My Year in Law(ish) Books
I’m not much for year-end rituals, but I do like to look over the books I’ve read during the year and see which I can’t stop thinking about and which I can’t even remember reading. For a holiday fluff sort of post, here are three loosely law-related books I read this year and would recommend, plus an attempt to stay on theme by drawing some “legal technology and innovation” connections.
The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell
Third of four books in a mystery series whose plots tend to hinge on obscure provisions of British tax law. Strongly recommend to fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books who wish they had more tax jokes. As far as legal technology goes, this one features a law office battle over the acquisition of a telex machine, with a senior partner who says things like “Technology is responsible for much that is wrong with the modern world” and an over-enthusiastic junior associate who is banned the machine after falling into a “delirium of telex-sending.” There are, perhaps, some parallels with the law world’s responses to current emerging technologies. The book also includes charming excerpts from a travel guide to various tax havens that would be a great addition to any library collection if it really existed, “The Guide to Comfortable Tax Planning.”
The Shamama Case, by Jessica Marglin
A surprisingly gripping tale of a cross-border inheritance dispute. Nissim Shamama was a Tunisian Jew who rose to power and wealth in Tunisia, then emigrated to France and later Italy. When he died in 1873, he was probably among the richest people in the world, and the litigation over his will implicated some of the most fundamental questions of international law. The validity of his will, and the choice of law used to determine it, depended on his nationality at the time of his death: was he Italian? Tunisian? Jewish? Ottoman? Stateless? What was nationality, anyway? And what was a nation? These questions are more or less settled now, but at the time they were only just beginning to be asked. Although this book isn’t really trying to draw modern parallels to other areas of law, anyone working in the law and technology space right now may find this situation familiar; technology and its role in society are rapidly changing, challenging some of our fundamental assumptions about how things work or how they should work. The way we adjust those assumptions—and the legal arguments that win—may shape the field for decades or even centuries to come.
The Ministry of Pain, by Dubravka Ugrešić
This novel explores exile, memory, belonging, nostalgia, language, national and individual trauma, and numerous other threads in its story of displaced Yugoslavians in Amsterdam after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed. The main character Tanja comes to Amsterdam for a temporary teaching position and finds that her class is filled with fellow Yugoslav exiles, who are mostly enrolled to maintain eligibility for student visas. About halfway through the book, Tanja and some of her students travel to The Hague to watch the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ugrešić uses the way in which the trials are mediated by technology—TV monitors in the viewing room, earphones for live translation into multiple languages, a glass wall with shutters raised and lowered to conceal witnesses’ identities— to emphasize how removed these proceedings feel from the characters’ realities, and how little they resemble the justice imagined by the characters. (“The reality the glass wall separated us from inspired no more confidence than ‘real’ reality: both of them—the one that churned out lies, lies, and more lies and the one that promised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—were equally fantastic, if that is the word for it.”) There are other reasons that the ICTY is not regarded as an unqualified success—I don’t know if the design of the public viewing room has been cited as one—but this scene is a reminder that technology is not merely a neutral tool or conduit for information, and that we should be attentive to the way our choice of technology shapes the viewer’s (or reader’s, or patron’s, or researcher’s, or…) experiences.
