"Тут важна точность"

Профессоры юстиции Евгений Волох (Калифорнийский Университет, Лос-Анджелес) и Рэндалл Кеннеди (Гарвард) опубликовали монографию "Новое табу: цитирование эпитетов в классе и вне." В нём они описывают недавно возникшую проблему: решения судов нередко включают в себя слова, которые многие студенты находят травматическими даже тогда, когда они воспроизводятся без одобрения:

A Westlaw query for
nigger & date(aft 1/1/2000) finds over 9,500 Westlaw-accessible opinions
(including cases, trial court orders, and administrative decisions). And that
does not include the nearly 5,000 such opinions from before 2000, plus
whatever is present in the vast set of trial court orders that don’t appear on
Westlaw. A search for (nigga niggaz) & date(aft 1/1/2000) finds over
2,300 opinions. A similar search for “fag” yields over 3,000 references,
though a few of those are false positives.

Судьи, однако, настаивают на точности:

Consider this for comparison: the word “motherfucker”
and its variants have never appeared in the print editions of 38 out of the 48
major United States newspapers; in the remaining ten, it appeared only
sixteen times put together. But it has appeared in over 10,000
Westlaw-accessible opinions, including six from the United States Supreme
Court (dating back to 1974) and over 500 from federal appellate courts.
Judges seem to value direct and accurate quoting.

Turning back to “nigger,” who are these judges who are willing to quote
the word, knowing that many lawyers and law students are a captive
audience who will have to read their opinions? They include Justices
Sotomayor, Thomas, O’Connor, Ginsburg, and a six-Justice per curiam
signed on to by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg,
Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

В заключение профессоры утверждают, что борьба за уничтожение или эвфемизацию эпитетов в учебной обстановке подрывает аспекты академической свободы и профессиональной откровенности, которые беспредельно важны для общества.