Yiddish and the Law.

Prof. Eugene Volokh of UCLA and the Volokh Conspiracy published this beauty in no less than the Yale Law Journal. It is a quantitative study of how often Yiddish appears in judicial decisions. It includes these choice snippets:

There is, of course, one obvious question that must be on every reader’s mind at this juncture: what about "schmuck"? Regrettably, we were stymied in our schmuck search by the fact that many people are actually named Schmuck. This is an unfortunate circumstance for researchers, and even worse for the poor Schmucks themselves.

The same happens to be true of "putz" and of "mensch." We’d much rather be named "mensch" than "schmuck," but, oddly enough, a search for NAME (SCHMUCK) found 87 cases and NAME (MENSCH) found only 63 cases. Perhaps this is because there are more schmucks than mensches in the world; but wouldn’t the real schmucks change their names so as to better fool people, and real mensches change theirs out of modesty? Besides, the true schmuck-mensch ratio is much higher than 87 to 63.

. . . [to the end]

We return then to the beginning, to chutzpah. The most famous definition of "chutzpah" is, of course, itself law-themed: chutzpah is when a man kills both his parents and begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.

But there’s another legal chutzpah story. A man goes to a lawyer and asks: "How much do you charge for legal advice?"

"A thousand dollars for three questions."
"Wow! Isn’t that kind of expensive?"
"Yes, it is. What’s your third question?"
Chutzpah.