TO-WIT: WILD PITCH
It wasn't unexpected; in fact, it had been planned for some time. Yet when I walked into my law library and watched as the movers unceremoniously pitched book after book into a wheelbarrow to be carted outside to the waiting dumpster, it felt nothing less than like I’d been hit in the head by an object moving at speed. For the brief period of time that this psychotic moment assumed full rein, my stomach churned, my knees buckled and it seemed as if my entire professional life had hit the dirt.
The anxiety engendered by the certain approach of this cataclysmic event had been depressing me ever since I decided to move my office to smaller quarters, quarters that had precious little room for such superfluous legal paraphernalia as law books.
Yikes! I just referred to law books as superfluous legal paraphernalia and yet here I still sit, no heaven-sent brimstone reducing me to ashes, no cavernous fissures opening up to swallow me whole hog, no woman demanding marriage.
I have forever had a reverence for books, all books (excepting perhaps Mein Kampf), but law books have always seemed to me to be particularly holy. They are the corporeal substantiation of professional knowledge, the foundation upon which the entire structure of law has been erected.
Every real lawyer has been in a true law library at one time or another, and insurance defense counsel must surely have heard about them. They are things of such beauty, such elegance, such splendor that I have clung to mine long after most of the volumes had been reduced by the Internet to nothing more than window dressing.
It’s all done by computer now of course, a few keystrokes here, a few mouse clicks there, and presto chango, the entire world of law is all there. The last time I saw a law book actually being used was in a recent television commercial in which someone playing a physician, standing in front of a bookcase, put a copy of a Pacific Reporter back on a shelf before turning to the camera to pitch a cure for diarrhea.
Computer research is just not the same as using books, note even close. There's no heft to it, no mass, no weight, and the opinions we now print out and hold in our hands have always seemed to me to possess way too much ethereality to govern the affairs of humankind.
In yesteryear we all carried books to oral argument. “Perhaps if Your Honor would just read this,” I would say, offering up a bound volume bookmarked to a specific case, “the Court may realize how meretricious opposing counsel’s argument really is.” But if I’m going to harness my vast vituperative vocabulary to justifiably denigrate every opposing counsel who disagrees with me, I sure as hell want something with more stopping power than a computer printout.
But to my eternal sorrow it won’t be that way ever again. The newer generations of lawyers do their research in the clouds and have no worship of bound volumes, no veneration of such bygone things as advance sheets, decennial digests, state reporters. The very things that used to evoke such awe at their assemblage now no longer elicit so much as the slightest "aw" at their dismemberments.
We cannot permit our beloved books to pass thusly. I therefore beseech all of you to join me next Friday precisely at noon as together we rise wherever we are and observe a moment of silence for our dearly departed friends. Insurance defense counsel are excused.
©2015, S. Sponte, Esq.