The Quotable Jurist

Christopher A. Anzalone, The Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Pp. xiv, 395. $83.95. Full Disclosure: I edited The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. The book being reviewed, Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations by Christopher A. Anzalone, might be considered a work competing with my own volume, so readers should take what I have to say with a grain of salt. Legal quotation is a somewhat oxymoronic concept when applied to case law. Judicial discourse is long-winded, and the need for precision or pseudo-precision is usually valued far more highly than literary qualities are by judicial writers. Looking at American sources, most quotable authors on law-related subjects have not been judges but rather academics (Karl Llewellyn, Fred Rodell, Alexander Bickel, John Chipman Gray), statesmen (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Daniel Webster), literary figures (H.L. Mencken, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville), or satirists (Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Will Rogers, Finley Peter Dunne). Among judges, four individuals (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, Learned Hand, and Benjamin Cardozo) account for a very high percentage of all quotable passages in opinions, and if these four were excluded, the landscape would be an extremely barren one. The paucity of good judicial quotes has become more pronounced in recent decades. Some of the explanation lies in the fact that the last of the Big Four died in 1961. Some lies in the tendency of recent opinions to be ghost-written by clerks who are unlikely to insert bold or humorous pronouncements in their boss\u27s decisions. Some may lie in a general decline of modern art and thought. Conservative court-watchers champion Antonin Scalia as a titan of eloquence on the contemporary United States Supreme Court, but I believe that they are influenced by partisanship and today\u27s greatly lowered standards. Consider this quip, widely considered to be one of Scalia\u27s best: Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep\u27s clothing.... But this wolf comes as a wolf. Not exactly one for the ages, in my view

The Effect of Courtroom Technologies on and in Appellate Proceedings and Courtrooms

The information presented to courts has traditionally been written and oral. Many courts are adopting technology into the courtroom. Changing the record from text to multi-media is the most sweeping of these changes

Phoenix from the Ashes—The 1999 Pacific Salmon Agreement

The United States and Canada have found a solution to their century long salmon war over how many salmon can be taken by each side\u27s fishing fleets from the once-bountiful Pacific salmon runs. Each country felt entitled to an equitable portion of the salmon, but no agreed means existed to calculate the shares. Canada felt that the prodigious U.S. fleet often caught more than its share. Substantial peace first came under the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty, but dwindling salmon populations, the expiration of the original management regimes, and flaws in those regimes threatened to doom the 1985 Treaty by the mid-1990s. The lack of harvest agreements left each country scrambling for the fish, putting unsustainable pressure on an already delicate resource. After half a decade of infighting and argument, Canada and the United States signed a new agreement under the treaty in 1999. On the surface, the genius of the new Agreement lies in the new Abundance Based Management scheme and the multimillion dollar Endowment Funds earmarked for conservation. The flexible, resource-based management programs considered the yearly strength of the salmon runs before and during the harvest season. These new regimes, and the 1999 Agreement as a whole, were subject to review under the Endangered Species Act, completed by NMFS in 1999. The Endowment Funds provided a financial base to undertake substantial conservation initiatives. With the understanding that an imperfect agreement was better than no agreement, the Canadians effectively set aside their longstanding equity demands to achieve consensus. As part of the overall compromise, the United States agreed to fully finance the Endowment Funds for a total of (U.S.) $140 million. The sea change in Canadian negotiation posture reflected a renewed emphasis on resource conservation and a willingness to pioneer new avenues for success

Women, the Church and Equality: The Religious Paradox

ABSTRACT OF THESIS Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.[1] Traditional religion and biblical interpretation helped to cement the passive role of women in the United States for hundreds of years. The emergence of spiritualism and communal societies, however, challenged the traditional role of women, and the very fabric of American society, throughout the 1800s to the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Women also used temperance and abolitionism--venues that had oppressed women--to champion women’s equality and social justice reform. In particular, leaders in the women’s rights movement came from Quaker backgrounds’, that religion challenged traditional clergy in respect to what defined a woman’s role in society. Throughout the 1800s, women were oppressed by tradition in religion, but they paradoxically turned to the more liberal spiritualist movement to speak publicly on the right to equality, and to hone skills needed to be effective leaders in the United States through increasingly tumultuous times. [1]King James Bible, Corinthians 14:34-3