TO-WIT: THE GOOD OLD DAYS
It is not very often that I find myself at the courthouse anymore, and even less often when it also happens to be time for lunch. It is for me such a sweet coalescence, as it affords me yet another occasion to dine with colleagues at Sans Merci, my favorite downtown restaurant.
It’s a quaint, little faux French establishment that sits across the street from the courthouse, nothing at all like your cold, au courant, big city eatery, perish forbid. The menu hasn’t changed since Napoleon’s time, and the food hasn’t been fresh since then either, but it is nonetheless a most amiable and familiar place, kind of like well-worn slippers absent most of the smell. “Perish forbid,” incidentally, is the phrase we all use whenever the food is served.
For many years now, a regular coterie of my colleagues and I have gathered there for lunch and companionship, to share stories and reminisce about what we have deluded ourselves into thinking were the good old days. It is not only a denial of the aging process to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, it also distracts us from trying to figure out what we’ve really been served.
“Remember when a landlord could simply distrain for rent,” a colleague reminisced. With that we all paused in silent and respectful reverie as homage to one of the most beloved inequities of all time.
“Oh yes,” another chimed in, “wasn’t that glorious? And confessions of judgment without any notice or hearing? God bless those warrants of attorney, oh, oh, oh.”
They’re pretty much gone now, those things, and have been for decades, their disappearance a result of a shift in focus onto due process of law and away from what’s convenient for its practitioners. Now that’s all well and good, I suppose, but there used to be so many quirky little paths to justice, oddities more concerned with result than means, making our work so much less labor intensive. Of course, we all knew about due process of law, notice and hearing and all that, we had read about it in law school, but now we were in the real world and those things, golly, well, they took so much time.
In addition to distraint and confession of judgement, there were any number of other examples of antediluvian gambols that, like the plague and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, are now extinct. That they are no longer around to ravage the poor, the defenseless, and whatever gender is then out of favor is most likely a good thing, but I would hate to see them pass into the fog of forgotten dreams without any remembrance at all. Inimical they might have been, but the best way to prevent new transgressions is to never forget the old ones. So, if you’ve forgotten, or if they were gone before you arrived on the scene, permit me to recall some of those quirky things we used to have at our disposal. Yeah, they were pretty ruthless, and yeah, they were pretty cruel, but I suppose in hindsight that’s what made them so much fun.
INJURED AND INNOCENT SPOUSE – Ah yes, the battle cry of the “fault” divorce, when marital freedom still required proof of marital misconduct. Proving adultery was almost always the name of the game, requiring stealth, planning, cunning and a photographer. Once no-fault divorce reared its insipid head and took sin completely out of the equation though, many colleagues got bored and quit doing matrimonial law completely. “It’s not as much fun without photographs,” one of my friends opined; he and a few of his colleagues used to pass them around like trading cards. He thereafter became so disheartened that he gave away all of his picture albums and took up crocheting.
MINIMUM FEE BILL – Typically written into the local rules of court, this was a list of the lowest prices a lawyer could ethically charge for various kinds of work. It was intended to prohibit fee-cutting which was universally thought to diminish the dignity of the profession in a way that such an agreement in restraint of trade apparently didn’t. It would not be accurate to say that some thought this was price-fixing; everyone thought it was price-fixing, and it too disappeared under the crushing weight of public interest, aided in meaningful part by the realization that truly crass lawyer advertising could make lawyers rich enough that they could afford to kiss the dignity of the profession goodbye.
DIVORCE A MENSO ET THORO – The “bed and board” divorce, a legal separation available only by wife against husband, was the most fun of all. Whenever a husband took up with a new chippie, his wife could obtain a support order that terminated only when she consented to a full divorce, and she never consented until she was offered all the marital assets. When the then male-dominated state legislature realized it was their own statutory petard that was hoisting them, it declared the whole scheme to be gender-based discrimination and repealed it. That it also significantly reduced the cost of a new chippie was something for which all male state legislators were eternally grateful.
The law now regards the common weal as its paramount objective, and I guess that’s how it should be. Oh, but there was a time when… wait, we’ll have to finish this later. I’m at lunch and Crepe Suzettes are about to be served as soon as the waiter can find the chisel.
© 2019, S. Sponte, Esq.