Dear Anne,

Please excuse my writing another letter so soon after the previous one.
My mind is swirling with legal thoughts, not (necessarily) for the Appeals
Court, but primarily for myself, thoughts which demand to be put in writing,
thoughts that need an address to which to be sent, and you are the obvious
victim. I've hitherto hesitated to explain my thinking, because I suspected it
to be different from yours, and I didn't want to repay you for your sympathetic
support with stubborn argumentation. But here goes:

My interest in a house on Nantucket has long since been eclipsed by my 
interest in the law. I find litigation much more edifying than plumbing,
and an understanding of "justice" much more valuable than a view of the
ocean. The courtroom confrontation which is ordinarily too expensive and
protracted to be of real value, is for me a ceremony as uplifting and 
enjoyable as her wedding was for my granddaughter Rebekah. Eight years
ago I tried to share my enthusiasm with George X. Pucci, Nantucket's lawyer
by telling him that our controversy would be so protracted that he could
purchase a Mercedes-Benz with the proceeds. In reply he snarled: They don't
pay that much.

Never by any means before the Court, but in my own mind I proceed in Aristotle's
fashion to search for first principles: I ask: What is law? and I answer: Law is
authoritative, validated language which binds the community and is binding on
all its members. What validates language? Truth. And what is truth? Truth is
dual and often contradictory. Truth is aletheia (Greek for unforgetfulness),
Truth is the correspondence of present language with past experience. But truth
is also troth, as in the marriage vow: I plight thee my troth, and as such 
truth is loyalty to ones sovereign, to the king, to ones nation, to ones tribe, 
to ones island, to ones family, to ones parents, children and spouse. Ultimately 
truth as loyalty to ones self (or loyalty to an inward God) merges with aletheia. 
Very important, and not to be forgotten, the lawyer's truth is loyalty to his 
client. Now it's obvious why Mr. Pucci, loyal to his client, and his witness 
Mr. Ramos, loyal to his island and to his trade, are truthtellers even when
what they say is so remote from our common experience, i.e. remote from the
aletheia that is objectively demonstrable to unbiased observers on the 35 photos.

Language not only binds us to one another (troth), not only corroborates our
(past) experience (aletheia) but has also the function of furnishing an "ideal",
an independent conceptual reality. The obvious immediate examples are "law" and
"justice". Speech is also commonly used as in advertising with the purpose of 
creating a fictitious virtual reality. Such speech is called propaganda. 
Propaganda may be inspired by troth or by aletheia or by a mixture of them.

The original Inspection Report and Condemnation Order is not written in plumbers'
prose. I assume, but do not know, that it was drafted by Mr. Pucci. He vouched
for its veracity when he filed it with the Court. That Inspection Report, 
ostensibly of integrity and fairness with detailed findings and reasoning was
in fact untruthful propaganda calculated to persuade the Court to permit 
destruction of my plumbing. With its second order to cite specific violations
enumerated in the Report demonstrable in the photos, the Appeals Court summoned
the chickens to come home to roost. It can't be done.

The valiant but vain attempts by Messrs Pucci and Kilb (the Board's lawyer) 
to do the impossible, i.e.  to cite specific violations enumerated in the Report 
and demonstrable in the photos, tells nothing about the Report, tells nothing
about the photos, tells nothing about my plumbing, but tells everything about
Mr. Pucci, Mr. Kilb and Justice Giles of the Superior Court. But what it says
about them is privileged. I'm not allowed to say. If the Appeals Court can't
figure it out, it's no use arguing. The Court wouldn't understand.

The first cause, to get back to Aristotle, is the penchant to despotism,
ineradicably rooted in human nature, which the starry-eyed idealists of the
18th century, in  the wake of Montesquieu on whose De l'Esprit des Lois 
our constitutions, state and federal are based, thought they could regulate 
out of existence by resurrecting Solon's doctrines of the Mixed Constitution. 
They sought to weaken government by dividing it into three branches which, 
having to fight for power with each other, would be so feeble that their 
despotism could no longer oppress us, "the people." 

I'm not enough of an historian to allow myself a judgment to what extent
if any, Montesquieu's tripartite scheme ever fulfilled its purposes, but
it seems to me that now, in the 21st century, the perceived need of
social order by governmental control, "there ought to be a law" - or at
least a regulation - to micromanage the affairs of the more than
365,000 licensed business entities in the Commonwealth has so overburdened
the legislatively starved Court system, that the judges must save themselves
by rubber-stamping whatever judicial decisions the executive agencies
choose to make. Such rubber-stamping by the courts entails the breakdown,
the dissolution of law into anomie, lawlessness, a state of moral and
intellectual chaos over which a Donald Trump is fit to preside, if not now,
then some multiple of four years from now. Don't tell anyone I said it. 
I can hear them yelling even now: Lock him up!

As I write, I'm acutely aware how irrelevant my ruminations to Dan's 
predicament and yours, in the face of which I'm helpless except to
send both of you my very best wishes.

Jochen