Another reason why lawyers write excruciatingly long sentences

There are so many reasons why lawyers write those tedious run-on sentences, but let's focus on one that probably afflicts my generation more than the more newly minted lawyers.  How many people regularly use the 'Digests'?  You know, the headnotes maintained by West that are filled with blurbs about legal principles.

Anyway, I'm at the Fifth Circuit law library (availing myself of their West books, and the free wifi), and I was reminded of something about the digests that's really strange.  The digests have a convention about how they're written that encourages lawyers to write long-winded sentences. 

Can anyone guess what it is?  I'll let the comments roll in and we'll see who guesses right first.  The winner will get an invite to Google wave.

Comments

[mgcarlucci]

[Already have a wave invite, it's great!]

My professional responsibility professor said lawyers write long sentences to protect themselves, confuse others, and convince clients that they know the law, because the law is long and a short statement looks less prepared than a long one.

[Ernie Svenson]

That's true too. But the question really is this: what is the strange convention in how headnotes (or digest blurbs) are written that encourages run-on sentences. In other words, almost every digest sentence is a run-on sentence. EVERY one! What convention causes this? It's so obvious that it might take you a long time to figure out.

[Brett Allen]

Not being a lawyer, but having a great interest in law, could you show us some examples so those who don't know what you're referring to can have a guess?

[Andrewraff]

Is each headnote deliberately written to stay within a single sentence?

[Ernie Svenson]

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Andrew is right. The headnote writers are told that they have to blurt out the entire premise in one sentence. Therefore, instead of creating short blurbs that are readable, they write tortuous ones that are excruciatingly difficult to read. I'll provide some examples in an update to the blog post.

Thanks to all of you for playing our game. Andrew send me your email address (to esvenson[insert magic symbol here]gmail.com) and I'll send you a Google Wave invite.

[David Bustamante]

And may I add... In summarizing the holdings of a case, digest writers will try to incorporate all of the various facts and circumstances that serve to narrow the holdings and distinguish them from those of other cases, past, present, and future. This way they tend to withstand the test of time better than those summaries that rely too much on unqualified generalities.

[Disability Insurance]

I'm sure the convention is that this will divert attention from the real issue at hand. To the layperson law writings can be extremely confusing and by making them long-winded will distort the issue at hand.