“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”
— James Madison, Federalist 62
Senior Judge Silberman of the DC Court of Appeals is having none of your alphabet-soup acronyms:
"The Agency and thereby the parties regularly use the acronym “ILEC” for Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, and “CLEC” for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, but we prefer the use of the English language and deplore the practice of using acronyms unknown to the general public. Thus, we use “incumbents” to refer to what the parties call “ILECs,” and “insurgents” to refer to what the parties call “CLECs.”"
I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. I find few things more repellent than looking down-page upon forests of menacing, unpronounceable non-words. So do judges. That is a feeling in your readers you want to avoid at all costs.
Comptel v. Fed. Commc'ns Comm'n, No. 19-1164, at *3 n.1 (D.C. Cir. Nov. 3, 2020).
https://lnkd.in/dHHVHqP