On this blog I will post some of my publications and writings together with occasional comments on topics of legal history and, to a lesser extent, current events.
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"Soul"
Our younger son once showed my wife and me a documentary about Eric Clapton (I think all our close friends know that my wife is a national-level expert on Clapton after having read everything ever written about him), and in the film B.B. King is interviewed (it appeared the interview was from the late sixties or earlier seventies) and asked whether some of the white guys (mainly Brits) who were pursuing blues guitar-work, such as Eric, were equivalent to those great black guitar artists of the United States, and King said “Yes, no doubt of that,” and then the interviewer asked King if the white guys were equivalent in their vocalizations to the great black blues artists, and King replied, “Are you kidding? No!” The interviewer persisted, “Why not?” and King replied, “They ain’t got SOUL.” The interviewer asked what he meant, and King responded, “They ain’t lived through everything we [i.e. African Americans] have had to live through.”
That is about as good an explanation as I have ever learned of the definition of “soul.”
Use of history in legal decision-making . . . and bourbon
I want to discuss the uses and abuses of history by courts in the decision-making of litigation. To set the stage, here is one example: Maker's Mark Distillery v. Diageo North America: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0126p-06.pdf
And since we are talking about bourbon, here is that classic appreciation of the amber beverage by the novelist Walker Percy: http://www.claremont.org/