I think it comes down to the fact that there is such a thing as legal jargon, which is designed to mean very specific things and to denote them as accurately as possible. You're lucky, though, that a lot of it doesn't resemble modern English anymore (for the reasons you cited). Who's going to confuse "estoppal" with anything else nowadays?
To contrast a bit, math and physics also has a lot of jargon for similar reasons (need very specifically-defined terms), but it sounds closer to modern English. This leads to moronic lit-crit types deciding they know what the jargon means (using the casual "dictionary" definitions) and spewing bullshit as a result. Alan Sokal parodied this very effectively in his hoax Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html).
As for the layman's reaction, it's art of the more general fact that there are subtle points that the naïve approach misses. The question now is how you (as someone in the know) will deal with that. Will you try to find good ways of pointing out where their idea falters? Or will you ridicule the layman and keep your answers to "you're wrong" and "I've got a J.D. so you don't know what you're talking about".
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 04:38 pm (UTC)To contrast a bit, math and physics also has a lot of jargon for similar reasons (need very specifically-defined terms), but it sounds closer to modern English. This leads to moronic lit-crit types deciding they know what the jargon means (using the casual "dictionary" definitions) and spewing bullshit as a result. Alan Sokal parodied this very effectively in his hoax Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html).
As for the layman's reaction, it's art of the more general fact that there are subtle points that the naïve approach misses. The question now is how you (as someone in the know) will deal with that. Will you try to find good ways of pointing out where their idea falters? Or will you ridicule the layman and keep your answers to "you're wrong" and "I've got a J.D. so you don't know what you're talking about".
JRJA