Recuse Who?
The National Law Journal recently posted this article titled “Supreme Court Issues Landmark Ruling on Judicial Recusal.” Here’s the intro:
In a landmark ruling that could affect state judicial elections nationwide, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that due process requires a state judge to recuse when a party in a case before him or her has had a “significant or disproportionate” influence on placing the judge on the court through a large campaign donation.
The problem with the intro is this — recuse, a transitive verb, has a subject (a state judge) but no object. Transitive verbs require both.
8 June 2009 at 19:18
I would double check your info. “Recuse” can be used without an object. Check http://www.dictionary.com. OED also uses it w/out an object.
9 June 2009 at 7:02
In the Yankee version of English, it’s a transitive verb (like accuse and excuse):
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recuse
And transitive verbs need objects.
9 June 2009 at 7:34
Sorry…I may not have been clear. What I meant was that “recuse” can be used with or without an object even though it is transitive. See here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/recuse
10 June 2009 at 19:05
Interesting. I don’t put a heck of a lot of stock in Ask.com, which says “recuse” could either be transitive or intransitive.
And I don’t rely on OED. It’s a foreign publication, and my concern is with Yankee English.
I rely on Merriam Webster.
I’ve sent a query to Bryan Garner (editor of Black’s Law Dictionary) to get his take on this. I look forward to what he says.
I figure “recuse” must have an object, as a judge could recuse someone other than himself. To say the judge must recuse leaves it open as to who he must recuse.
10 June 2009 at 19:42
Dictionary.com, while an ask.com service, uses legit dictionaries as its source if you go back to that recuse entry. It’s not an ask.com dictionary.
OED is by no means a foreign dictionary. It uses both SAE and BE texts as its sources, as well as texts from other dialects of English. I understand your desire to focus on SAE, but it is most definitely not a foreign publication, except in the sense that it is not published in the US. It uses California Lawyer as a source for its definition of recuse, for example. And it also cites this in its definition:
1990 Arkansas Democrat-Gaz. (Nexis) 29 Aug., The first-degree murder trial..was postponed after the judge in the case recused
I like Garner, but he can be too prescriptivist for my taste. Still, I’ll be curious what he says. He might cover it in one of his books. But I am leery of using any one person–Garner or otherwise–as the final arbiter of an issue when it comes to the English language.
11 June 2009 at 9:34
I seem to remember Bryan Garner suggesting that, to avoid sexism, the reflexive pronoun can be dropped as object of the sentence when the judge may be male or female. But I can’t find anything suggesting that in the Garner-edited books on my desk, so I may be mistaken about attributing this suggestion to him. At any rate, this suggestion seems sensible when “recuse” is reflexive, as the context will usually make plain who is being recused.
A dictionary in my office (Webster’s New College Dictionary (Wiley Publishing Inc. 2007)) lists “recuse” as both transitive and intransitive.* Also OED online lists “recuse” as transitive and (in North America and South Africa) reflexive and occasionally intransitive. At home, I have an Oxford American dictionary; it’ll be interesting to see what that says.
* I realize that not all “Webster’s” are Merriam-Websters. But this one seems to have a solid group of editors.
11 June 2009 at 9:48
I just walked downstairs to consult my firm’s big dictionary: Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2d ed. 2001). It provides two definitions, one transitive and one intransitive. The intransitive definition is “to withdraw from a position of judging so as to avoid any semblance of partiality or bias.”
11 June 2009 at 12:21
Garner’s Modern Legal Usage says that “‘Recuse’ is almost invariably reflexive; that is, judges are said to ‘recuse themselves.’” I believe that the challenged usage — “requires a state judge to recuse” — is best thought of as a form ellipsis, not as an intransitive form. That is, “The judge will recuse” is an elliptical form of “The judge will recuse himself.”
So to Thorne’s statement, “Like ‘accuse’ and ‘excuse,’ ‘recuse’ needs an object, else we don’t know who was recused,” we can answer: Are you kidding? We absolutely know — if we speak English — that when we read “The judge recused,” we know that the judge himself was recused. You would have to be entirely ignorant of how the word “recuse” is used to wonder whether “The judge recused” could mean that the judge recused anyone else.
Finally, in his dissent in Caperton, Justice Scalia asks: “In the best of all possible worlds, should judges sometimes recuse even where the clear commands of our prior due process law do not require it?”
Lexicography is an empirical science, not a theoretical one, and this is pretty good evidence that “recuse” does not need an explicit direct object.
11 June 2009 at 16:33
OK. So I’m on the bus and I’m reading yesterday’s article about the court’s decision re recusal. From the New York Times:
[The] ruling on conflicts of interest among elected judges could prompt a deluge of requests for judges to recuse themselves from cases.
[The] court ruled that judges must remove themselves from cases that involve . . . .
The court . . . ruled that the Constitution requires judges to disqualify themselves from hearing a case . . .
So . . . what happens when we just start converting transitive verbs into intransitive verbs to avoid sexism (as the speculation goes)?
11 June 2009 at 16:44
I have to agree with Bobo Linq on this one. Justice Scalia is not one who sacrifices good usage for the sake of political correctness.
12 June 2009 at 4:36
One more dictionary to weigh in with: the New Oxford American Dictionary (2d ed. 2005) lists “recuse” as a transitive verb only. Included in the definition of the transitive verb is the sense of excusing oneself from a case.
12 June 2009 at 4:43
Most interesting. It seems as if the new rule is this — when the object is not stated, the object is the subject.
To say:
[The] court ruled that judges must remove from the cases . . . .
Means they must remove themselves.
In the long run, we’ll probably save a sheet of paper per year.
12 June 2009 at 5:30
[...] a lively debate at Set in Style about recuse — is it strictly transitive, or can it be [...]
12 June 2009 at 6:47
Mr. Thorne,
You seem to have some fantasy of a Platonic word cave in which the “true essence” of words can be found. Your entire argument is based on the premise that “recuse” is “transitive” in some essentially true way. This is silly. If we want to know how recuse should be used, we must look at how it is used.
As for your sarcastic argument that using “recuse” without an object is an instance of some more-abstract rule that “when the object is not stated, the object is the subject,” this, too, is just silly. Your “rule” is obviously not a rule, but no one said or implied that it was. You’ve simply picked an arbitrary level of abstraction to describe what’s happening with “recuse”; at a lower level of abstraction—that is, at the level of the word “recuse” itself—there’s no problem with the “rule” (which is really just a description of linguistic facts about how “recuse” is used) that “recuse” when used non-reflexively is implicitly reflexive.
This should prove my point (though I expect that you are too enamored of your Platonic word cave to agree):
(1) The man masturbated.
(2) The man masturbated his dog.
Both of these are standard English. Neither of them is ambiguous, and neither of them is an instance of some “new rule” in which an object, because unstated, is the subject. To the extent that there is a “rule” at work here, it is this:
When transitive verbs are used reflexively, the reflexive pronoun (the direct object) need not always be expressed. When the reflexive pronoun is omitted, the verb will be understood to be reflexive.
Examples abound:
(1) I washed. (Understood to mean “I washed myself.”)
(2) I washed my car.
Or:
(1) I shaved. (Understood to mean “I shaved myself.”)
(2) I shaved my cat.
Etc.
3 August 2009 at 7:02
Bobo — The issue is about transitive verbs: those which require an object. “Masturbate,” “Wash,” and “Shave” are not transitive. They don’t need objects.
“Excuse” and “Accuse,” like “Recuse,” ARE transitive.
Would it make sense to say “The man excused,” or “the man accused?”