Lexisnexis Fact or Fiction

I'm up to 19 or 20 out of the 60 you can answer playing this year's Lexis Nexis's "passport of fun" game. Often it takes a minute, and the questions are pretty straightforward. Every now and again though, Fact or Fiction takes some liberty and will just not be right or it picks an ambiguous question that may be false or true depending. Honestly, I only get mad when I pick wrong.

Today's question, however, speaks for itself. It asked whether "res ipsa loquitur" meant "the thing that does for itself." Any first year law student who has gotten that far in torts knows that generally it what res ipsa means. Of course, the exact dictionary definition (according to fact or fiction and the subsequent research on their site I had to do to see exactly why I got it wrong) says it means "the thing that speaks for itself." While the choice of words in some cases (and probably more than some) are very important in law, I protest that those definitions have any meaningful difference and stand by my original answer. Stupid fact or fiction.

At least Fact or Fiction this year just goes until you get 60 right (presumably) so it doesn't matter how many you get wrong (presumably).

Similarly, my Westlaw trivia question asked whether the statement "Restatements provide concise, clear black letter law statements, often followed by comments and illustrations of the law" was true or false. Thinking that this had to be a trick question because black letter law only comes from cases and maybe statutes and restatements are simply combined presentations by academics and have no binding effect unless adopted by a court, I believe the answer should be false. However, being somewhat familiar with Westlaw's trivia questions and knowing that the obvious answer is usually the right one, I figured they didn't put too much effort into and got it right.

Tags: westlaw, lexis, fact or fiction, westlaw trivia