Photos and tweets from today's Commencement at UMass Law.
Photo of stage by UMassD_Alumni. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Elspeth Cypher (read more), honorary degree recipient, at right, first row, second from left. I'm three rows behind her.
Professor and former Dean Phil Cleary (who can count Mass. tort law among his many talents), respected faculty senior, hoods the youngest member of the class. Thurgood Marshall-award-winning dad Jesse Purvis looks on. Photo by UMassLaw.
My tweets in time sequence:
'With great power comes great responsibility,' Chancellor Johnson quotes of #lawschool degree, placing in top 3% of educated globally. So build civility, transform world, he admonishes @UMassLaw#Commencementpic.twitter.com/JlJjx8tQL6
UMass Law awards honorary degree to #Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Cypher, first SJC judge from Bristol County in >100 years, will teach @UMassLaw in fall semester. See e.g. https://t.co/ImixldMizY
Saturday I saw Ink, by
British playwright James Graham, at the Manhattan
Theatre Club, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York.I wanted to see Ink primarily to fan-boy Jonny Lee Miller.I’ve idolized him since he appeared alongside
Ewan McGregor in the brilliant 1996 Danny Boyle film adaptation of Ian Welsh’s Trainspotting.I fell in love with him all over again as the
reimagined Sherlock Holmes of U.S. CBS’s Elementary,
the longest-ever screen-time run of an actor in the role and complement to Lucy
Liu’s equally landmark portrayal of Watson.
As newspaper editor Larry Lamb, Miller live was all that I dreamed.His jaunty spirit and dark-edge demeanor gave
life to the tidal forces of moral conflict that tore Lamb apart as he labored
under Australian upstart Rupert Murdoch—played by Bertie Carvel, who has owned the
role to deserved acclaim since Ink’s debut
at the London Almeida and then the West End—to reinvent news in the British tabloid
Sun, circa 1970.
I don’t want to give away too much of the play’s awestriking
climaxes, so I’ll only mention that one moment comprises a thundering explosion
of physicality by Miller as Lamb, as he literally pounds his newspaper vision
into reality over union workers’ refusal to roll the presses.Miller seemed to be losing his voice by the matinee’s
end, and my wife and I wondered that he could pull off this exhausting feat a second
time that day, much less eight times per week.Ink opened on Broadway in
April and was just extended to July 7.
To my giddy delight, Ink
delivered so much more than a stellar cast.Mansfield-born James Graham is an accomplished writer of stage, TV, and
film, and he’s evidenced an award-winning capacity to grapple with social
issues through context.(His film
adaptation of Mikey Walsh’s Romany-expose memoir Gypsy Boy is in pre-production.)Graham’s socially provocative Privacy
in 2014 was informed by the Edward Snowden affair, and Daniel Radcliffe joined
the cast for its New York debut in 2016.With Privacy, though, lukewarm
reviews suggested that Graham modestly missed the mark, giving audiences angst,
but not much that was new.He might have
bitten off more than he could chew by trying to tackle a subject of such wide-ranging
complexity.
If Privacy was Graham’s
faltering early exploration of the social landscape, Ink is his finished dissertation.I knew Ink would be about the
birth of modern tabloid journalism—the less modern iteration being the Hearst-Pulitzer
yellow journalism of the 1890s, another turning point in the history of news, evidencing
my journalism professors’ admonition that nothing
ever happens for the first time.I
did not understand before I went that Ink
is calculated as a commentary on our present-day problem of “fake news,” or,
otherwise packaged, the consumer-driven, 24-hour news cycle that undoubtedly
represents another centennial shift in the enterprise of journalism and
signifies to many a circular cause and symptom of moral decay in human civilization.
Set principally in 1969, Graham’s play never mentions “fake
news” in modern terms.But it does talk
about populism, and therein lies Graham’s clever contextualization.He locates Murdoch’s revolutionary arrival on
the global media scene relative implicitly to the Fox Corporation of 2019, five
decades hence, and at the same time relative explicitly to the spilling of populism
onto the world stage in 1939, three decades earlier.
Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu talk Elementary at San Diego Comic-Con in
2012. (By GenevieveCC BY 2.0.)
As the cast discussed on stage in a talk after the show on
May 11, an insightful feature of Graham’s Murdoch and Lamb arises in their
portrayal as protagonists.Part of you
roots for them to succeed in overturning the staid paternalism of post-World
War II journalism.Fleet Street had
become entangled with elitism, arguably peddling news as nothing more meaningful than a
new opiate for the masses.Media had
fallen out of touch with the everyday plight of the working classes that post-war
chroniclers had purported to protect with anti-establishment bulwarks. Sound familiar?
Lamb’s fall reminds us that the shortest path
from Cronkite-esque public servant to Alex-Jones-town social menace is more slippery
slope than cliff-edge drop.Murdoch is
the devil to Lamb’s Doctor Faustus, and one must remember that the devil was
not really the villain of that story.Protagonist
and antagonist at once, Faustus was everyman.
Graham artfully traced the unraveling of countless threads
in social policy in Ink’s
Sorkin-paced script.Almost in the play’s
background, the aforementioned union press workers evolve from butt of ridicule
to moral compass as Lamb loses his grip.Characters’ commentary collateral to the business of newspapering portends
the looming behemoth of television, à
la Marshall McLuhan.Lamb’s dogged
insistence that absolute freedom of information is the best way to save the
life of kidnapped
Muriel McKay evokes pondering of Julian Assange’s access-to-information
fundamentalism, such as birthed Wikileaks.
Front and center, the advent of the Murdochian media empire,
portrayed in Ink, posits a simple question that has haunted ethicists since the construction of the Fourth Estate:
Is the role of journalism in a democracy
to give the public what it needs or what it wants?
Had Donald Trump never entered politics, never become
President, his billion-dollar-plus tax-return losses reported by The New York Times would still have
happened.And no one is so naïve as to
think that Trump is alone in exploiting the tax system, if not mocking it.The alternative minimum tax, in place long
before the Trump-Times study decade, is
supposed to curtail claimed-loss shenanigans by the 1%ers.But they don’t
pay it and hardly ever have.Working
people pay it.(I paid it at least once.)Sure, we should go after tax fraud.But I’d like to see our congressional leaders
talking about unfairness in the tax system as it exists in law.That’s Congress’s wheelhouse, after all.
Let me issue the perennial reminder that personal income
taxes are fully transparent, public, and online—for everyone—in
Norway, and they always have been public, if only more recently online.Yet the sun still shines there—most places, most
of the year—and people get on just fine.It turns out that knowing what other people
earn in income does not undermine or destroy society. In fact, transparency might generate overwhelming
positive consequences, such as a better informed therefore better functioning
free market for labor, and, lo and behold, public confidence in government and tax equity.
America has a weird ethic about salary secrecy.My pay is online; you can look it up at
Mass Live.Look for my wife there,
too, so you know what our household income is.And then explain to me why we owed thousands of dollars in taxes this
year even after we reduced our 2018 W-4 deductions to zero and supposedly got a rate
cut. (Spoiler alert: Pretty sure the IRS over-cut withholding to create short-term economic stimulus at later public expense.) I’d tell you what we make right here,
but I learned the hard way that people at my workplace hate when I talk openly about
salary.There’s some social taboo, I
guess, that I never learned.Anyway, 🤙.
Here’s my modest proposal.We don’t have to be Norway.But
how about, when you’re elected to federal office, executive or legislative, your tax returns, back some
number of years and going forward some number of years, are entered into a
public database.We see
politicians herald the release of their returns; that’s the norm we hold up
as desirable. So let’s formalize it.Simple and nonpartisan.These are people holding public jobs, paid from the public fisc. So we know their earned incomes. What’s left
to hide?
Maybe if we saw everyone’s taxes in Congress, as well as the President and Veep, we’d finally get
meaningful and bipartisan tax reform.
A narrow decision from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) today is important for keeping alive plaintiff personal injury claims based on road defect injuries, especially amid the trending privatization of public services. The opinion stops off in Boston history en route to its conclusion. The case is Meyer v. Veolia Energy North America, No. SJC-12606 (Mass. May 8, 2019).
Reversing summary judgment for defendant Veolia Energy North America, the SJC concluded that the statutory requirement of notice within 30 days to a potential defendant alleged to be responsible for road conditions giving rise to injury applies to the governmental defendants, but not to private-sector defendants.
Plaintiff Meyer was injured when on his bicycle, on Sudbury Street in Boston, he "struck a circular utility cover one foot or less in diameter that was misaligned with the road surface." He gave notice to the City of Boston of a potential tort claim within 30 days. But the city denied his claim on day 31, referring Meyer to private-sector Veolia as the party responsible for the utility cover. Upon purportedly late notice to Veolia under the statute, the lower court awarded summary judgment to the energy company. The SJC reversed, holding the statute inapplicable.
Most of the 32-page decision concerns statutory interpretation and is worth a read if that's your jam. A couple of points stood out for me, though, as a general observer of law American-style. The relevant Massachusetts statutes are found in General Laws chapter 84. The SJC observed that section 1 "reflects its origins in the preindustrial era." Indeed, the section states, "Highways and town ways, including railroad crossings ... shall be kept in repair at the expense of the town ... so that they may be reasonably safe and convenient for travelers, with their horses, teams, vehicles and carriages at all seasons."
The SJC traced interpretation of the relevant statutes to an 1883 opinion by Justice Holmes. Yes, that Justice Holmes, the Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., when he served on the Massachusetts high court. Explained today's SJC, Justice Holmes for the Court, in in Fisher v. Cushing, 134 Mass. 374 (1883) (electronic page 376 of this free ebook), had
interpreted the road defect and notice statutes, and the meaning of the reference to "persons," in the course of reviewing the statutes' legislative and legal history. As a noted scholar of legal history and the author of The Common Law (1881), Justice Holmes brought special knowledge and expertise to this interpretation. The defendant in Fisher was sued for negligently maintaining a coal hole on a Boston sidewalk.
Held the Court in Fisher, "The whole scope of that [statutory notice] scheme shows that it is directed to the general public duty [to keep the way in repair], and that it has no reference to the common law liability for a nuisance." Explained today's SJC,
The court therefore held that the defendants could be sued in tort for the nuisance they created with their coal hole.
The court also went on to explain the meaning of "persons": "The mention of 'persons' in the statute, alongside of counties and towns obliged to repair, is easily explained. The outline of our scheme was of ancient date and English origin. In England, while parishes were generally bound to repair highways and bridges, a person might be, ratione tenurae, or otherwise .... [W]e cannot say, and probably the Legislature of 1786 could not have said, that there were no cases in the Commonwealth where persons other than counties or towns were bound to keep highways in repair.... Even if there were not, it was a natural precaution to use the words.
Footnotes elucidated, "A coal hole was an underground vault covered by a hatch with a cover where coal used for heating purposes was kept for easy access" (citing S.P. Adams, Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century 105-106 (2014)). And "'[r]atione tenurae' is a Latin phrase meaning by reason of tenure," as in being an occupier of land (citing Black's Law Dictionary 1454 (10th ed. 2014)).
I'm assuming that when the Court wrote that the late, great Justice Holmes "brought special knowledge and expertise" to the case, that assertion was strictly a function of the preceding clause, "as a noted scholar of legal history and [common law]," and not, as my mind hastened to wonder, because Justice Holmes had some particular tenura with coal holes.
I don't usually care for pictures of myself. But I had to admit that this one, from my recent visit to Varna, Bulgaria, really captured my personnage whilst on the road.
