this year in the U.S.

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Army gynecologist charged with video recording patients during exams

An Army gynecologist has been charged with secretly recording more than 40 of his patients at Fort Hood in Texas, military prosecutors revealed the charges, as members of Congress expressed concerns that the Army was slow to stop his misconduct, reported The New York Times.

The doctor, Maj. Blaine McGraw, 47, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, has been charged with 54 counts of indecent visual recording, five counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, one count of willful disobedience of a superior officer and one count of making a false official statement, prosecutors said.

The U.S. Army Office of Special Trial Counsel said the charges covered crimes that the doctor committed against 44 victims this year. Most of the offenses happened during medical exams at Darnall Army Medical Center, although one victim, who was not a patient, was secretly recorded at a private home near Fort Hood, the office said. It said the investigation remained open.

Major McGraw worked at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu from 2019 until 2023, when he started at Fort Hood, military officials said.

Fort Hood said it suspended Major McGraw and revoked his access to medical records on Oct. 17, the same day a patient made allegations against him.

Tripler Army Medical Center said it had sent 1,100 letters to the doctor’s former patients, and Fort Hood said it had sent letters to over 1,400 former patients at Darnall Army Medical Center and had created a hotline for them to report misconduct.

Major McGraw has been held since Dec. 2 in pretrial confinement at the Bell County Jail, in Belton, Texas, after Fort Hood officials accused him of violating the “conditions of liberty imposed by his commander.” The base did not elaborate.

Major McGraw’s lawyer, Daniel Conway, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, told NBC News on Tuesday that he had not yet seen the charging documents.

“I am aware that they cover non-contact recording allegations,” Mr. Conway said. “We expect the charges will cover offenses for which Dr. McGraw was cooperative with law enforcement. We continue to be cooperative while maintaining that no non-medically touching occurred.”

A lawsuit filed by a military spouse, identified only as Jane Doe, filed last month in District Court in Bell County, Texas, accused the doctor of secretly recording her on Oct. 14 during what she believed would be a routine pelvic exam.

While in the exam room, the suit said, Major McGraw pretended to take a call from a nurse on his phone and then slipped the phone into his breast pocket, with the camera facing outward and recording. After conducting the pelvic exam, the doctor suggested that he perform a breast exam, the lawsuit said.

On Oct. 17, the lawsuit said, the woman received an unexpected call from Army investigators, who informed her that they had recovered images of her body on Major McGraw’s phone from her Oct. 14 appointment.

The woman’s lawsuit also accused Major McGraw of groping her under the guise of medical treatment and of making inappropriate comments about her body and calling her after hours in an effort to “cultivate personal familiarity.”

The suit said that, years earlier, at least one patient at Tripler Medical Center had filed a complaint accusing Major McGraw of improperly recording her pelvic exam, but the chain of command there dismissed the complaint and allowed him to continue practicing.

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