The moon's in charge

The tides might tell themselves stories about why they’re rushing in and out, but it’s ultimately the moon that’s in charge.

Leslie Jamison, The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage, New Yorker (Jan. 15, 2024)

Thanks, teachers!

Thank you to the English teachers of Kansas public schools, who told a child from a family of laborers that she was a writer who deserved to be heard: in elementary school, Val Cheatham; in middle school, Patty Strothman; in high school, Stacey Walters and Lawna Bass Kurya; at a state university, Mary Klayder and Tom Lorenz.

Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of  Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018), p. 290

Reading? Not in the Smallweed family

 "Don't you read or get read to?" 

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (orig. pub. 1853) (Mr. Smallweed, answering a question from Mr. George)

Wiglomeration

"Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. "He must have a profession; he must make some choice for himself. There will be a world more wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be done." 

 "More what, guardian?" said I. 

"More wiglomeration," said he. "It's the only name I know for the thing. He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have something to say about it; Master Somebody—a sort of ridiculous sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane—will have something to say about it; counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general, wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don't know; so it is."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (orig. pub. 1853), ch. VIII

Some Birthdays Are Like That

“Listen to what it says in the horoscopes: ‘If it is your birthday, there may be an increased amount of mail. Expect gifts, friendly salutations from people and the occasional surprise. Possibility of cake.’ That’s so weird—I wonder if any of it will come true?” 

Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (New York: Penguin Group, 2007), p. 50

Hitting 50 Isn’t So Bad

That’s the thing about hitting fifty. All your life you think the half century is death’s adolescence, but actually it’s really not that bad, as long as you can remember where you left your glasses.

Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (New York: Penguin Group, 2007), p. 17

Keeping track of papers is hard

Ulysses S. Grant, who left office in 1877, said, 

“The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat pocket or the hands of a clerk…more careful than myself.” 

Ronald G. Shafer, Presidential papers have long been turning up in unexpected places, Wash. Post (Feb. 4, 2023)

Look at the universe: are you overwhelmed or amazed?

This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifying insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so  many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel  amazed and fortunate to be here.

On the whole, though, I take the  side of amazement.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 234

Does an administrator have to read the statutes?

One of the ablest administrators that it was my good fortune to know, I believe, never read a least more than casually, the statutes that he translated into reality. He assumed that they gave him power to deal with the broad problems of an industry, and upon that understanding he sought his own solutions.

James M. Landis, The Administrative Process 75 (Yale Univ. Press 1938), quoted in Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960, at 217 (Oxford Univ. Press 1992)

Grieving for the future

Grief confuses us by  spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend —that everything  that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 74

Grief is boring

Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with  my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61

Ketchup-Bottle Type of Argument

We find this to be a ketchup-bottle type of argument: it looks quite full, but it is remarkably difficult to get anything useful out of it.

Judge Bruce M. Selya, The Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College, 889 F.2d 13, 18 (1st Cir. 1989)

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