Welcome to The Cardinal Lawyer. This forum represents your direct link to the University of Louisville School of Law and to the dean's office. I hope to post items here on a regular basis, the better to stay in touch with the Law School's most valued constituents.
I'd like to take this opportunity to spotlight the University of Louisville's Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility. The Center has a threefold mission:
» Adapted from the August 2008 issue of the Louisville Bar Association's Bar Briefs «
In the hope that homage delayed is not homage denied, I dedicate this post to the first legal academic I ever met. A quarter century of familiarity with that scholar's work lights a path toward understanding the place and the power and the grace and the grandeur of law in a world beyond borders.
Harold J. Berman died November 13, 2007, at the age of 89. I knew him as an advisor and an instructor. I first met him at Emory University in the mid-1980s, where he recommended the study of law. Professor Berman later supervised one of my first scholarly papers in law, which began as an assignment in his Harvard Law School seminar on international business law.
The legal world will long remember Professor Berman for his contributions to Soviet law, legal history, international law, and above all his "integrative jurisprudence" of law in concert with history, politics, and morality. His work reached its apogee in the two books called Law and Revolution. Part I, published in 1983, addressed The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition; part II, published in 2004, explored The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition.
Professor Berman's work informs the global practice of law at multiple levels. In the first instance, his expansive view of law transcends the conventional understanding, often expressed in "international" or "transnational" settings, of law as a product of the contemporary nation-state and of the nation-state, in turn, as a creation of the Peace of Westphalia. To Professor Berman, to think so narrowly would be to party as if it were 1648. The Western legal tradition grew from many sources beyond national authority, including canon law and the law of feudal lords and global merchants.
Like all other journeys, legal education has a fairly well defined end. Like the best of journeys, legal education at its best does not set its destination in advance, but rather refocuses along the way. Moreover, this is no overnight trip. Although students spend as few as a thousand days at the Law School, the University of Louisville's bond with its graduates lasts a lifetime. With those thoughts in mind, I am pleased to offer readers of The Cardinal Lawyer a bit of literary inspiration on the first day of classes during the 2008-09 academic year. Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης), better known in the English-speaking world as Constantine P. Cavafy, was a major Greek poet who lived from 1863 to 1933. Among his 154 poems, perhaps the best known and most beloved is Ithaka. This poem makes apt reading for all new beginnings, including the first day of a life in the law.
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Herewith Access to Knowledge: Defining and Measuring Economic, Legal, and Human Capital 
, my contribution to a July 13, 2008, program called International Law and the Evolving Knowledge Society at the 2008 meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries.
A Flickr photo set by Donald Vish (class of 1970) commemorates a July 9, 2008, event honoring the Honorable John D. Minton, Jr., the fifth Chief Justice of Kentucky. Chief Justice Minton met members and leaders of the Louisville Bar Association and the Jefferson County judiciary.
The Cardinal Lawyer welcomes members and friends of the UofL Law community to collaborate on a new project — The Cardinal Lawyer II: Birds of a Feather.
Birds of a Feather represents an extension of the original Cardinal Lawyer blog. At Birds of a Feather, I invite graduates, students, faculty, staff, and friends of UofL Law to build pages that present people, news, events, and ideas of interest to the entire Law School community. The key is collaboration: this new site, unlike the original Cardinal Lawyer weblog, counts on an entire community of readers to contribute content of their own.
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| Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultán’s Turret in a Noose of Light. — Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) | |
Translations, according to conventional wisdom, are like lovers. Though the most faithful translations may be plain, the most beautiful translations tend to be unfaithful.
The opening words of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám leave little doubt: the Rubaiyat’s 75 quatrains would take their place among the most beautiful lines of English verse. How faithful FitzGerald was to the original Farsi is, to put it mildly, a different matter: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on . . . .”
What concerns me here is the question of fidelity in translation in a realm far removed from poetry. Law, which is after all a truth-seeking enterprise, is so thoroughly dedicated to the disciplinary and organizational functions of government that it must banish “falsity, irrationality, and seductiveness” — the very traits that make all literature, lyric, epic, or prosaic, irresistibly beautiful.
This essay addresses questions of truth and beauty, of poetry and fidelity, as applied to legal education and ultimately to law. After discussing how law schools can most faithfully translate their teachings to lawyers’ real concerns, I shall ponder how the law itself reconciles its duty to truth with its practitioners’ longing for beauty.
Editor’s note: This essay extends themes first developed in Fidelity in Translation and Law’s Double Helix.
In response to this forum's discussion of Duke football, Mack Sperling has posted a fantastic article, The Law And Duke Football. Mr. Sperling departed from "the mainstream of the business litigation decisions that" he normally covers on his blog, North Carolina Business Litigation Report, in order to discuss the Louisville-Duke football controversy as "a contract case that's important to the jurisprudence of North Carolina." In so doing, he stresses "the quality of Duke University football" — or, more accurately, its utter absence.
In Danzig U.S.A. and elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we take college sports very seriously. Partisans of the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky spare nothing in passionately supporting their teams — and in vigorously opposing their teams' rivals. If there is one opponent that unites the Cardinal Nation with Wildcat Country, it is Duke University's Blue Devils.
True to the traditional athletic preferences of Kentucky and North Carolina — two states where the cultivation of tobacco surely gives rise to their unusual predilection, unknown elsewhere in the South, for basketball over football — Louisville and UK partisans have historically trained their hatred at Duke's basketball program. But a recent decision by Judge Phillip J. Shepherd of the Franklin County (Ky.) Circuit Court gives people across the Bluegrass State reason to despise Duke football as well:
