The Better Chancery Practice Blog

Word on the street is that Chancellor Gene Fair of Hattiesburg will be announced as Gov. Barbour’s appointment to replace COA Judge Wm. Myers, who is resigning effective December 31.

No official announcement yet, and I haven’t been able to get in touch with Judge Fair, but if it’s true this is a good day for chancery practitioners throughout the state.

I’ll update this as soon as I have something more substantial.

We all have had a client or two who wished to wax eloquent in his or her will. You know what I’m talking about: a sermonette; a poem; an admonishment; a reproof; or even a love note. It happens, and you accommodate the client, blending the proffered language into your more prosaic will form, tucked strategically in among the bequests and devises. 

I came across a rather extreme example in the blog Futility Closet, and decided to share it with you:

At a dinner for law alumni of New York University in 1907, Walter Lloyd Smith of the New York Supreme Court read “the most remarkable document that ever came into his possession” — the will of an inmate of the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning, Ill.:

I, Charles Lounsbury, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make and publish this, my last will and testament, in order as justly as may be to distribute my interest in the world among succeeding men.

That part of my interest which is known in law and recognized in the sheep-bound volumes as my property, being inconsiderable and of no account, I make no disposal of in this my will.

My right to live, being but a life estate, is not at my disposal, but these things excepted all else in the world I now proceed to devise and bequeath.

Item: I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and generously, as the needs of their children may require.

Item: I leave to children inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the Milky Way to wonder at, but subject nevertheless to the rights hereinafter given to lovers.

Item: I devise to boys jointly all the useful idle fields and commons where ball may be played; all pleasant waters where one may swim; all snowclad hills where one may coast, and all streams and ponds where one may fish, or where, when grim Winter comes, one may skate; to have and to hold the same for the period of their boyhood. And all meadows with the clover blossoms and butterflies thereof, the woods and their appurtenances, the squirrels and the birds, and echoes and strange noises, and all distant places which may be visited, together with the adventures there found. And I give to said boys each his own place at the fireside at night, with all pictures that may be seen in the burning wood, to enjoy without let or hindrance and without any incumbrance of care.

Item: To lovers I devise their imaginary world with whatever they may need; as the stars of the sky; the red roses by the wall; the bloom of the hawthorn; the sweet strains of music, and aught else by which they may desire to figure to each others the lastingness and beauty of their love.

Item: To young men jointly, I devise and bequeath all boisterous, inspiring sports of rivalry, and I give to them the disdain of weakness and undaunted confidence in their own strength, though they are rude; I give them the power to make lasting friendships, and of possessing companions, and to them exclusively I give all merry songs and brave choruses, to sing with lusty voices.

Item: And to those who are no longer children or youths or lovers, I leave memory, and I bequeath to them the volumes of the poems of Burns and Shakespeare and of other poets, if there be others, to the end that they may live over the old days again, freely and fully, without tithe or diminution.

Item: To our loved ones with snowy crowns I bequeath the happiness of old age, the love and gratitude of their children until they fall asleep.

The original, it turns out, was written by Williston Fish in 1897 and published in Harper’s Weekly the following year. He had intended it as a poetic trifle, but newspapers around the country had picked it up and run it as fact, often embellishing the language, until, Fish wrote in 1908, “this one of my pieces has been translated into all the idiot tongues of English.” Charles Lounsbury was the name of an old relative of his — “a big, strong all-around good kind of man,” but not, evidently, insane.

In a couple of weeks, the population of the world will pass seven billion. That’s 7,000,000,000 people on the third rock from the sun.

BBC has a site where you can go, click in your birth date, and find out what number person you were on this planet.

The site tells me, based on my birth date, location and gender that:

• I am the 2,513,525,838th person born among the 7 billion pop.
• My life expectancy is 75.4 years (that will be in 2025 or so, for you “planners” out there).
• I was the  75,616,463,538th person to have lived since history began.

A UN site with even more detailed info is here.

If you enjoy stats, this is a thought-provoking and entertaining way to see how you fit into this rapidly changing — and growing — world.

So how will this help you practice law? I have no idea. I just found it interesting.

RIP Meridian attorney Champ Gipson. September 23, 1921 – October 20, 2011.

Comments are most welcome on this blog. I encourage you to question, react or add your opinion. The law is an art, not a science, so ideas and interpretations can vary.

Having said that, though, I have to say that all comments are not on a level playing field. There are some subspecies of comments that are, well, different.

For one, there are the so-called “spam comments,” which apparently are generated either by machines or by humans with the linguistic skills and intelligence no greater than that of machines. Here are three recent examples:

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And how about this whopper:

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The foregoing specimens were trapped in my spam filter, which claims to have snagged 4,608 of them over the life of my blog, which is now 16 months old. That’s an average of 288 spam comments a month, or 9.6 per day.

The above are exemplars of the English-language variety spam. Spam comments also arrive in Russian (in Cyrillic, no less), French, Italian, Bulgarian and Romanian (I know the latter two only from the suffix on the name of the web site, since those languages are beyond my ken). These comments may actually have been intelligent commentary on something I posted, for all I know. For lack of knowing, I send them the way of spam.

Spam comments are intended by the sender to plant a link on your blog that will either generate traffic for the sender or allow the sender to inundate your blog with ads and other unpleasantries. I delete all spam comments and send them to spam hell, wherever that is.

Another genre of comments is the disgruntled litigant. I have had several proposed comments from litigants critical of their judge (in one instance me as judge), the legal system, their attorney, and the appellate courts. Most come from outside Mississippi. A major reason I moderate comments is to screen those out.

There are also commentors who ask for legal advice. Sorry, judicial ethics preclude me from doing that. Besides, that’s not the purpose of this blog.

Then there are the commentors who ask for a slot on my blogroll. One proposed commentor asked me to add a link to his blog, but I politely declined because it was a blog promoting dissolution of the legal system, abolition of the legal profession, and encouraging self-representation until the courts can be done away with. Anybody who has read this blog for any length of time will recognize that those topics are somewhat inconsistent with what I am doing here. He was very polite, though; I’ll grant him that.

So, all of you “blog crazed persons” out there, keep your comments coming. For all your comments, I “Truly thank you a large amount.”

“Decision-making is a Gestalt phenomenon, a three-dimensional agitated blob of factual, impressionistic, inferential, prejudicial miscellany from which a decision spins forth,  trailing behind it sufficient selective supportive  material to assuage  the conscience and justify its genesis as a product of the rational mind.”

Thanks to attorney Jak Smith