No matter what reasons you might give for the lack of fulfillment of many the Trump’s promises and no matter whether you agree with Poltifact’s categorizations of compromised, stalled, or in-the-works promises, only a fraction of the President’s pledges have been kept. Even so, educated, knowledgeable, historically and politically astute friends maintain that Trump is keeping his promises. That disconnect makes me think back to Ronald Reagan. Reagan was politically popular even though polls often showed widespread disagreement with many of his specific proposals and policies. Even so, Reagan was able to project an overall message that resonated with many. Ethan Bronner in Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America examines this phenomenon and finds this lesson: “People would go with you if they were attracted to the feel of your campaign, even if they disagreed with many aspects of it.”

Something similar is happening with my friends, and I assume for others. Trump’s promises projected a feel. His speech announcing his candidacy was important not for its promises but for an attitude. Trump said that existing politicians could not make America great again because “they’re controlled fully by lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully.” The public does not want the usual “nice” person in office because “they’re tired of being ripped off by everybody in the world.” America is no longer a winner. “We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us.” The world has taken advantage of the United States. America, battered, stands alone. For example, Mexico is “laughing at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems.”

There are no promises here, but in this opening salvo Trump projected a tone or a feel. His promises have been consistent with that tone. For many that feel is what was promised and is being kept no matter what the score is on specific promises. It may be overwhelmingly likely that Trump will keep only a minority of his promises, but it does not matter to many because what he does and says all seem consistent with that feel he has communicated to so many in the country. If we think that what he promised was that feel and don’t look at the specifics of his pledges, then it feels as though he has been keeping his promises.

RELATED POST

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bullshit

Many presidential promises require the action of Congress. Trump does not have the constitutional authority to enact the tax plan that he promised. It requires congressional passage. Perhaps we can conclude that a president is hypocritical in making promises that are not entirely in his control, but many, if not most people, know this when the promise is made and reasonably conclude that the promise really is, “I will work for the enactment of a law that will do this.” On some level the promise is broken if the promised law is not enacted, but this broken promise is not as bad as other unfulfilled promises if the president has worked sincerely and diligently for the passage of the promised legislation.

More blameworthy are Trump’s promises where a president has no role or authority in their implementation. For example, Trump said that he would sign an executive order that would require convicted cop killers to be executed. No president has the authority to do this. The sentences for killing state and local police offers are determined by state law. The president does not have authority over state criminal laws. The federal government does have a death penalty, but not one that imposes that sentence on cop killers. Even if the federal government could constitutionally authorize executions for the murder of police officers (and that is a big if), it would require legislation passed by Congress, and the president has proposed no such legislation. Instead, he said that he would sign an executive order to accomplish this death penalty, but the president does not have the constitutional authority to decide how and when crimes are to be punished. (Dare I say that that only happens in dictatorships.)  Furthermore, the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution forbids the automatic imposition of the death penalty for any crime and that juries must weigh aggravating and mitigating factors to decide whether a death sentence should be imposed. A mandated death penalty for cop killings is unconstitutional. In other words, Trump made a promise that would require him to take an unconstitutional action.

This promise of executions for cop killers may have just been empty words. Trump may never have had this as a policy goal; perhaps he made the statements merely because the statements appealed to his supporters. If so, however, it falls into the hypocritical category. If he was sincere, he had to be ignorant of presidential limitations and the basic structure of separation of powers and our federal system. If the promise fell into this latter category, how should this death-penalty promise be considered? My view: A person in authority or seeking authority should comprehend the limits of that authority. The promise that the maker knows or should know cannot be fulfilled is the equivalent of being hypocritical. The adage is appropriate here: Ignorance is no excuse.

Politicians may also backtrack on promises claiming that circumstances have changed since the promise. For example, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 proclaiming that he had kept us out of the Great War. Less than a year later he was asking Congress for a declaration of war, but he said that the continuing destruction of neutral shipping by Germany now made war necessary. A politician may acknowledge that he promised to build a dam, but he no longer would support the new dam. He might say that when he made the promise the dam would have cost $1 billion and now it be $2 billion. The dam no longer makes sense, he says, and it will not be built.

Surely promises should not be followed if changed circumstances make a once wise promise unwise, but in judging the broken promise, we should not just accept the changed-circumstances rationale. With that dam, for example, we should question the cost estimates. Were the numbers sound or the product of ignorance or fabricated for the politician’s purposes? If the promise-maker knew or should have known that the estimates were not truly sound, then the promise and its breaking was hypocritical or ignorant. However, even if the numbers are solid, it still may be hard to determine if the new circumstance is the real motivation for the change. The politician may have promised a dam he did not intend to build and seizes the fig leaf of valid numbers to explain a result he always intended—no dam.

Trump’s promises so far, however, have not fallen into the category of not-fulfilled-because-of-changed-circumstances. They probably won’t in the future either because it seems unlikely that Trump would ever admit that he had not kept a promise.

(concluded on August 20)

RELATED POST

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bullshit

At least some right-leaning pundits suggest that Trump has not kept promises that Politifact has not rated as broken. Consider the conservative columnist Ross Douthat who writes that Trump has to be strong on tariffs “because it’s the only remaining economic issue where he’s stuck to his campaign promises. . . . . Those campaign promises, as everyone is well aware, were generally more populist than the official G.O.P. agenda: Trump promised middle-class tax cuts and a generous Obamacare alternative, he stiff-armed the entitlement reformers and talked up infrastructure spending, and he railed against free trade deals with every other breath.” Douthat states these promises were essential to his victory, but as President he has mostly reverted to traditional Republicanism and he has not fulfilled his populist promises: “The infrastructure plan never materialized and the tax cut was a great whopping favor to corporate interests and the health care repeal-and-replace effort was a misbegotten flop.” Attacks on free trade and imposing tariffs are all that is left of Trump’s economic populism.

Douthat’s opinions indicate that different people can come to different conclusions about whether Trump has broken his promises. While the conservative columnist sees important broken promises, Politifact sees the enacted tax plan as a Trump compromise; the infrastructure promise in the stalled category; and the Obamacare pledge as in the works.

Douthat also indicates that in judging promises, all promises are not created equal. Assessing the relative importance of a promise is even more subjective than categorizing whether a promise has been broken or whether someday, somehow, even though unlikely, it will be fulfilled. What did you consider Trump’s most important promises? That list is probably different from mine, and we no doubt would differ as to how Trump is doing in keeping or breaking his promises. There is great value in Politifact tracking 102 promises, but it treats them all equally when, of course, they are not.

Which promises are kept and broken is important, but perhaps it is also important why a promise is broken. For example, the President promised to do many things on his first day in office, at least some of which he did not do.  Does that really matter if he does them a month or two later?

On the other hand, some Trump promises may not have been kept because he was not sincere in making them; fingers were crossed behind his back. Of course, any insincere promise-maker is a hypocrite or a liar. If there are gradations for broken promises, this is the worst, and I am sure anti-Trump people see many of his unfulfilled promises in this category.

While it is difficult to determine whether a promise-maker was insincere, a related category of unfulfilled promises broken is more objective. These are promises that were uttered to please the listeners but were made without any plan for their implementation and no efforts made to fulfill them. Replacing Obamacare with a system that would have better coverage with lower premiums falls into this category. Who wouldn’t like the country to have this? But there was never a plan for it or even an attempt to devise such a plan. This is not surprising, because, in all likelihood, it is impossible. Perhaps Trump really meant to propose this golden health care system, but the promise was so problematic that it comes close to a false promise. Having Mexico pay for a border wall also falls into this category. (My friends who say Trump keeps his promises tell me that this is not a broken promise because no one could take this promise seriously. Yet, I have seen many Trump supporters say that, of course, Trump will get Mexico to pony up. My friends’ conclusion that the promise was so ludicrous that it should not have been taken seriously seems to be in effect saying that Trump was lying when he made the promise.)

(continued on August 17)

RELATED POST

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bullshit

In separate conversations, two of my very smart friends who regularly criticize Donald Trump have pronounced that they give him credit for keeping his campaign promises. These mirror signs at Trump rallies: “Promises Made: Promises Kept.” My reaction has been “Really!”

I remember him whipping up his campaign crowds with four major pledges: To build a border wall that Mexico would pay for; to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a better system where all would have health insurance at lower premiums; to bring back manufacturing jobs; and a tax plan where everyone would have a tax cut and businesses would be taxed at a 15% rate. And, of course, in addition to these biggies, Trump made a slew of other promises.

I went to look for a more objective source than my memory of how the President was doing in keeping his myriad promises. I turned to Politifact.com, a fact-checking website that has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Politifact had kept score on Obama’s promises and concluded that he had broken about a quarter of them. That website now has a Trump-O-Meter which tracks 102 promises made by Donald Trump. Its summary states the President has kept twelve promises and broken eight. It concludes that seven have been “compromised,” thirty-three are “stalled” and the other forty-two are “in the works.” The Trump-O-Meter makes interesting reading, and I urge my friends and everyone else to look at it.

You can argue with some of Politifact’s assessments. Take the tax cut. By most analyses, everyone does get a tax cut for a while, but taxes will increase on many people in a few years, and the business rate is 21%, not 15%. Politifact places the tax cut promise in the “compromise” category, a defensible categorization, but others might conclude that a compromised promise is a broken promise.

The “stalled” category contains promises that conceivably might someday be fulfilled, but for many of them, the President could have taken action but has not. Thus, Trump said he would propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits for all members of Congress; impose a hiring freeze on federal employees; and appoint a special Hillary Clinton prosecutor. Presumably such promises can be categorized as “stalled,” not “broken,” until his last day in office because there is a chance they will be kept one day.  On the other hand, the chances that some stalled promises will be kept seem so slim as to be really non-existent. What odds would you lay that, as Trump promised, the federal debt will be eliminated in eight years or that the federal budget will be balanced “fairly quickly”?

The Obamacare promises are rated “in the works.” The plural is used because Trump’s pledges on the topic varied. As a candidate, he sometimes said Obamacare would be repealed and replaced “immediately.” I would say that promise has been broken. Other times he left out immediately but said that Obamacare would be replaced “with a great, great plan” with premiums at a “fraction” of existing ones. Other times he promised that all would continue to have their present doctor. Sometimes he promised more complete coverage than under Obamacare. Other times he would just promise to “repeal and replace Obamacare” without further elucidation. Congress, of course, considered repealing Obamacare, but the effort failed. While actions have been taken to undermine Obamacare, I am not aware that Trump ever proposed any replacement plan that was “great,” that had extensive coverage, allowing all to keep their doctors, and paying only a fraction of existing premiums. If the President is working on such a replacement plan now, he is uncharacteristically quiet about it. But Politifact categorizes the Obamacare promises as “in the works” as they do many other promises, including ones that I was hoping for, his pledges on improving our infrastructure.

(continued on August15)

RELATED POST

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=bullshit

When I worked in White Plains, a city in Westchester County north of the Bronx, I would take the subway from my Brooklyn home to the northern reaches of Manhattan and run the eight or ten or twelve miles to White Plains. That meant crossing the Harlem River. There are a number of bridges with walkways that do that, and I ran over quite a few of them, but I don’t remember their names. I did not especially enjoy these bridges. I almost always ran them going to the Bronx. The views of the Bronx were uninspiring, and often I was thinking about how it was going to be running through the South Bronx, a very tough neighborhood in those days. These bridges were utilitarian, only part of my route to get me from point A to point B.

Just as I ran over the George Washington Bridge only once, I ran over the Manhattan Bridge but once. In my running days, the Manhattan Bridge walkways were not open. The plural is correct because that bridge has walkways on both north and south sides. I call them walkways even though one is now supposedly reserved for bicyclists and the other for pedestrians. I have gone over both walkways since they opened, but by walking or biking, not running. Neither is pleasant.  Both are narrow and on the same level as the road and the subway tracks.  With trains rattling twelve yards away and cars constantly on the move even closer, the bridge is hardly a respite from the city. On the plus side, however, I like peering down into Chinatown, a place that still retains some mystery for me.

The only time that I ran over the Manhattan Bridge was in a race, put on by a newspaper that printed legal news. It was billed as a courthouse-to-courthouse run.  It started at the federal courthouse in Manhattan, went over the Manhattan Bridge on the roadway to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, turned around, back over the bridge again, and ended at the federal courthouse in Manhattan’s Foley Square. We ran on the bridge’s road, not either of its walkways, and the entire race may have been four miles. I remember nothing of what I saw.

I do remember, however, many of the runs over the Williamsburg Bridge. Those runs were not nearly as frequent as my passages on the Brooklyn Bridge, but I ran the Williamsburg Bridge frequently going to and from my office when I worked in lower Manhattan. If I wanted a short run, I ran from my home over the Brooklyn Bridge to my law school or vice versa, a three-plus-mile distance. If I wanted something longer, I went over the Williamsburg, about a 10K run.

The Williamsburg Bridge walkway was not in good shape when I ran it. It was supposed to be covered with something like tiles, but many were missing, giving a sense of decay. The path did not seem unsafe, but it was unsightly. It, however, was elevated above the roadway allowing unimpeded views. The bridge is situated at a dramatic bend in the East River. To the north, one can see to the United Nations and beyond; to the south, to Governor’s Island, the Statute of Liberty, and beyond. No bridge I had crossed before or since offered better views. If you get the chance, walk or bike or run across that bridge. But stop in the middle of the span and admire the view.

But running in New York also brought me to many other bridges because, as I said, New York City is a city of bridges. Many of the bridges are not widely known, but I have run over bridges that span the Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal; that are above waters in Mill Basin and Gerritsen Beach; and that separate the Rockaways from the mainland. I have run over bridges to get to Roosevelt Island and City Island. There are bridges in Central Park and Prospect Park.

Running has given me memories of many New York City bridges. They gave me vistas and skies and waters I would not otherwise have seen or noticed. But there was another good thing about those bridge-crossings. They often brought me to a new neighborhood, places to learn about and explore. But that is for another day.

RELATED POSTS

Running the Brooklyn Bridge

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=%22brooklyn+bridge%22

Before the Marathon

https://ameliasdad.blog/2017/11/06/before-the-marathon/

Who is Othmar?

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=othmar

It may not be apparent when walking the canyons of Manhattan, sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone, or gazing longingly at the single-family homes of Forest Hills, but New York City is a city of bridges. When I was younger and a runner, I experienced many of those bridges and in a different way from driving over them. Each time I ran over a bridge for the first time, I was aware it was a new experience. I felt as if I had “collected” another one.

I have both walked and run over the Brooklyn Bridge, but I have run over it many more times than I have walked it. Early in my running days, I would run over it and back at lunch time. Later I would run to and from work over the Brooklyn Bridge several times a week. I have tried to calculate the total number of trips, but those calculations are not precise. I’m guessing it was more than a thousand times. I have run the Brooklyn Bridge in the heat and humidity of summer and the cold and crispness of winter, early morning and at night, in rain and in snow, and almost every time its Gothic arches, its supporting wires’ parabolas, its views gave me some sort of thrill.

While I have been over the Brooklyn Bridge many times, I ran over the the George Washington Bridge that connects New York City and New Jersey but once. It was after seeing a doctor in upper Manhattan. I ran from the office to nearby parks on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River and then north to the bridge. I had driven over the bridge many times, and I always admired the view north up the Hudson. The Hudson is a majestic river, and I envy those who have homes overlooking it. However, I was a bit disappointed as I ran across the GWB. The walkway is on the south side of the bridge, so the view up the Hudson is obstructed. On the other hand, this walkway is higher than any of the other bridge walkways and this allowed me to feel as if I were taking my place among the birds. The sun was strong and sparkled off the water far below. The views of Manhattan were spectacular with the sun mirroring off skyscraper windows. Everything looked like a stage set.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that connects Brooklyn and Staten Island is also high above the water. (New York arcana: While the structure is the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the water it spans is simply The Narrows.) I have run over that bridge only while participating in New York City marathons. That is hardly surprising since that bridge does not have a walkway and the only time it can be traversed on foot is during that event. I understand that it must cost extra to include a pedestrian path, and that it might be seldom used on this particular bridge, but I do think all bridges should allow for foot and bike traffic.

Running that bridge during a marathon was hardly a sightseeing opportunity. The marathon starts on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and the runners are tightly clustered. I only could see other runners, and I had to concentrate on running my pace without either being run over or stepping on someone’s heels. If there was a spectacular view of the harbor (there no doubt is), I never saw it.

The marathon goes across the 59^th Street Bridge, also known as the Queensboro Bridge connecting Manhattan and Queens, too. (Now that bridge has an additional name because, for reasons not clear to me, the city or state, or whoever is in charge of such naming, adds dead politicians’ names to them.) I hated it. During the race, we were allowed to run on the roadway or the walkway. The first time I ran on the road because it was more open with fewer runners than the walkway, but the road has little metal projections, presumably to give cars more traction, but they felt like spikes and hurt my feet. In subsequent years I tried to run on the walkway, which was covered with matting.

Even if my feet were not hurt by the bridge, it was hard running. The 59^th Street Bridge comes at the sixteen-mile mark of the marathon. Sixteen miles is a long way to run, but there are still ten more miles to go! It was hard not to be psychologically drained at this point, and, of course, the half the bridge uphill. That incline seemed a mile long, and that was tough to do after sixteen miles. That bridge itself was the loneliest part of the marathon. The runners by now had thinned, many were struggling, and there were no spectators to cheer us on. Thoughts about dropping out surfaced, but I struggled to make it over the bridge each marathon.

Even though I have no pleasant memories of the 59^th Street Bridge from the marathon, I did run over it a few other times. When I was not so exhausted from having run sixteen miles before encountering it, it was not so bad. But still I never enjoyed it. The walkway is next to the highway, and the bridge’s structure impedes views of Manhattan and the East River. I decided to avoid the 59^th Street Bridge on my runs as much as possible.

(continued on August 10.)

RELATED POSTS

Running the Brooklyn Bridge

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=%22brooklyn+bridge%22

Before the Marathon

https://ameliasdad.blog/2017/11/06/before-the-marathon/

Who is Othmar?

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=othmar

I didn’t know what to make of the man who asked for money saying he wanted to buy food because he was hungry, and he was wearing earbuds.

New Yorkers are not always as tolerant as I would like. Someone made fun of me for eating sushi at a Yankees baseball game.

Why is it that conservatives refer to the Democrat Party but not the Republic Party?

The package for the mini-cucumbers bought at a fancy, and therefore overpriced, food mart was labeled “locally grown in New England.” If those cukes had come from California, Mexico, Peru, or Timbuctoo, wouldn’t they still have been locally grown?

At a different market, the sign above the cucumbers said, “3 for $3.” I was unsure if that was different from a dollar apiece, so I bought three.

Over breakfast at the recent stay at a Virginia bed and breakfast, I met a woman from New York who worked in “wealth management,” a field I only vaguely understand. She said that she had a client worth over $100 million who was very pro-Trump. I asked why he felt that way. I expected the answer to be something along the lines of liking the tax cut and how good it would be for the country, something I have heard from other rich people who will pay tens of thousands dollars less to the government. She said, however, that her client said he was behind Trump because “he felt so disrespected by Obama.”

“Fucked up is the universal condition of man.” Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.

In a park or outside an old house, I would come across a hand pump as a kid. Of course, I had to try it. The first couple strokes always seemed hard, but with minimal persistence they became easier. As I pumped, I would wonder if the pump still worked. Was there really water down there? Sometimes the effort produced nothing, but with others, a little water would spurt out. That sight produced a quickened, more forceful stroke. Then larger spurts, and finally, a stream without interruption. These efforts always produced a smile and a sense of accomplishment, a satisfaction that most in a younger generation will never have.

“The speed of light: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

I didn’t know what to make of the man who asked for money saying he wanted to buy food because he was hungry, and he was wearing earbuds.

New Yorkers are not always as tolerant as I would like. Someone made fun of me for eating sushi at a Yankees baseball game.

Why is it that conservatives refer to the Democrat Party but not the Republic Party?

The package for the mini-cucumbers bought at a fancy, and therefore overpriced, food mart was labeled “locally grown in New England.” If those cukes had come from California, Mexico, Peru, or Timbuctoo, wouldn’t they still have been locally grown?

At a different market, the sign above the cucumbers said, “3 for $3.” I was unsure if that was different from a dollar apiece, so I bought three.

Over breakfast at the recent stay at a Virginia bed and breakfast, I met a woman from New York who worked in “wealth management,” a field I only vaguely understand. She said that she had a client worth over $100 million who was very pro-Trump. I asked why he felt that way. I expected the answer to be something along the lines of liking the tax cut and how good it would be for the country, something I have heard from other rich people who will pay tens of thousands dollars less to the government. She said, however, that her client said he was behind Trump because “he felt so disrespected by Obama.”

“Fucked up is the universal condition of man.” Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.

In a park or outside an old house, I would come across a hand pump as a kid. Of course, I had to try it. The first couple strokes always seemed hard, but with minimal persistence they became easier. As I pumped, I would wonder if the pump still worked. Was there really water down there? Sometimes the effort produced nothing, but with others, a little water would spurt out. That sight produced a quickened, more forceful stroke. Then larger spurts, and finally, a stream without interruption. These efforts always produced a smile and a sense of accomplishment, a satisfaction that most in a younger generation will never have.

“The speed of light: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

The novel-reading I did when a judge took a break seemed only a continuation of what I had done from the first grade, for I had been an avid reader from an early age. Even so, the mentor attorney who said read a good novel each week made me wonder if novel-reading could actually aid my professional career. I thought about conversations with the not-yet-spouse when I was in law school. She was in graduate school studying English literature, and her professors stressed the close reading of texts. Some of my law school professors recounted their conversations with those same English professors and how they discussed the similarities between the study of English and the law, both centering on the close reading of texts.

Law requires close reading. Judicial opinions are read carefully to extract the deciding principles to apply those principles to future legal disputes. Statutes and regulations and contracts have to be read carefully with the assumption that every word matters. However, I didn’t think that the mentor urging the reading of novels was referring to the similarity of the close reading of literary and legal texts. Instead, he was saying that because a trial concerned the human lives of witnesses, jurors, judges, and attorneys, the more the trial attorney understood human perceptions, reactions, motives—human psychology in general—the better the attorney could perform. As I became more experienced trying cases, I realized that he was right: The more I could understand others, the better I was in the courtroom.

Each of us, of course, learns human psychology from our own experiences, but the attorney was suggesting we needed to find ways to expand our knowledge about others beyond that gained from our firsthand observations and interactions. I found that I agreed with that.

The experienced attorney was telling us that one of the quickest and best ways to expand beyond our personal experiences was to read novels, for good novels often contain insights into human nature and behavior. Good novels imaginatively explore human behavior and psychology with sharp observations of manners and societies. Trials are always about human behavior, psychology, and societies, so reading the insights of great writers might help a trial attorney. On the other hand, I have known people who read much but remain clueless. I don’t know if novel-reading truly enlightens me or others, but I learned that trials tell stories and can make, change, rehabilitate, and destroy lives. Novel-reading certainly could not hurt a trial attorney, so, as a trial attorney, I continued to read novels. But I still did not read them while court was in session. And whether novels have aided me or not, I know that reading novels is more enjoyable than reading advance sheets.

I don’t recall how the conversation started. I do remember that the attorney, a generation older than we newbie bar members, said, “If you want to be a trial lawyer, read a novel a week.” I was not the only listener who looked quizzical. He continued, “To be good at trials you have to understand human nature, and the best way to learn human nature is to read good novels.” He repeated, “Read a novel a week.” Since he had a reputation as a stellar trial attorney, I registered his remark. My first reaction was to think that there might be something in his pronouncement, but I also quickly concluded, “It has to be better than reading advance sheets.”

Court decisions are eventually published in bound volumes, but back in the day, a considerable lag intervened between the time the court issued an opinion and the decision’s appearance in the official report. Today, the opinions are filed online as soon as they are rendered, and there is immediate access to them. When I started as an attorney, though, there was no internet. Instead, in New York, a weekly magazine-like publication was available containing a week’s worth of opinions by the New York courts. These were called advance sheets.

I spent a good part of my working day as a Legal Aid attorney waiting in the inefficient Manhattan courtrooms for a case to be called. I initially filled the time by reading books, but this brought on the ire of the court officers. I could understand that a newspaper with its rustling pages might be an irritant, but, for reasons I never understood, those officers also forbade the reading of books. I learned, however, that I could read my case files. Preparing for the upcoming hearing was acceptable to the court personnel.

Then I tried reading an advance sheet. The court officer came over for chastisement, but when I held it up, he saw what it was and walked away. I assumed that he thought the reading was preparation for a case about to be called. From then on, I carried advance sheets to court. This not only passed the time better than sitting dumbly waiting for something to do, it also advanced my legal education. The front of the advance sheets broke down the enclosed decisions into legal subject matters, and I read every decision on criminal law and criminal procedure because that was what I was practicing. Most of the opinions were mundane, but from reading them I got a thorough grounding in New York criminal law and procedure.

However, even before the advice from the seasoned attorney, I had read novels, and I continued to do so afterwards. I did read them in the courthouse, but not in a courtroom when court was in session. My memory of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray is bound up with memories of the Brooklyn Criminal Courthouse. I was working a week of night court where the court was in session from 6 PM until 1 AM, grueling for many reasons. The judge, however, took numerous breaks, and I made significant dents in Vanity Fair. I was entranced with the character and name “Amelia,” and my difficult work was made a bit more bearable whenever I could dip into Thackeray’s created world drawing me away from the real world I was dealing with of poverty, violence, ignorance, and crime.

(Concluded on August 3)

“Dreams of God and of gold (not necessarily in that order) made America possible.” Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.”

“It takes three men to pull the body from the water.” Christine Mangan, Tangerine

“Cola Pesce was always playing in the sea and one day his mother said in exasperation she hoped he’d turn into a fish.” Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“My father, Oswald Jacoby, was an unquestioned mathematical genius.” Oswald Jacoby and James Jacoby, Jacoby on Card Games.

“The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born—we weren’t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lily and Egg.” John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire.

“This book was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the split-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying.” Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

“’Now what I want is, Fact.’” Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

“The first news story appeared on the morning of April 6, 1987, when the Charlotte Observer reported that a barge filled with New York garbage had been turned away from a privately owned port near Morehead City, North Carolina.” Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York the Last Two Hundred Years.

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Toni Morrison, Sula.

“My first indication that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one’s face when hungry—like filling up at a gas station—came after fourth grade.” Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.