Legal Food for Thought

A Savory Stew of Stimulating Essays Laced with Law

To compare a book to food is nothing new. “Some books are to be tasted,” Francis Bacon famously wrote around 1600, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Maya Corrigan, our contemporary author of mysteries involving food, says, “You are what you eat and read.”

And a book can also be food for thought, as it nourishes our minds and souls, a meaningful literary equivalent of a good meal, consumed but not quickly forgotten. It is, then, not going too far out on a limb to hope that readers will think of the essays in this book as food for thought, snacks or a meal for the reader, and a special kind of meal at that—one warranting serious consideration.

This book resembles what foodies call an olio, a rich, thick, spicy Spanish dish or stew with a variety of ingredients. Figuratively speaking, olio means a medley or miscellaneous collection of things, a hodgepodge, mixture, or assortment. This book is a figurative olio, a harvest, a curated collection of essays, but with a special, idiosyncratic spice. Because they are an olio or hodgepodge, the essays may sometimes seem at first glance to lack an overall theme, thesis, or connecting thread, but that would be a misperception. Throughout the essays runs a recurring idea.

Apart from the essays having been the product of one mind over several years, they have another unifying theme in that they all relate in some way to law. They cover a wide range of topics, from ways to improve our democracy, to whether law can be practiced creatively, to lawyers as comic book superheroes, and much else besides. But don’t worry; it is not a law book, and I tried very hard not to make it dull. They are one man’s personal views, a practicing lawyer’s spare time ruminations, on many various topics in some fashion connected, however loosely, to law.