Q.E.D. — from the Latin quod erat demonstrandum, “what was to be shown.” The abbreviation has been used at the end of syllogisms since at least the renaissance. But, as much as I love the Latin language, even I can admit that it’s fallen to disuse of late. So, I propose a new conclusions to proofs, a phrase that has a more modern spirit, but still conveys a sense of accomplishment and success: booyah.
Today’s terrible idea was diversity jurisdiction. Why is it a terrible idea? Well, I just wrote out a beautiful post explaining why, but I realized that (1) I hadn’t explained it in enough detail for the lay person to understand it, and (2) even in its lack of detail, it was still too long.
It was such a great post, too. I talked about legal realism and the idea that common law develops into justice. I even referenced Holmes’s scornful reference to common law as a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.” But it was too much, and I erased it all. All these memories are lost, like tears in the rain. Time to die.
The aptly-named mid-20th century jurist, Learned Hand, whose name generates more jokes than anything else for first-year law students, had this to say about the income tax:
In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax… merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception — couched in abstract terms that offer [me] no handle to seize hold of [and that] leave in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
Thomas Walter Swan, 57 Yale Law Journal No. 2, 167, 169 (December 1947)
As my Constitutional Law professor says about Marshall opinions, “Why can’t I write like that?”
On a side note, I learned (hand) from Wikipedia that Learned Hand had a brother, Noble Hand, who also sat on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and apparently would sit on the same panel as Learned. Imagine, as a young lawyer arguing an appeal, getting benchslapped by Learned Hand on the left and Noble Hand on the right…
I saw the first two parts of the John Adams miniseries on HBO. I liked them well enough, so I decided to pick up the David McCullough book, to see just what was really going on. A few thoughts:
I’ve never read a real historical text. In grade school and high school, we read textbooks — the Happy Meal summary of some real historian’s work. Sure, Freshman year in undergrad had the required history classes, but there we read the primary source material. This is a text unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. It’s not a Saturday morning cartoon version of history, nor is it the impenetrably dense primary source. This is history, turned into a modern-language narrative. It is gorgeous. It’s fun to read, it’s clear, it’s informative… It’s everything I never thought history could be. It seems, based on the comments from critics, that McCullough is particularly adept at performing this feat, but if other history texts have even a fraction of the readibility of this one, I can finally understand how history majors still exist, instead of suffering a Darwinian extinction years ago.
The most interesting thing about the miniseries, at least as it relates to the book, is how many of the things Adams said in his private letters or even more private diary are, in the miniseries, said aloud and to the faces of his political opponents. I hold no illusions about the marketability and dramatic value of a true-to-life, documentary style account of John Adam’s life would be on film. As interesting as the McCullough book is, its primary value is in its exposition, not its plot. (This is the same reason I think Neal Stephenson’s novels would translate poorly to film — but that’s another post.) However, there are things that Adams says in his letters that are followed by a caution that he would never say that in public. Or, as an even starker example, a letter he sent to Abigail, his wife criticizing John Dickinson. It was intercepted by the Tories and put in a newspaper to show how divided the Continental Congress was. Some of the lines from this letter, which caused great embarassment to Adams upon its publish, were said directly by Adams to Dickinson in the miniseries.
Like I said, creative liberties must be taken with historical pieces like this. But, even accounting for the necessities of the motion picture form, what can these differences in content tell us? What does it mean? The first conclusion I came to is that modern political dialogue is more direct (to put it one way) or less tactful (to put it the other). The slights that made John Dickinson refuse to acknowledge Adams’s presense back then are merely good rhetoric these days. Without the book’s exposition to describe just how big of a deal it was, we wouldn’t understand why Dickinson got so upset over an intercepted letter. Maybe Adams’s insults were a bit over the top, sure, but nowhere near the level of a negative campaign ad. This is the first conclusion, but I’m not sure I’m taking all possibilities into account.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the miniseries, and I’ve enjoyed the book more — I recommend both. The third (and possibly fourth?) part is saved on my DVR — we’ll see how it holds up.