Utter Justice

This book is a compilation of legal and law-related statements that have defined and characterized our legal system over the centuries. But the reader will quickly recognize that it is not a textbook in disguise. The quotations and the actions and ideas they present and represent were selected by purely personal criteria: the author found them fascinating important or revealing. They range from history-changing statements (Henry II's will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!) to purely mythological encounters (Lincoln's cross-examination of Sovine about the phase the moon was in when a murder took place) to royal chit-chat (a devastating remark a high-born lady made to the fugitive King James II which can be viewed as the final word on English royal tyranny) to an apology made in a casual encounter on an American street that symbolized the healing of a terrible cultural wound. The hope is to convey not a rigid history but a random flavor of how the law has been shaped by calculated casual powerful and even silly words uttered for the ages or merely for the moment.<P>This disparate verbal collection tells us that our legal system is not like a carefully sculptured statue but like a human being is composed of all that it has known and done and said.