Trollope, Cross-Examined

    Codd [a barrister] was not always so lucky. He once defended a man for stealing from a post-office, and cross-examined one of the prosecution witnesses.

    "What is your occupation?"

    "A supervisor of the Post Office," said Anthony Trollope.

    "And have you also written a book called Barchester Towers?"

    The witness agreed.

    "Was there a word of truth in that book from beginning to end?"

    "It was a work of fiction", said Trollope.

    "Fiction or not," said Codd relentlessly, "was there a word of truth in it from beginning to end?"

    "Well, if you put it that way," said Trollope, "there was not."

    Codd sat down in triumph. He invited the jury in due course to consider whether they could possibly convict on the evidence of a man like that.

    They could and did. But you can never tell with juries.

R. G. Hamilton, All Jangle and Riot: A Barrister's History of the Bar (Abingdon, Oxon.: Professional Books, 1986), p. 274

Nuclear Power’s Big Downside

Splitting atoms to boil water was never a good idea. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, and 80 years into the nuclear age, we still have no idea what to do with these lethal byproducts.

Thomas Bass, The Bomb Next Door, American Scholar, Summer 2022, at 33, 34.

Librarian Follows up

I reshelved the paper, stepped outside, and locked the door. Miss Mountjoy was still sitting idle at her desk when I returned the key.

“Did you find what you were looking for, dearie?” she asked.

“Yes, I said, making a great show of dusting off my hands.

“May I inquire further?” she asked coyly. “I might be able to direct you to related materials.”

Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.

“No, thank you, Miss Mountjoy,” I said.

Alan Bradley, Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009), ch. 5

Law Students Should Learn Law Practice (1933)

The law student should learn, while in school, the art of legal practice. And to that end, the law schools should boldly, not slyly and evasively, repudiate the false dogmas of Langdell. They must decide not to exclude, as did Langdell—but to include—the methods of learning law by work in the lawyer's office and attendance at the proceedings of courts of justice. . . . They must repudiate the absurd notion that the heart of a law school is its library.

Jerome Frank, "What Constitutes Good Legal Education?" (speech to the ABA Section of Legal Education, 1933), cited in Edward T. Lee, The Study of Law and Proper Preparation (Chicago, 1935), quoted in Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: Univ. N. Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 156-57.

The Framers Had the Advantage of Few Books

There is truth in the reply of a great lawyer when asked how the lawyers who formed the United States Constitution had such a mastery of legal principles: "Why, they had so few books."

Charles Warren, The Colonial Lawyer's Education, in A History of the American Bar (1911) (quoted in David Shrager & Elizabeth Frost, The Quotable Lawyer (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986), p. 58)

Sometimes there's a clear precedent

 The appellant has attempted to distinguish the factual situation in this case from that in Renfroe v. Higgins Rack Coating and Manufacturing Co., Inc. (1969), 17 Mich App 259. He didn’t. We couldn’t.

Affirmed. Costs to appellee.

Denny v. Radar Industries, Inc., 28 Mich. App. 294 (1970) (J. H. Gillis, J.)

Judge Rubin wrote opinions in pro se cases

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants. 

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants.

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Alvin's habit of writing opinions in nearly all pro se cases reflects one aspect of his civility. He often deprecated the use of long opinions in routine cases, but he ordinarily declined to enter one line dispositions. “Let us write a little,” he would say, and he would then succinctly but painstakingly explain the court's ruling, especially to pro se and under-represented litigants.

Edith Hollan Jones, A Farewell to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 5 (1991)

Origin of That "Seamless Web" Metaphor

Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.

Frederic William Maitland, Prologue to a History of English Law, 14 Law Quarterly Review 13 (1898). Also: Pollock & Maitland, The History of English Law, 2d ed. (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1898), vol. 1, p. 1