Knight Out

The language most lawyers use might just as well be written in Sanskrit, so far as the layman is concerned. But no man, no matter how lay, would have trouble understanding the language of Lawyer Richard Knight. Socialite Knight, who used to shock friends and intoxicate New York tabloid readers by such didos as kicking out taxicab windows and standing on his head at a Metropolitan Opera opening, who for years has swung a legal tomahawk around New York courts, terrifying lawyers and citizens alike, has devoted himself during the past two years to writing. He writes a simple, direct, Elizabethan style that soars far above legalese. Its simple, pungent, unlegal merit is that it is as understandable as swearing. That is mostly what it is.

Lawyer Knight's language has been broadcast in a series of mimeographed letters, to a mailing list of more than 3,000. The objective of his mail campaign has been to direct attention to the alleged mishandling of the estate of his late father-in-law, Lewis Cass Ledyard Jr. Lucky readers of his epistles wondered as they read: Why could not more legal writing be like Knight's?

His general charges, contained in letters to friend & foe, were that New York jurists, banks, grand juries, the Bar, stank. Some notable Knightisms:

"This mouthy, pretentious, calculating little climber . . . this degraded knave . . . this glib, vulgar, slippery little jackleg . . . that posturing sometime reformer . . . the twenty-two goats and monkeys who composed the grand jury . . . this blank-brained menagerie, bamboozled by transparent obfuscations ... the gang of sneaking child-cheaters . . . these two low, skulking rogues . . . and the rest of the besotted judicial jackals . . . illiterate imbeciles . . . lick-spittle timeservers and chore-boys . . . aromatically crooked as a skunk's hind leg. . . . The corruption of these abject poltroons is merely one example of the corruption which infects our entire judicial system . . . these esurient, self-seeking herding jerks."

But last week, as it must to innovators, a prattfall came to Lawyer Knight. Finding him "guilty of gross moral turpitude," the New York Appellate Division, unimpressed by his command of loose-reined English, declared in unyielding legalese: "The imputation of corruption and dishonesty renders it impossible for the most open-minded individual to characterize the vituperative attacks as fair criticism of the courts." In words of one syllable, Mr. Knight was kicked out of the New York Bar.

At once he declared he would appeal. His readers could hardly wait.

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