In the heat of litigation, tempers often flare and
lawyers sometime have difficulty expressing their
frustrations. When English fails, Yiddish
may come to the rescue. So it happened that defense
attorneys arguing in a recent summary judgment motion
in Federal court in Boston wrote, in a responsive
pleading, 'It is unfortunate that this Court must wade
through the dreck of plaintiff's original and
supplemental statement of undisputed facts.' The
plaintiffs' attorneys, not to be outdone, responded
with a motion that could double as a primer on
practical Yiddish for lawyers....
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
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MONICA SANTIAGO, Plaintiff, v. SHERWIN-WILLIAMS
COMPANY, et al.
Defendants.
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Civil No. 87-2799-T PLAINTIFF'S MOTION TO STRIKE
IMPERTINENT AND SCANDALOUS MATTER
Plaintiff, by her attorneys, hereby moves this Court
pursuant to Rule12(f) of the Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure to strike as impertinent and
scandalous the characterization of her factual
submission as "dreck" on page 11 of Defendant's Rule
56.1 Supplemental Statement of Disputed Facts (a copy
of which is attached here to as Exhibit A).
As grounds therefore, plaintiff states:
1. For almost four years now, plaintiff and her
attorneys have been subjected to the constant
kvetching by defendants' counsel, who have made a big
tsimmes about the quantity and quality of plaintiff's
responses to discovery requests. This has been the
source of much tsoris among plaintiff's counsel and a
big megillah for the Court.
2. Now that plaintiff's counsel has, after much time
and effort, provided defendants with a specific and
comprehensive statement of plaintiff's claims and the
factual basis thereof, defendants' counsel have the
chutzpah to call it "dreck" and to urge the Court to
ignore it.
3. Plaintiff moves that this language be stricken for
several reasons.
First, we think it is impertinent to refer to the work
of a fellow member of the bar of this Court with the
Yiddish term "dreck" as it would be to use "the
sibilant four-letter English word for excrement."
Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (Simon & Schuster, New
York, NY 1968) p. 103.
Second, defendants are in no position to deprecate
plaintiff's counsel in view of the chozzerai which
they have filed over the course of this litigation.
Finally, since not all of plaintiff's lawyers are
yeshiva bochurs, defendants should not have assumed
that they would all be conversant in Yiddish.
WHEREFORE, plaintiff prays that the Court put an end
to the mishegoss. |
