The Better Chancery Practice Blog

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

To Kindle or not to Kindle. That is the question.

On the one hand, books have played a significant role in my life. I love them. I love their heft, their solid feel, the way the pages riffle as you fan them. I love the aroma of a good book, the enticing allure of the dust jacket, the texture of the pages, the quality of the binding. I love to see the words in print, to savor the typography, to marvel at never-before-seen illustrations. I love to find a nugget of the author’s personal story on the inside sleeve. I could never opt for an electronic book reader if it meant the extinction of books with real paper pages and bindings.

On the other hand, I have hundreds of books, and an electronic book would help reduce the numbers I have to deal with. Too, with an e-reader, you can literally carry an entire library onto a plane or across town. It’s like having a Bookmobile in your hand.

But what is the effect of e-readers on the availability of book stores? I would be lost without access to a good book seller who is local, knows what I want, and offers a stock of tomes that appeal to my sensibilities. Book shops are one of the great pleasures in my life. I remember spending youthful hours in the Sans Souci Bookstore in Lafayette, LA., a modest shop with books filling every space in abundance, something a small-town boy could barely imagine. Over the years I have spent countless hours browsing in book shops. I have gone out of my way to find book sellers in Paris, London, Munich, Rome, New York, Boston, San Francisco and God knows how many other locales. Each local shop offers a different stock in trade to please the palate of its local clientelle. What a pleasure to see the parcels of books ordered awaiting pickup, and to hear the familiarity between seller and reader inquiring about a title or just exchanging pleasantries.

Over the years the book-selling trade has been taken over increasingly by chains and e-tailers like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million and (now almost extinct) Borders. They were preceded by the Walden Books and Brentano’s chains, who now are past. Chains are giant corporations that make deals with publishers to hype certain books, for which the chains make millions, pushing many deserving authors to the back shelves or out of the store entirely. Of course, any bookseller in a way dictates the readers’ choices by what is in stock, but the big chains go for the big bucks. Regional writers get lost in the shuffle. I wonder whether you would find Eudora Welty, Larry Brown, Ernest Hemingway or Will Faulkner on the bookshelves of the big chains today if those magnificent authors were unknown and just starting out.

Right here in Mississippi we have three phenomenal independent booksellers: Square Books in Oxford; Lemuria in Jackson; and Turnrow in Greenwood. These three stores are as good as any independent shops you will find anywhere. They offer books that the local owners know will interest their readers. Your book choices are not dictated out of corporate headquarters in a skyscraper in a big city up north. The shelves are not stocked by a corporate drone with eye fixed solely on the bottom line. The owners stock titles they know will enrich their patrons and the community as a whole. The local bookseller looks you in the eye and says, “Here is an author that will interest you” or “Have you read this?” They listen to what interests you and respond. The local readers and local sellers become an organic unit.

So that is my dilemma. I am not adverse to supplementing my love of books with an e-reader if … (1) it does not make books any less available … and … (2) it does not adversely impact the availability of independent booksellers.

In the midst of my dithering over this dilemma, I received the Square Books Dear Reader Newsletter that included the following:

KINDLE = Amazon only. ALL OTHER DEVICES = Square Books. Want Choice? Don’t get left to their devices. Google e-books are available at coompetitive prices from www.squarebooks.com and are compatible with any device (smartphones, laptops, tablets and e-reading devices including the Nook and the Sony Reader), except the Kindle. Those who surrender to Amazon’s monopoly reduce local economics, diminish their consumer power, and imperil freedom of choice!

Voila. An answer to my quandary. I can buy a Kindle and work against my interests, or I can acquire another e-reader that uses Google e-books and protect my interests.

I am not particularly fond of the idea of battery-powered books, but I recognize the advantages. I just might pick up one of those new-fangled gadgets after all, but there’s no way that it will take the place of my need for books without batteries.