New resource: A Supreme Court pronunciation guide
on Aug 22, 2012 at 1:29 pm
When the Court resumes oral arguments in October, the Justices – along with the rest of us – will face an annual challenge: how to pronounce the names of the parties in (just to name a few) cases like Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Kloeckner v. Solis, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, and Florida v. Jardines. However, Eugene Fidell, a scholar and lecturer at Yale Law School, and a group of Yale students have solved this problem for many of the Court’s past cases with their Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States, which is hosted by the website of the Yale Law School library. The Pronouncing Dictionary provides both phonetic spellings and audio for some of the case names that Fidell and his students identified as most susceptible to mispronunciation, from Abdur’Rahman v. Bell (2002) to Yasui v. United States (1943); the authors of the dictionary provide more details on their methodology in an article for The Green Bag. And looking ahead, they solicit “suggestions for additional listings” for inclusion in a future new edition of the dictionary, so we may eventually learn how to pronounce some of this Term’s trickier cases as well.
