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May 23, 2008
Karl Llewellyn
We have no great illusions, my brethren and I, about how much good it will do you to be told these things in advance. We have learned by bitter experience that you will not take the things we tell you very seriously. You conceive this, I take it, to be somewhat in the nature of the pep meeting to which you were first exposed when you entered college. You expect me to tell you that you should be earnest about your work, and get your back into it for dear old Siwash, and that he who lets work slide will stumble by the way.
Okay, you semiliterate drones and law cattle. In our May 8 quiz, Chicago's Shaula Evans was the first and only person to identify Karl Llewellyn, Professor of Contracts and Chief Reporter on the Uniform Commercial Code, as the author of the above. The prize? She wins a collectible: a Hull McGuire PC/What About Clients? coffee mug in burgundy, navy blue and white.
The above speech? It's from the opening chapter of the The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study (1931), which sprung from a series of introductory lectures Llewellyn gave to first-year law students during the 1929-30 academic year, when he was appointed the first Betts Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia.
The book's name? It's from a poem.
There was a man in our town
and he was wondrous wise:
he jumped into a bramble bush
and scratched out both his eyes--and when he found that he was blind,
with all his might and maine,
He jumped into another one,
and scratched them in again.(from "The Bramble Bush", Robert Penn Warren)
Posted by Brooke Powell at May 23, 2008 11:55 PM