Freespace

Friday art

The Great Blue Spring of the Lower Geyser Basin by Thomas Moran

Here’s an interesting old California case

There’s nothing that remarkable about the holding in People v. Payne, 8 Cal. 341 (1857). It’s a typical case about justifiable homicide. One man owned property, and others claimed it, and sought to claim it by murdering him if necessary. He ended up shooting one of them, and the question was whether it was justifiable, which the California Supreme Court said it was.

What’s interesting are the personalities involved. The case was decided by Justice Peter Burnett, who had served as California’s first governor, and famously served as defense counsel for Joseph Smith. Probably his most important legal opinion would be issued the year after Payne—that was Ex Parte Archy, 9 Cal. 147 (1858), which declared, contra Dred Scott, that slavery was not permitted in California. Concurring in both of these opinions was Chief Justice David S. Terry, who would not long after murder California Senator David Broderick in a duel, and then flee to the south to join the Confederate Army. After the war he would serve a leading role at California’s second Constitutional Convention in 1878.

The attorneys arguing the Payne case were no less illustrious. The state was represented by William T. Wallace, who would later become a leading Progressive and Chief Justice of California. A man of distinctly unpalatable political views, Wallace’s most important decision was probably the Stockton & Visalia Railroad case (41 Cal. 147 (1871)), rejecting the substantive due process theories that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon after embrace in Loan Association v. Topeka. Wallace, by the way, married Burnett's daughter.

Payne’s attorney, on the other hand, was Edward D. Baker, one of Abraham Lincoln’s closest friends (Lincoln named his son after Baker) as well as a close friend of Sen. Broderick. Only three years after the Payne case, Baker would move to Oregon and be elected Senator, but shortly thereafter, he joined the Union Army, and was killed at the battle of Ball’s Bluff, becoming the only serving U.S. Senator ever killed in battle. At that same battle, future United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was also seriously wounded. Baker is buried in San Francisco.

Still more on the late freedom of speech in Canada

Screenwriter Alex Epstein writes,

Some odd bits of Canadiana today. The RCMP is telling my assistant that it has approval over any RCMP characters appearing in movies or TV shows. Wow. To an American, that seems kinda, well, fascist. You can't criticize an Arm of the Government without the Arm's approval?

Founders' College collapses

I was way out of the loop on this, but it looks like Founders College didn't work. (More here.) Although I didn't think it was the wisest use of resources that committed Objectivists could have chosen, I think it would have been nice if it had succeeded.

Bulwer-Lytton Contest winner

This year's winner: "Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."'

Wow, that's something else. Worse even than poor Bulwer-Lytton himself ever did.

From the Commonplace Book

I've been re-reading Gulliver's Travels lately, and was once again impressed by the brilliant, almost prophetic satires of Part 3. Here's Swift on Lysenko and other Communist agricultural plans.

During our journey he made me observe the several methods used by farmers in managing their lands, which to me were wholly unaccountable; for, except in some very few places, I could not discover one ear of corn or blade of grass....

The sum of his discourse was to this effect: “That about forty years ago, certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and, after five months continuance, came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot.  To this end, they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy.  In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments, and tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing.  All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals.  The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.  By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth’s men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.”

This is almost as prescient as Shakespeare's Jack Cade, whose war against intellectuals disturbingly prefigured the Khmer Rouge.

Communists cheating in the Olympics?

Say it ain't so!

Gotta love those precise court rules

If an attorney wants to appear by telephone at a hearing in California, Rule of Court 3.670(g) requires that he or she notify both the court and opposing counsel of this intention. That rule specifies,

"If the notice is oral, it must be given either in person or by telephone."

Well...yeah. I mean, how else would one give oral notice of anything?

I guess this nixes my plan to take out a series of ads on the local radio station....

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

"Provocative" foodstuffs. What is it with these people?

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism is being published today (although Amazon has it for next week). It contains five entries by me: "Frederick Douglass," "Constitutionalism," "Judiciary," "Censorship," and "Individualism, Ethical And Political."