Barbarous Terms, Ill Explained

Edmund Burke (credit)

From Edmund Burke, who entered Middle Temple in 1749, via David Bromwich, Alan Ryan and the New York Review of Books, here is a challenge to all would-be authors of legal treatises:

The study of our jurisprudence presented to the liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best Authors, hardly any thing but barbarous terms ill explained. . . .  Young men were sent away with an incurable, and if we regard the manner of handling rather than the substance, a very well-founded disgust.