"The law is an ass"

According to my calender, on this date in 1784, an Englishman used creativity to avoid taxation. The Parliament had levied a tax on horses. This Englishman, in order to avoid the tax, rode a cow to market in Stockport. I don't know if he had the last laugh or if the tax-collectors ultimately were able to collect tax on the cow. Tax collectors and judges can be quite creative when it comes to levying taxes and fines and such.

Parliament had to be quite creative themselves in coming up with new things to tax back in those days. The desire to wrest control of North America caused quite a lot of hardship and expense on France and England in the seventeenth century. That struggle actually led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the ultimate loss of most of the British Empire in North America. The instrument which led to the struggle and strife was the taxation power of the Chancellory of the Exchequer. William Pitt was elected the youngest Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In order to pay for all the military struggles with France, the Chancellory had to levy taxes any way they could. Pretty soon everything you produced or used in the British Empire was taxed one way or another. Ergo, the Revolutionary War and American Independence.

This all reminds me of a law case I read when I was in law school which arose in Sydney, Australia. A begger had been arrested for riding a horse in a public park in Sydney. The begger argued that he was riding a bird and not a horse. The begger argued that he was sitting on a cushion which was filled with down. Since down came from a fowl, and a definition of a bird was an animal with feathers and two legs, the animal upon which the begger rode was a bird. The appellate court in Australia overruled the conviction on the factual basis that the begger was not riding a horse, but, instead, was, by definition, riding a bird. Since the animal was a bird and the statute didn't proscribe the riding of birds, the conviction was overruled.

That reminds me of a ruling entered by Judge Whalen in a drug case several years ago. The Sheriff had received a tip that a Fed/Ex package was enroute to delivery to a citizen of Spalding County, which package contained illegal drugs. Rather than acquire a search warrant and search the van, the sheriff's deputy stopped the van, opened the package, found the drugs, resealed the package and followed the delivery van to the residence and arrested the recipient after delivery.

When the case came before the judge, the defendant argued, rightfully, that the deputy sheriff should have acquired a search warrant before conducting the search. A Motion to Suppress was filed by the defendant and argued and Judge Whalen grudgingly granted the Motion. However, Judge Whalen, being the former prosecutor that he was, inserted an editorial jab at the law and the appellate courts by including a quote from Shakespeare, saying, "If that is the law, then the law is an ass."

That quote may not be exact, but you get the idea. Judge Whalen was quite humorous from time to time. His funeral earlier this year ended up being a succession of humorous lawyer stories. I have known quite a few humorous judges and district attorneys and assorted lawyers in my time. It may seem strange to most laymen, but I enjoy the company of lawyers more than most others. We always seem to have the best stories.

When I was a first year law student, we could always get my criminal law professor, Professor Kurtz off task if we could just get him to start telling lawyer jokes. There were at least three or four instances in which he wasted the entire class period in telling us lawyer jokes. He was the Woody Allen of the Georgia School of Law.

I had a contracts professor in my first year who always had the students stand and answer questions in the socratic method popularized in the movie, 'Paper Chase.' During the second quarter, Professor Holmes got off the socratic method and delivered his lessons in lecture form. When we began the third quarter, Professor Holmes began the first class by calling on one of the students. The chosen student inquired if Professor Holmes wanted him to stand. Professor Holmes responded, "or kneel."

Professor Holmes was also the faculty member who ran the March Madness lottery. I remember seeing Professor Holmes flipping a coin in front of the law library to see who would have the first choice of team in the lottery. I also remember that Mike McDaniel, who has been an assistant district attorney in Dekalb County for a long time, had the second choice when we were third year law students. We all piled into his apartment with a case of beer and some pizza to cheer Georgetown University over UNC. I don't think I have cheered for a team in the championship game, short of UK, of course, like we cheered for Patrick Ewing and the Georgetown Hoyas. Unfortunately, UNC won on an errant pass by one of the Georgetown guards, which was intercepted at the end of the game by one of the UNC guards. I have hated UNC since I was a freshman at W&L and UVA made it to the championship game in the ACC tournament. All of the students from Virginia were excited to have UVA showing anything in the ACC tournament. Hell, UVA had played us earlier in the year in Lexington.

Of course, UVA lost its allure when the damn wahoos crashed our party at the Pines at Randolph Macon and the security guards made us fold up our private party with the girls from Randy Mac because we had too many 'men' at the party. The Pines were private cabins on the campus at Randoph Macon which could be rented by the students for private parties. The only problem was you had to limit the occupants of the cabin to a specific number as registered when you reserved the cabin.

I will never forget sitting on the grass on that August evening, playing my guitar for a sweet young thing, and some other football players from W&L, only to hear the obnoxious noise of the security guards calling for us to close the party and seeing all the damn wahoos flushing out of the cabin like a bunch of circus clowns leaving a miniature car. Don grabbed the stereo and all of our records and I not only lost the girl in the grass but somewhere in the process lost my copy of 'Derek & the Domino's Layla and other Love Songs.'

Yeah, a bunch of damn wahoo clowns.

In the old days, there were W&L, UVA, VMI and VPI. All those sister institutions which played each other in athletics and competed for students in Virginia. I have to remember sometimes when I refer to the damn wahoos, because a number of my friends from W&L ended up going to law school in Charlottesville.