The Art of Tetman Callis

“You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination […]

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“Law is at all times an approximation of the ideals of justice then predominant. Each year has its peculiar public problems, and the current law is the solution which each year finds thereto. The next year finds new problems and new solutions of the old ones.” – John B. West, “Multiplicity of Reports”

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“Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women.” – Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…

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“There are some things in life that people simply have to put up with. A glaring stranger is one of them.” – Neal R. Bevans, Tort Law for Paralegals

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“On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds. On the left the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in […]

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“We go up the line again. On the way we pass through a devastated wood with the tree trunks shattered and the ground ploughed up. At several places there are tremendous craters. ‘Great guns, something’s hit that,’ I say to Kat. ‘Trench mortars,’ he replies, and then points up at one of the trees. In […]

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“I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like sick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers hook round the mesh. Often many stand side by side, and breathe the wind that comes down […]

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“In my room behind the table stands a brown leather sofa. I sit down on it. On the walls are pinned countless pictures that I once used to cut out of the newspapers. In between are drawings and postcards that have pleased me. In the corner is a small iron stove. Against the wall opposite […]

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“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades–words, words, but they hold the horror of the world . . . . We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile […]

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“The beneficial effect of doubling the home market for our industry by the simple expedient of higher wages for all employees marked the opening of new vistas of prosperity if not the birth of a vast new economic concept.” – Hugh Johnson to John J. Pershing, September 28, 1930

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“To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror […]

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“When we went to the district-commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish […]

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“Conduct calculated to intimidate and distract those who, though in an adversarial position, have independent responsibilities and important roles in the effective administration of justice cannot be countenanced. The adversary system depends on the effectiveness of adversary counsel. Our rules of procedure are designed in large measure to bring to litigation adversaries who have an […]

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“Men talk much and importantly about principles but they agree upon them much more readily than they do upon details because, perhaps, they hold theoretical principles so much more lightly than they hold practical details.” – Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative

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“Among the moral forces, exists there one superior to justice? This dominates all. Old as humanity, eternal as the need of man and of people to be and to feel themselves protected, it is at the base of all civilization. Art and Science are its tributaries. Religions live and prosper in its shadow. Is it […]

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“A lawyer is not only a professional competent to represent the interest of parties before justice and to defend in a courteous and honourable struggle the interests of the client: he is a necessary auxiliary of the judge, to whom he brings his learning, his probity, and his labour.” – Leon Theodor, Bâtonnier of the […]

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“A favorable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders.  The highest commander and the youngest soldier must always be conscious of the fact that omission and inactivity are worse than resorting to the wrong expedient.” – General Helmuth Karl Bernard von Moltke (as quoted by Trevor N. Dupuy in A Genius for […]

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“The authoritative statement is the statutory text, not the legislative history or any other extrinsic material. Extrinsic materials have a role in statutory interpretation only to the extent they shed a reliable light on the enacting Legislature’s understanding of otherwise ambiguous terms. Not all extrinsic materials are reliable sources of insight into legislative understandings, however, […]

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“The presumption of negligence is not a true presumption. It is an instructed inference of fact and is circumstantial evidence to be considered by the jury. It does not vanish when defendant introduces evidence of his due care in managing the injuring instrumentality, but remains in the case. The jury must weigh the circumstantial evidence […]

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“Truth is often exasperating in her deliberate movements and not to be hurried but she always arrives calm and unflushed at her destination.” – Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative

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“The best committee in the world is a committee of three, two of whose members are dead.” – Tom L. Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio (as quoted by Brand Whitlock in Belgium: A Personal Narrative)

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“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face […]

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“The monuments say Not in Vain and Glory and Sacrifice. But the rows of identical white stones say simply Death, and Death, and more Death.” – Samuel Hynes, “Verdun and Back: A Pilot’s Log”

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“The Somme—or rather the first day of the battle—lingers in memory as an intensely sad affair, a monumental loss of innocence not only for the British Army, but for Britain itself, and the world. Those tragic, cheering ranks of ‘Pal’ and ‘Chums’ battalions hurled into eternity with the fluid sweep of the machine gun cannot […]

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“The person who has an opportunity to prevent a crime and deliberately fails to do so ends up by being resentful to its victim.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945

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“A country is not only what it does—it is what it puts up with, what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky (trans. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945)

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“There is this terrible and fatal quality in all writing, which should no doubt adjure us all to silence—namely, that, no matter how imperfect a picture the writer gives of everything else, he always draws a perfect portrait of himself.” – Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative

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“The origins of the annihilation of the German Jews were much more remote in time than the events of Krystallnacht. They are to be found in popular reactions to the dislocations that accompanied Germany’s belated but headlong rise as an industrial Power in the nineteenth century and in the growth of a virulent form of […]

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“The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be […]

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“In the muddle of competing agencies that constituted the governmental system of the Third Reich, the SS was the effective instrument of domination. Unfettered by the normal restraints of law and accountable only to its commander, and beyond him the Führer himself, it exercised sovereign control over the lives and liberties of German citizens, arresting […]

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