Taking Culture to the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys

The day after Président-élu Sarkozy announced a rapprochement in Franco-American relations comes word that our friends at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute are being dispatched to the city of light to bring the good news about American legal documentation to a culture anxious for more CSI and Court TV.

The Ithaca papers are abuzz with the list of celebrities:

Cornell Law School center to be dedicated in Paris in July
The Cornell University Center for Documentation on American Law in Paris will be dedicated July 17 before an audience of the world’s leading jurists at an international judicial conference.

The new legal center is an initiative of the Cornell Law School, a leader in international legal perspective law and scholarship, and the Cour de cassation, the highest court in the French judiciary. The center, which will be located within the court in the Palais de Justice, will house 13,000 law books from Cornell’s Law Library and will offer special training and instruction in online research by Cornell law librarians.

The Cour de cassation’s First President Guy Canivet said: “You and your school are taking a pioneering decision, which is bound to have deep political and judicial and intellectual repercussions for which I not only congratulate you but also thank you, profoundly.”

The dedication ceremony will take place during a first-ever conference attended by the chief justices of European Union countries and the United States. Among those expected to attend are U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer. The conference will be chaired by Lord Phillips of Worth MatraversWho has a Canadian connection, the lord chief justice of England and Wales and attended by Sir Basil Markesinis.

Of course a cynic might argue that ever since La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen du 26 août 1789, the traffic in legal documenation might have been a touch more reciprocal.