The Year of The Cat

FELIS CONCOLOR

Enough Said.

Working on this trial brief is really sapping my energy, but I went to the professor today and I think I finally have a handle on the direction it was supposed to go. So I sent it there. (Enjoy your trip!) Now I just need to finish Bluebooking and proofreading. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. When I have an interview at noon, and the brief is due at 3 pm on the dot. Yeah, this should be interesting.

Anyway, as usual during the proofreading madness, I put my iTunes* on shuffle, and sang along to the various showtunes that popped up.** What came on but a little Wicked, and the song "Wonderful." Now, I usually skip that one in the rotation because it's not my favorite, but my laptop was across the room and I am notorious for my laziness as well as my love of Broadway.

Where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true.

We call it history.

A man's called a traitor or liberator,

A rich man is a thief or philanthropist.

Is one a crusader, or ruthless invader?

It's all in which label is able to persist.

There are very few at ease with moral ambiguities,

So we act as though they don't exist.

In Anthropology, we spent a lot of time discussing what history really meant. History is really more a timeline through someone else's glasses, colored not only by their point of view, but also in the way they view time. (For instance, one group of Native Americans sees time the same way as distance. Someone displaced from you in time, is really only displaced by distance, so that really makes the way they see history different from ours, which is more like a running river.***)

Anyway, I find that case law is very similar to history, in that its the story of the winners, not the losers. Ever wonder why you didn't learn about the Trail of Tears too much in middle school, but they made Andrew Jackson look like more of a badass than Chuck Norris? Probably for the same reason that Cardozo didn't mention that the scale that fell on Mrs. Pfalsgraf's head was actually so heavy that its a wonder she didn't die instead of simply suffering severe brain damage.

Facts in cases are selected and highlighted to make the judge's (and jury's) decision look like the right one. Even as 1Ls we learn to hide dissatisfactory facts in the middle of sentences and to mitigate them with more favorable facts. We're trying to make the loser's (or opponent's) story disappear, to remove them from history and to make their tale appear less noble and dignified.

But I've never been satisfied with the history of the victors. It hardly seems fair to hide the story of the other side just so that the future readers feel at ease because of a lack of "moral ambiguities."

As for the judges who suddenly found themselves to go from "dime a dozen mediocrates" to "Solomons and Socrates", I certainly hope that they're being careful when writing their opinions to be as fair to the "losers" as they can. After all, they're writing legal history here.

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*Speaking of iTunes, did you know that Steve Jobs pretty much announced that he killed the CD in his last "unveiling"? Seriously, he said that the iTunes logo is changing to be just the music notes with no CD behind them, because he made them unnecessary. I can't decide if that's arrogant, or creepy, or both. I feel like Steve Jobs might be the Hitler of technology. (But God help me, I love my Apple products.)

**Yes, I have lots of showtunes, and I can belt a mean "All I Ask of You" given half a chance and some room to really turn up the volume. Anyone up for a duet? (I also love doing Somewhere That's Green.)

*** Which is ironic, because in Pocahontas, there's that whole song about how you can't step in the same river twice. Which I may also have listened to tonight.