Marks v. Waiahole Water Co.

DISSENTING OPINION OF

MATTHEWMAN, CIRCUIT JUDGE.

This case affords an example of the importance which the legal profession is inclined to attach to the presence or absence of what Mr. Justice Cardozo termed “the precise word”. In 1917, speaking for the Court of Appeals of New York, he said, in the Lady Duff-Cordon case— remembered from their law school days by many lawyers: “The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal.” (Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Cordon, 222 N. Y. 88; 118 N. E. 214). Those words were used in a…