Notes on the May 12, 2009 Hearing in
Meyer v. Nantucket Building Department et al.

The hearing was bad, but I suppose it could have been worse.
I was the first to arrive. A bit later Kimberly (the Nantucket
lawyer) came. "Bet you don't recognize me." she said. She was done
up in a dramatic new hair style, with medusa-like strands of red,
streaming in all directions like the rays of the sun in a kindergarten
watercolor.  I wouldn't venture a guess whether she was intent on
frightening or seducing the judge. Klemens was there to give me moral
support.  That was comforting. Having been silent all morning, I started
to talk to him, to get my voice in gear, so to speak. When I
ran out of chatter, I extracted from my briefcase the copy of
Kleist's "Der Zerbrochene Krug", and started to read it aloud
in German. The laywers who had begun to assemble in the 
courtroom were discussing their cases with each other and seemed
not to notice. Der Zerbrochene Krug is a wonderful comedy, a 
satire about the law, starring a corrupt judge who has himself
committed the crime for which he imposes sentence. In its way,
the play is more trenchant than any of Shakespeare's comedies,
though not nearly so lyrical. Klemens is very familiar with the
plays of Heinrich Kleist. He wrote a college thesis about trial
and ordeal in Kleist's writings, and got a summa for his efforts.
After the hearing, Klemens wasn't a bit critical of me and said
he thought I had performed quite well.

Ahead of mine were hearings in two cases, the first a medico-legal
complaint from a patient whose anticoagulant (coumadin) had been
stopped prior to surgery and who had suffered a stroke.
A good example: that as a physician if things go wrong you're sued,
if you did something, because you did it; and if you didn't do
that same thing, you're sued because you didn't do it.
The next case was against Lesley University, -
in simpler days it called itself Lesley College. I once had an
office on Sacramento Street next door. In one of Lesley's buildings
there was a leaky toilet, - you can't get away from plumbing
problems, - somebody, - whether a student, a teacher, a visitor, 
slipped on the wet floor and sued the company with whom Lesley
had contracted premises maintenance. That entailed a lot of to
and fro as to who was responsible. Then it was my turn.  As the
only plaintiff, I had a seat to myself. The judge started out
by confessing that he hadn't read "all" of my filings, - which I
took to mean that he hadn't read them at all, but just now started
to look at what I had filed. He started to ask me questions about
the Nantucket trust, an issue which has nothing to do with the case,
but seemed to him a reasonable starting point for thinking about it. -
I had drawn the trust, I told him, to distribute the property among
the children and grandchildren. Anticipating just such legal
predicaments as the present one, I explained, I had prevailed on
Klemens as trustee to give me a twenty-five year lease for the
express purpose of letting me build a house on the land. The judge
seemed satisfied with the explanation.  He asked me about my plumbing
experience, and I told him I had spent much of my life doing glaucoma
surgery, which I said was a form of very delicate micro-plumbing.
He smiled. He asked me and I told what I meant by do-it-yourself plumbing.
I explained to the judge that I liked to do things myself, - including
representing myself in court. He commented that my filings were
better than what many (or most) lawyers gave him. Next, Kimberly
spoke. She was standing behind me, but I heard her clearly. She
reeled off her account about how I had knowingly broken the law,
and about how it was Nantucket's duty to uphold it. The shocker
was the assistent attorney general who spoke next and made light
of his having defaulted on the opposition to the motion, saying
"We usually leave that to the parties." Then he continued by
regaling the Court with a story how, a hundred years ago someone
had died from incorrectly installed plumbing. I was appalled.
After the assistant district attorney had spoken, the judge
turned again to me. As I spoke I lapsed into a popular style
that I picked up from my grandchildren, and that I had the gut
feeling was perhaps persuasive to a judge who had obviously
not been President of the Harvard Law Review. I whined that
what Mr. Hadas, the assistant attorney general had done to me
wasn't fair, refusing as he did to articulate his opposition in
a formal document as he's supposed to, and instead telling stories
about what happened a hundred years ago. That was a mindless complaint,
but it occurred to me that maybe it would make it easier for the
judge to accept me as one of the lawyers he was accustomed to. And
indeed, the Court's response was to reassure me that he would decide
on the merits. I still can't figure out why the Attorney General
took the case away from the Plumbing Board's inhouse attorney,
failed to file an opposition, but urged to the Court in a totally
informal argument to favor the Plumbing Board whose defense he had
neglected and left to Kimberley, who strictly speaking, had no authority
to make it. Where's Macchiavelli when I need him to explain to
me how the world works?

So now I don't know what to think. Maybe I shouldn't think at all.
Maybe I've thought too much. Klemens thinks that there's a 20%
chance that the Court will rule in my favor. But I don't even want
to hazard that little sliver of optimism. Emotionally, I'm ready now
to start working on my appeal, although the actual drafting can't
begin until I have the judge's written opinion. As I have said
before, I have a very low opinion of the quibbling about procedure
which is the ultimate legal activity. It's a kind of gutter logic
which has never shown anyone the path to salvation. My parents would
have berated me for spending so much time and energy on a project of
ultimately so little consequence. Do I deceive myself with the 
justification that I'm acquiring knowledge about language and words,
about meaning and action, about "ethics" in the only honest sense of
that term, acquiring knowledge more profound and radical than I could
obtain by a less intense and less passionate involvement?