Honorable Mentions 2011

LTB logo

In an effort to clear out the stories I flagged but didn’t get around to writing up during 2011, here’s an end-of-last-year assortment that collects some of those, in no particular rank or order. I might or might not return to some of these tales; as you may have noticed, there is no shortage of material, and I don’t want to fall too far behind.

  • Dead letters,” Futility Closet (July 8, 2011) (describing Cummins v. Bond, a 1926 case in which a medium claimed to have the copyright on messages she allegedly received from disembodied spirits); see also Copyright of Automatic Writing,” 13 Va. L. Rev. 22 (1926-27) (same).
  • This post will exceed your expectations,” The Lawyer (Dec. 7, 2011) (an excellent post criticizing jargon; cites an article in Harvard Business Review in which the author admitted that in about half of his conversations he had “almost no idea what other people are saying”).

And those are just some of the items I didn’t get to. A summary of those I did cover during the past year will be coming out shortly in The Green Bag‘s Almanac & Reader, where “A Year of Lowering the Bar” has appeared since 2010. (They were kind enough to publish my series “If Great Literary Works Had Been Written by Lawyers” way back in 1999 and 2000, and are still being kind.)