Legal advice: pound the facts, the law, the table (variant 1911)

victor steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Jul 3 21:43:07 UTC 2010


As usual, I wanted to pitch in, at least, by looking at the list. This
was a very nice find. What I found to be amazing is how infrequent is
the occurrence of "pound the table" in GB prior to this date. And most
or all of these seem to be related to "making an argument", although
not all are related to law (some are theological, for example). But
the number is surprisingly small, which means that "pounding the
table" may not be such an old expression either. I thought it odd, but
I'll let professionals figure it out.

VS-)

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> Note that the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations does have this aphorism (see page 11), although Garson does a characteristically great job of improving upon the earliest use mentioned in the ODALQ.
>
> Fred Shapiro

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