The Court
First, the serious stuff.
A plaint and a plea –
As many (some?) of you have probably seen, there’s a distinct lack of commentary / posting / discussion on the court by people who are (1) not undergraduate law students or (2) maybe “qualifed” [bg] lawyers not hiding behind anonymity. I happen to think both trends are not helpful and not likely to draw participation from practitioners, or at least not those The Court would generally want to have.
I’ll leave it to others to comment on how those trends might affect academics.
If any of you feel you can help, or can see your way to urging others who might contribute to enlist, then please do so.
I’d like to see The Court reach the status that SCOTUSblog has in US realms, but it’ll need contributions from many people with expertise for that to happen. I’ve no idea what the “critical mass” is for blog life, and The Court will exist so long as Osgoode HLS students and professor(s) are prepared to run it, but that’s really not the point.
Now the less serious – call this a Thursday Twist to Friday’s Fillip.
Once upon a time, there was a better poet than I am. Actually, that’s more than once upon a time and there were and are far more than one. Nonetheless, I parodied something John Milton had written to tell the story of a the birth of an online discussion group. Since poetry references keep reappearing, here ( much in the way that discussions about food and recipes repeatedly occur in writers’ discussions groups, in my experience), I offer an imcomplete 2007 version of that parody for communal completion. It’ll become the story of the birth of The Court and I’ll pass it “up”.
———-
The ____ mark portions to be completed, the [] options; however, feel free to play elsewhere. Osgoode gets first rank only because I say so. And, as it happens, it fits. (Yes, I know portions no longer have the proper feet. Tough)
————————
The History of The Court (www.thecourt.ca)
Sing _____Muse, what on the secret top
Of Osgoode, or Toronto, or ___ [Queens] didst inspire
Those academics, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how The Court
Rose out of chaos.
Instruct me, for thou know’st all; thou from the first
Wast present, mighty terminal and board outspread
Owl-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss
And saw it stagnant. What in me is dark
Illume, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this Great Argument
I may assert thy Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of the academy to men.
Say first, for the datasphere hides nothing from thy view,
Not even the deepest tracts of ____ [Dis], say first what cause
Moved the professors to that unhappy state,
Disfavoured of the ___ Chief Justice [Deans] so highly, to fall in
With _____, and express their will
With no restraint, Lords of their own domains besides?
Who first seduced them to that foul result?
The Judges and Lawyers? Was it they, whose guile
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The professors at _____?
What time their pride
Had cast them out from these domains
With all their host of students; now by whose aid,
Aspiring to set themselves in glory above their peers,
They turned to seduce the _____, if he opposed.
And with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of _____
Raised impious war in ____ and battle read
In apparent contempt.
Would them the [Almighty] _____
Have hurled flaming from ethereal screens
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To ____ perdition, there to dwell
In intellectual chains and ____fire,
Who durst seduce the ____ to arms.
“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,”
Said then the students, “this ___ [hell] the seat
That we must change for heaven, this ___ [mournful gloom]
For a celestial light? Be it so, since you
Who still are sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right.”
What though that field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of literature, immortal love,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory shall never their wrath or might
Extort from us. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify ___ [his] power
Who from the terror of our right so late
Doubted ___ [his] empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignomy and shame beneath
This downfall.
Farewell happy fields
Where joy ever dwelt? Now hail horrors,
Hail infernal word, and a profoundest hell
Receive thy new possessors: we who bring
Minds not unhinged by place or time?
No: the mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if we be still the same,
And what we should be, none the less than them
Whom _____ hath made the greater?
Here, at least
We shall be free; the _____has not built
Here for ___[his] envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in this choice
To reign is worth ambition though not in ____[heaven]:
Better to reign in __ [hell], than serve in [heaven].
Current draft @ May 3/07
[based on, of course, Miltons’s Paradise Lost]
Ah David – if you can riff like this on Milton – what could you do with Rochester, Pope or Villon? See http://www.staff.u-szeged.hu/~gnovak/00strepnec.htm for other ways to blaze with the language .
Pope? If I tried that on him, I’d be …. Donne.
You’ll remember that once upon a time we didn’t have the web to search during lectures to which we weren’t paying attention. Some slept, some doodled in various ways. I’m a lousy artist.
I was better at this once – “hearing” how the poet would have done it – but the problem with that trick is that one needs to forget one’s own voice to make it work
Thanks for the site (sigh). As if I didn’t have enough distractions already.
The lack of participation by practicing/qualified Canadian lawyers in my mind is attributed to these two factors:
– an atmosphere of caution, wherein many practitioners do not want to make written, public comments on the Internet. They do not want to create any conflicts with existing client work or (more likely) possible future work. It might be easier for solo lawyers to make comments since they have more control over the future work they take on, however.
– lack of time. My observance is that many practitioners cannot justify to themselves time spent reading on the Internet. If they are not taken to a blog post out of work necessity, chances are good they won’t see it.
If you want to encourage frank, public discussion on the Internet, I am not sure how you get around these two obstacles. I’d be interested to hear ideas on this.
Simon:
“Milton is the most unpleasant of English poets, and he has certain definite and analysable defects. His unpleasantness is a matter of personal taste. His faults of language are subject to argument just as are the faults of any other poet’s language. His popularity has been largely due to his bigotry, but there is no reason why that popular quality should be for ever a shield against criticism. His real place is nearer to Drummond of Hawthornden than to ‘Shakespear and Dante’ whereto the stupidity of our forebears tried to exalt him.” Ouch.
Connie:
Practictioners have been known to write for law reviews. They’ve been known to lecture at CLEs. If they’re prepared to do the first or the 2nd, they’re already risking “creating conflicts” with client work; especially if he or she says something about what the law is that might alert another lawyer to something he or she didn’t know, where that lawyer has a client at odds (or about to be, or might be) with the speakers.
In short, if you’re right, no practitioner should ever say anything in public about what the law is other than his or her rate (and, of course, success rate.)
Time? Everybody can make enough. It takes far longer to writer for journals or prepare a paper for a CLE. Of course, it might be that many a senior practitioner’s paper/speech has been prepared by a junior associate, but we won’t go there, will we?
The Court is a moderated so one doesn’t have to worry about too many drive-by trolls. Besides, the subject matter of the Court is such that one doesn’t have to worry overly about invading hordes of flame-bearers.
Requiring registration and some sort of real name (even if it’s an alias) with a valid e-mail address helps.
Anonymity and strange handles tend to increase the likelihood of distemper.
Finally, are so many Canadian practitioners the sort of wimps you’re suggesting [g]? The American’s seem to have no trouble finding people to say something intelligent. (But, then maybe they’re more intelligent than we are. If you check Oxford’s undergraduate admission policies, they indicate they’ll take Americans right out of high school. There’s no mention of Canadians. I suppose it is possible that Oxford didn’t think it necessary to mention us because it’s self-evident we’ll qualify. Or, maybe not.)
Cheers,
David
Actually, there is a level of formality and finality in the Court that makes me reticent to be as flip as I would be on Slaw and other blogs.
Partially it’s the length – but it’s also the formality. Perhaps if it were more like the undertherobes blog, it might be easier to post.
As it is, I would want to reread the cases before committing myself in what appears to be more of a space of record, than this one.
David, I am playing devil’s advocate here since I do agree with you.
I think there could be arguments that there is a far cry from presenting at a CLE program or writing for a law review compared with commenting on a blog. The first two are not largely accessible to the general public, not necessarily inadvertently pulled up with a Google search.
But we are a much smaller country than the U.S. in terms of number of potential clients, and number of law firms. I think this may be why Steve hasn’t seen the commentary he was hoping for, either.
Connie: I’m sure there’s a large grain of accuracy in your suspicion. What you’re describing amounts to lawyer’s paranoia about clients’ reactions; however, you’re right that it exists and there’s almost certainly some basis for the existence of paranoia given some types of client.
Having said that, it’s not a fear of a conflict as such. It’s a fear of saying something about the law that might “injure” an exisiting or hoped for client because it helps an existing or potential adversay of the client by telling that adversary or its lawyer something about the law that they didn’t already know.
If that were a valid concern, no practitioner who knows anything more than what every lawyer actually knows about a particular area would ever dare speak. All CLE lecturers would be people who are not in practice in any way.
Connie: adding to what I said in #8, compare the length of the names in the list of contributors on SCOTUSBLOG to the list of Canadian practitioner or academic names on The Court.