The Art of Tetman Callis

“Few of those forced to account for their actions under Hitler showed remorse or contrition, let alone guilt. With scant exception, they showed themselves, when called to book, incapable of acknowledging their own contribution to the remorseless slide into barbarism during the Nazi era. Alongside the inevitable lies, distortions, and excuses often went, it seems, […]

[Read more →]

“When you are up against the enemy in close combat, you want smoking boots on the other end. You don’t want a fair fight.” – Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster Jr., U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“There were still over 65,000 prisoners of numerous nationalities—the majority of them Jewish—in Auschwitz and its numerous subsidiary camps in mid-January 1945, as the Red Army approached. . . . arrangements to evacuate the camps were improvised with great haste. . . . For five days, beginning on 17 January, long columns of emaciated, starving, […]

[Read more →]

“Riches take to themselves wings, and in a moment least expected elude our grasp.” – Sallie Brock, “The Fall of Richmond” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“There was no way out. The failure of the conspiracy to remove Hitler took away the last opportunity of a negotiated end to the war. For the German people, it ensured the near total destruction of their country. Whatever the varied reactions to the events of 20 July [1944] and their aftermath, ordinary Germans were […]

[Read more →]

“In an assault, actual fear is not a requirement. The victim must simply be apprehensive of the contact. Because awareness is a requirement, a victim cannot be assaulted if he or she is unconscious.” – Neal R. Bevans, Tort Law for Paralegals Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“On any given day in a courthouse anywhere in America, you are far more likely to see a civil trial that involves a car wreck or a divorce than a trial involving intentional torts. This is not because people do not intentionally injure each other. Unfortunately, people hurt, maim, and kill each other every day.” […]

[Read more →]

“In terms of significance, the central myth of art must be the vision of the end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, the free human society.” – Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth is the archetype, though it might be convenient to say myth only when referring to narrative, and archetype when speaking of significance. In the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle […]

[Read more →]

“An author’s narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the integrity of his completed form. Similarly an image is not merely a verbal replica of an external object, but any unit of a verbal structure seen as part of a total pattern or rhythm. Even the letters an author spells his words with form […]

[Read more →]

“The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes […]

[Read more →]

“The assertion that the critic should not look for more in a poem than the poet may safely be assumed to have been conscious of putting there is a common form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology.” – Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email […]

[Read more →]

“The texture of any great work of art is complex and ambiguous.” – Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“For all the continuing (and in some ways astonishing) reserves of strength of the Führer cult among outright Nazi supporters, Hitler had become for the overwhelming majority of Germans the chief hindrance to the ending of the war. Ordinary people might prefer, as they were reported to be saying, ‘an end with horror’ to ‘a […]

[Read more →]

“By 1944, Hitler was a sick man—at times during the year extremely unwell. Cardiograms, the first taken in 1941, had revealed a worsening heart condition. And beyond the chronic stomach and intestinal problems that had increasingly come to plague him, Hitler had since 1942 developed symptoms, becoming more pronounced in 1944, which point with some […]

[Read more →]

“In a modern state, necessarily resting on bureaucracy and dependent upon system and regulated procedure, centring all spheres of power in the hands of one man—whose leadership style was utterly unbureaucratic and whose approach to rule was completely unsystematic, resting as it did on a combination of force and propaganda—could only produce administrative chaos amid […]

[Read more →]

“The German people’s bonds with Hitler were dissolving. This was no overnight phenomenon. But Stalingrad was the point at which the signs became unmistakable. . . . The mood was sullenly depressed, anxious about the present, fearful of the future, above all else weary of the war; but not rebellious. . . . [T[houghts of […]

[Read more →]

“If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did not let it show. Those in his closest proximity could detect the signs of nervous strain. He hinted privately at his worry that his health would not stand up to the pressure. […]

[Read more →]

“In Munich, a group of students, together with one of their professors, whose idealism and mounting detestation of the criminal inhumanity of the regime had led them the previous year to form the ‘White Rose’ opposition-group, now openly displayed their attack on Hitler. The medical students Alexander Schmorell and Hans Scholl had formed the initial […]

[Read more →]

“For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. A radio broadcast linking troops on all the fighting fronts, including Stalingrad, brought tears to the eyes of many a family gathered around the Christmas tree back home, as the men […]

[Read more →]

“For those in the Führer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at […]

[Read more →]

“The law is nothing more than a means to a social end and should never, for all the law schools and law firms in the world, be treated as an end in itself.” – Fred Rodell, Yale Law School, “Goodbye to Law Reviews” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.” – Fred Rodell, Yale Law School, “Goodbye to Law Reviews” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“The minute you read something and you can’t understand it, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer. Then if you give it to another lawyer to read and he don’t know just what it means, why then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer.” – […]

[Read more →]

“Do not start writing your brief or memo until you have a succinct statement of what the case is about. And you must do this in 50-75 words. If you can’t explain the case in 75 words, you do not understand it very well, and neither will your reader. Too often I have seen cases […]

[Read more →]

“A litigation system must be workable. It does little to advance underlying policy goals to have a system that is too complex for trial courts and jurors—who in the last analysis are linchpins in our litigation system—to implement.” – Kenneth S. Abraham and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., compilers, A Concise Restatement of Torts Share this… […]

[Read more →]

“Elser himself was already under arrest at the customs post near Konstanz when the bomb went off. He had been picked up trying to cross the Swiss border illegally. It seemed a routine arrest. Only some hours after the explosion did the border officials begin to realize that the contents of Georg Elser’s pockets, including […]

[Read more →]

“It was some time in October [1939] that Hitler had one of his secretaries type, on his own headed notepaper and backdated to 1 September 1939—the day that the war had begun—the single sentence: ‘Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr med. Brandt are commissioned with the responsibility of extending the authority of specified doctors so that, after […]

[Read more →]

“With the decision to invade the Soviet Union, confirmed in the directive of 18 December 1940, Hitler had closed off his strategic options. In his anxiety not to concede the initiative in the war, he had shifted the entire focus of the German war effort to the aim of inflicting comprehensive military defeat on the […]

[Read more →]

“Hitler’s combination of bullying and blackmail could not have worked but for the fragility of the post-war European settlement. The Treaty of Versailles was ‘the blackmailer’s lucky find’. It had given Hitler the basis for his rising demands, accelerating drastically in 1938-9. It had provided the platform for ethnic unrest, that Hitler could easily exploit, […]

[Read more →]