2:30 a.m. on March 22, 1997, a convicted felon named Anthony Dye was racing his Corvette through the streets of Elkhart, Indiana. The police were in hot pursuit. Dye pulled into his mother's driveway, got out of the car, and made a run for it. When the police caught up with him, Dye took a semi-automatic pistol from his waistband and opened fire. At that critical moment, a valiant police dog named Frei leapt into action, fastened on to Dye's leg and, as it were, took a bite out of crime. Dye was arrested.

Having been injured in the course of his arrest, Dye did what any red-blooded American would do. He brought a lawsuit — against Frei the police dog. Dye argued that dogs are "persons" who can be sued, at least when they work for the police. Dye fought his way to the second-highest court in the land, the United States Court of Appeals, which dismissed his claim.

Dye's theory that a dog is a person is not as far-fetched as you might think. In fact, he wasn't even the first person to sue a police dog. And some very respectable lawyers have argued that the legal definition of person ought to be expanded, at least to include other primates. Lawrence Tribe, Harvard's leading constitutional scholar, has maintained for years that chimpanzees should be considered persons under the Constitution.

That the country's best legal minds can be consumed with questions about whether the word person includes dogs or chimpanzees tells us a lot about lawyers. But it also tells us something about the language of the law. Nothing in the realm of legalese is quite what it seems.

Consider the fact that Congress once passed legislation declaring that "September 16, 1940 means June 27, 1950." In New Zealand, the law says that a "day" means a period of 72 hours while an Australian statute defines "citrus fruit" to include eggs. To American lawyers, a 20-year old document is "ancient" while a 17-year old person is an "infant." At one time or another, the law has defined "dead person" to include nuns, "daughter" to include son, and "cow" to include horse; it has even declared white to be black.

At times, legalese appears to be almost willfully perverse. Standard legal agreements, for example, typically contain some version of the following clause:

The masculine shall include the feminine, the singular shall include the plural, and the present tense shall include the past and future tenses.

In other words, the law sees absolutely no difference between "the boy becomes a man" and "girls will be girls."