I want it to be yours, too. Reprising his Cocktail Party Lawyer success, Wisconsin lawyer John Macy took the reigns of this issue to deliver everything you always wanted to know about major federal laws. Charged with the Sisyphean task of selecting which of the 312,739 major federal laws most commonly affected our readers' practices, Macy forged ahead in a race to complete this issue before Congress did something foolish like repeal all federal laws except for the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and the Tucker Act Shuttle Relief Act of 1997. A Roadmap to Chaos Landmines for the unwary, federal laws can ambush the savviest practitioners. Sure, it's possible to know by heart every book, chapter, and verse of state law, and perhaps have committed to memory a few favorite federal laws, but the sheer breadth and complexity of federal legislation, snarling its tentacles into every aspect of our practice and our clients' lives, boggle and frustrate even the most astute and learned of lawyers.
Federal laws touch even parochial areas of practice.
There's too much to know, and so little time to learn it. Many of us are lucky if we can manage to recognize our limitations. Sprinkled with far more semicolons, brackets, dangling participles, double negatives, and negative pregnants than ordinary garden-variety state law, many federal laws seem abstruse and obtuse. Clearly, obfuscation's purpose is to prevent users from willy-nilly pretending to understand, much less invoke, those federal laws unmatched in fecundity by even toadstools after a summer rain. Fancy language and codswollop are there for your own protection.