October. You know it’s that time of year when the maple leaves start to turn orange, yellow, and russet, when the air becomes a bit colder, when wisps of grey smoke from the yard fires curl lazily upward into a transparently blue sky—then you know it’s time for your annual apple picking trip north to Wisconsin.
When you arrive at the Orchard, you see that all too familiar sight—rows and rows of apple trees laden with red apples, lush, fully ripened, ready to be picked. There’s an electricity in the air, a mysterious mingling of cinnamon and smoke and apple cider and freshly cut grass mixed with the clear autumn air to create that ineluctable and utterly evanescent sensation of rapture and wonder. I’m another year older, you say to yourself, but no matter because you’re fascinated, entirely engrossed, by what’s before you.
Legal cases, though each inherently fascinating purely as an element of thought, are best seen and interpreted as brief historical moments.
You select your basket and ascend your ladder and there hang your apples—stem, flesh, core, seed, and skin—round, smooth, and sensual, it’s almost as if they’re seducing you ever so slowly. Time seems to slow down, you can see your outstretched hands reach, encircle, and gently pull, then steadily lower each into the basket, carefully so as not to bruise, softly because each presents itself to you as a delicious gift of flavor and nutrition.
Examination of older case law is most optimally studied as a form of archeology.
The friends and family you’re with are talking and laughing and you hear fragments of their conversation—“Look over there…” “They’re bringing out another wagon…” “They just started serving…” “I’ve already filled one basket…”—but their words pass you by, you’re now in a trance, apples, their smell and taste, their sight and texture, are surrounding you, enveloping you, they’ve become the very embodiment of nature’s dreamlike spirit—and with each touch of your hands and fingers you’re being held deeper and deeper in thrall.
Seen thus through the prism of historical context, legal cases hold interest not by their holdings, but rather by opening a window into a particular society’s psyche, its mores and ethos.
You’re being transported, first back to childhood, with its endlessly leisurely hours, its hypnotic states, then to adolescence, with its unconstrained energy and surreal vividness, then to adulthood, where a sense of stability and perspective is finally acquired. These you can see clearly—and then it dawns on you with the speed of a lightening flash, it comes to you as a revelation—everything that is was meant to be. This simple thought is somehow very comforting to you, a way to make sense of things, a flash of insight that makes the world comprehensible. Your hands continue to reach and grasp, and the apples you’ve picked now come to assume a special significance to you, as if each were somehow destined to be chosen.
In fact, it can be argued that the common law provides a true glimpse into the soul of a particular historical time and place, its fears and phobias, its yearnings and expectations, its approvals and condemnations.
“We’re going to the next area…” someone calls out to you, and suddenly your reverie is broken. You see the ladder and the leaves and the unpicked apples and the sun shining through and you take in once again that delicious rich smell, but you’re now in the urgent present, there are people who depend on you, obligations that must be kept.
To look through and beyond a case rather than to read or interpret it—the only sure way to discover what a case truly means.
Only on the way home do you allow yourself to take your first bite, first putting it up to your nose, then biting and chewing slowly so as to savor the taste. You wish this moment were capable of being prolonged, at least for a while longer, but you know in your heart that it cannot. When you hear someone say in passing —“It’s not the sweetness so much as its slightly sour flavor…” you smile secretly, secure in a newly-acquired wisdom that’s soft and round enough to hold in your hand.
