TO-WIT: EDIFICE LEX, WING 3
Dear Fellow Board Members:
I am pleased to submit to the Board the annual report of the Edifice Lex Self Aggrandizement Committee, which I have the honor to chair, together with this year’s list of proposed candidates for admission. The committee has worked hard to come up with a slate of candidates that meet the Board’s established criteria, and I trust you will be in accord with our recommendations.
To recap briefly, Edifice Lex was established as the lawyer’s hall of fame some fifteen years ago in Sioux City, Iowa for the avowed purpose of recognizing, memorializing and honoring those members of our profession who, by dint of their hard work, their accomplishments, their dedication to the principles of lawyering and their remarkable and inexplicable capacity to avoid obvious mental illness, have throughout their careers come to exemplify the finest traditions of the bar.
COOPER “COOP” DEVILLE – a stalwart in the burgeoning title insurance industry at the turn of the twentieth century, he pioneered the use of such optional extra cost title protection as Endorsement No. 666, Wrath of Satan, Endorsement No. 703, Alien Mortgage Foreclosure, and Endorsement No. XVII, Rights of the Crown. The contributions he made to the profitability of the title insurance industry in particular and to the profession as a whole should not be tainted by the disclosures coming late in his career that he was improvidently billing clients annually for the premiums.
KAY SARAH SARAH – Unjustifiably remembered as malephobic, Kay gained her notoriety as the first family law practitioner of the modern era to argue that the inveterate problem of deadbeat dads could be significantly ameliorated by reinstitution of the rack as a court imposed sanction. Burned out by time she was forty, she determined to get as far away from the practice of law as she could, a career decision which led her to run for and obtain a seat on the county bench. Alas, her career went downhill from there when the president judge, whose ex-wife Kay had successfully represented in the divorce and who was apparently still miffed at losing his Porsche in the settlement, assigned her in perpetuity to criminal court where, by the end of her career, she was widely known as “The Judge Who Knew Too Little.”
IRVING “BUZZ” AHLWHAYZ – Acknowledged for all of his career as a flamboyant and highly successful trial lawyer, Buzz was honored by his bar association on the occasion of his retirement with a large and lavish party. Drink in hand as always, Buzz took to the microphone and addressed the assemblage. “Half the cases I won, I should have lost,” he remarked philosophically, “and half the cases I lost I should have won. So all in all, I guess I was screwed half the time.”
PROTANTO PAEMINT – born of New Zealand immigrants, Protanto worked his way through college and law school as a development follow through coordinator for the Girl Scouts of America (“Time to pay for the cookies, me bucko”), then launched a highly successful career in the field of eminent domain. He single handedly created such revolutionary concepts as the reverse taking and the speculation approach to value. He spent his retirement years authoring the treatise by which he is best known, Vacant Lots – America’s Priceless Heritage.
EZEKIAL ELIJA SCHMALTZ – a regretably forgetten litigator from the mid nineteenth century, Ezekial became increasingly frustrated trying to prove meaningful bodily harm resulting from the rear end collisions of horse drawn wagons. Endeavoring to provide his plaintiffs with sufficiently serious injuries to make personal injury claims worth both their and his while, he developed the evidentiary technique to demonstrate that drivers actually sustained the greatest damage from being lacerated by their own buggy whips when struck from behind, thus forever entrenching whiplash as a staple of personal injury claims.
COSMO AURELIUS PACKPENNY – a jurist of unwarranted obscurity, he freed the judiciary from the constraints of antiquated case law by maintaining throughout his career that the doctrine of stare decisis was an unconstitutional infringement of his right to free speech. His pioneering work in this field thus set the stage for the accession to power of a great number of latter day United States Supreme Court justices.
That concludes this Committee’s report. As always, thanks to all of you for once again affording me the opportunity to be of service to the profession.
Your humble & obedient servant,
S. Sponte, Esq.