Eclectivity

I recently opened a new package of notebook paper. Unlike most of my classmates, I take notes by hand rather than on my computer. I’m hoping this will be my last paper package. If not, I’m probably taking WAY too many notes.

Speaking of notes, here are some eclectic notes from my recent life:

As I read, I like to move. My ideal world would be one in which I could read and run at the same time. (Yes I know books on tape exist, but I don’t like running with things in or on my ears.) Since running and reading isn’t really an option, I do a good amount of walking and reading. But textbooks get heavy (and looking down too long causes sore necks) so I also do a LOT of sitting and standing around reading. That’s when my hands start playing with things, most recently a yo-yo and a slinky.

During classes I usually play with the elastic or bracelet I have around my wrist. I wonder how my professors would react to a yo-yo . . .

In History of the Common Law we recently read the Magna Carta, an appropriate activity for its 800^th birthday. My professor showed up in a celebratory polo shirt. (You can find souvenir items at magnacarta800th.com.) I learned that one ancient copy of the Magna Carta spent WWII safely hiding in Fort Knox.

Along with Magna Carta, we read the Charter of the Forest, which is the Magna Carta’s forgotten little brother, so to speak. Forest laws were a unique, often vilified portion of English law pertaining to royal forests (which, counter-intuitively, involve much more than just woods). Of course, Robin Hood came up during this class (it was only a matter of time in a class about historical English law).

As I was walking down DOG Street one day,
the governor drove by on his way to the capital.
He interrupted a heated street argument about
Parliament closing the port of Boston.

Switching to Admiralty, the best opinion I’ve ever read (even better than the haunted house rescission) is Margate Shipping Co. v. Montco Offshore Inc. (143 F.3d 976). It starts out, “’Twas a dark and very stormy night . . .”, goes on to cite the law of ancient Rhodes, and heaps accolades on the aptly named and deserving Captain Strong. The judge who wrote it must have been in a good mood. Either that or he/she moonlights as a serial novelist.

My Admiralty professor recommended a website: marinetraffic.com. Just in case you’re wondering which ships are in the neighborhood.

My other Admiralty professor (there are two) spent our last class discussing treasure salvage. He was involved in the litigation surrounding the salvage of the Central America, which sank with so much gold that it contributed to the economic panic of 1857. One of the largest gold bars in history, over 900 oz., was retrieved from the wreck. My professor got to see the gold piled up in the Brinks vault where it was stored. (He was working on the insurance company side, which was awarded about 10% of the treasure; in his words, their portion “wasn’t a huge amount; it was like $10 million.”)

This desperate onion has been
in my fridge a little too long.
I think Desperate Onion is a
great name for a rock band.

In Copyright, we discussed the copyright-ability of a series of choreographed yoga poses (no go), an undulating bike rack (nope), and a belt buckle (if it is a Winchester-type with independent artistic value, yes!). Copyright is intriguing because it prompts me to look up things like Winchester belt buckles and the Hindenburg disaster footage. Ah the joy of copyright law in the era of Google and YouTube. (After I Googled “Winchester belt buckle”, belt buckle ads started showing up in my browser.)

My most recent favorite quotation from Copyright: “[They are] both working in the genre of large freaky puppets . . .”

My favorite quotation from a chapter on Talmudic (Jewish) law in my Comparative Law textbook: “Creation is a hard act to follow.” (H. Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 5^th Ed. 2014, 117.)

I’ve also recently been reading an undergrad textbook because I’m working as a graduate assistant for a business professor who is teaching a course on the legal environment of business. After two years of hyper-technical law books, the undergrad book seems almost laughingly simple. The legally-trained part of me wants to qualify everything and point out all the nuances. In other words, my default answer has officially become the very lawyerly, “It depends . . .”

And in case you’re wondering, there are 33 weeks left until graduation. I counted.

I was reading by the lake one day
when a flotilla of geese came by.

Versus the Wild Turkey

One of the great things about admiralty law is reading the names people give their boats. The “Wild Turkey” is my favorite so far.

Another benefit is the frequent telling of sea stories. My professor was in the Navy and has practiced maritime law for a long time, so he has some good ones about the crazy things that happen in the navigable waters of the Unites States. His stories are frequently accompanied by illustrations – rough sketches on the board of some harbor or another. He is fond of introducing them by saying something like, “Of course, you all recognize this as the San Juan, Puerto Rico harbor because of the palm trees I’ve drawn on the peninsula.”

One of the first considerations in admiralty law is whether the case involves a “vessel.” An object doesn’t become a vessel just by being able to float (a floating log is probably not a vessel; a yacht probably is). For example, does an inflatable bubble designed to work like a human hamster wheel and allow someone to run on water count as a vessel? (My professor terms this device an “aquabubble.” Reza Baluchi used one in an attempt to run the Bermuda triangle, but was picked up by the Coast Guard somewhere in the middle of his course.)

One of the other fun things about admiralty law is you can sue a vessel and have it arrested, as if it were a person. (My professor jocularly termed the arrest a “habeus grabbus.”) That’s how you end up with a court case called So-and-So versus the Wild Turkey. It’s a little bit of a strange notion, but has a long history (longer, indeed, than the existence of the United States).

Another strange notion came up as I was reading part of Justinian’s Institutes (one of the oldest written law texts in the western world). A provision was included for ownership rights related to pursuing a swarm of bees. The idea, of course, is to hive them and harvest their honey; but I don’t know that I’d have the gumption to pursue my bee swarm if it decided to move on to greener pastures.

The wacky stories continued in Copyright, where we read a case involving a photograph of a man holding his daughter on his shoulders (taken for a local newspaper). Federal Law enforcement became very interested in the photo because, as it turned out, the man was impersonating a Rockefeller and had abducted his daughter (there was a custody battle going on). As my professor put it, the story “not surprisingly became a made-for-TV movie” and a copyright battle ensued over whether the photo that was created for the movie infringed the original copyright.

And then there was the Supreme Court doctrine we studied in First Amendment this week. I won’t try to explain it, but my professor described it best when he said, “It’s mind blowing on so many levels.”

Come to think of it, that comment applies to a lot of what I’ve learned in law school.

This Would Be Easier If I Spoke Latin . . .

I spent most of one day this week reading a medieval law textbook: Decretum, by Gratian. (I’m enough of a nerd that I actually enjoyed it.) It left me with the impression that the practice of law hasn’t changed much in the last thousand years, although nowadays there is much less discussion about the superior authority of the church.

The Decretum was originally written in Latin. I, of course, read an English translation; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten much out of it. One of my other books was also translated from another language. This only becomes a problem when I’m reading the footnotes, many of which were not translated. I’ll be reading, reading, reading, and . . . something in French . . . reading, reading . . . something in Spanish . . . reading, reading, reading . . . something else in French . . . reading, reading, reading . . . is that Italian?

It feels like a game of “Name That Language” (. . . German? . . .) The Decretum has a footnote in Greek, but the translators were kind enough to put an English translation for that as well.

In other history news, we read a very old case that would have been among the first malpractice cases on record (if they had malpractice back then). It involved a property dispute between a younger son and his older illegitimate brother. When the younger son’s lawyer began to lose the argument, he tried to bring up the older brother’s illegitimacy. The judge flatly told him that he plead the wrong thing to make that argument and the older brother won.

We also discussed trial by ordeal (for example, throwing someone in water to determine if they are guilty by whether they float or not) and trial by contest (accusing someone of a misdeed and challenging them to a duel to determine guilt). In England, these methods eventually gave way to trial by getting-a-bunch-of-people-from-a-few-nearby-villages-to-give-testimony. That was the early beginnings of trial by jury.

Part of this legal evolution took place during the reign of King John, whose movements are so well documented that there is a website dedicated to his daily itinerary. He was involved in increasing the penalty for serious crimes (later to be known as felonies) from merely having your foot cut off and given 40 days to abjure the realm (that is, leave the country) to having your foot and your hand cut off and being forced to leave. And those who were acquitted of serious crimes weren’t much better off; they were also given 40 days to abjure the realm, though they did get to keep all of their limbs and possessions.

Trial by ordeal is not extinct, by the way. In Comparative Law, we are studying chthonic law (also known as customary law; that is the type of oral, traditional law you find in societies the western world calls “aboriginal” or “developing”). Liberia, for example, has a long tradition of trials by ordeal. Some of their methods are severe, but others are pretty benign. And in a customary law system, which is heavily focused on returning harmony to the community, trial by ordeal can be an efficient way to solve contentions and pacify both the accuser and the accused.

Meanwhile in Copyright, we’ve discussed the concept of fixation; something has to be fixed in a physical medium to be copyrighted. (In other words, you can’t copyright a thought.) “So,” my professor asked, “can you copyright skywriting?” (For the record, I have no idea. But these are the kinds of questions I spend my days pondering.)

A copyright also requires a modicum of creativity (illustrated nicely by an old case about copyrighting circus posters) and some originality. The originality requirement raised a conundrum for a scholar who was trying to fill in the missing gaps of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The more accurate his work was, the less original it would be; if it was not original, he couldn’t copyright it and another scholar would be free to steal and publish his work.

That wouldn’t have been a problem for me, of course, because I don’t read Hebrew. Or Latin. Or Greek. Or . . .

___________

Favorites of the week:

• Professor quotation (from Admiralty): “What do jet skis do? They hit things.”

• SCOTUS quotation: “The English language has a number of words and expressions which by general consent are ‘fighting words’ when said without a disarming smile.” Justice Murphy, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), emphasis added.

• Picture: abandoned ships in San Francisco Bay during the 49er gold rush (the sailors went to find gold, leaving the harbor clogged with empty ships)

• Song: Ancient Sea, by Elephant Revival (thanks to NPR for the recommendation)