Legal Neologism

The legal profession seems to encourage making up new words. Law students who have used Microsoft Word to take notes during class are frequently confronted with the following situation. You're typing away, trying to catch the most salient points of the daily Socratic dialogue when the evil red squiggly line pops up under half of the words. At first, you think you must have misspelled it. But no, you had it right. It matches the professorial scrawl on the board; it matches the printed text in the casebook.

Granted, some of the words used in law school might be expected to set off Word's spelling alarms. Some words/phrases are basically latin (res ipsa, parens patriae, etc.). Others are clearly terms of art that lawyer-types have adopted (tortfeasor, offeree, textualism). A few others at least look like words (consider, e.g, foreseeability).

Then there are the really fun ones: those that don't even look like words. These are words that clearly sprung from the mind of some lawyer or judge who either couldn't quite find the word s/he was looking for, or had some idea they wanted to convey but couldn't be bothered to consult a dictionary. Justiciability? Purposivism? Neglify?

Of course, other professions have been known to invent words as well. I hear that engineers have given us plenty of "-ize" gems, the most ridiculous of which is probably "requirementize." Still, I find it funny how many crazy words the legal profession has created. After getting through law school, maybe I can be a neologist too.