Corporation is a fascinating concept: the bringing forth out of thin air an incorporeal person that acts only through its agents. Corporations enjoy the same legal personality as natural persons. In most modern jurisdictions, incorporation is granted by statute, but it used to be granted by Royal Charter. The oldest corporation in the world is, of course, The Bay, which was formed in 1670 by these words:

Now know yee that Wee being desirous to promote all Endeavours tending to the publique good of our people and to encourage the said undertaking have of our especiall grace certaine knowledge and meere mocion Given granted ratifyed and confirmed And by these Presentes for us our heires and Successors Doe give grant ratifie and confirme unto our said Cousin Prince Rupert Christopher Duke of Albemarle William Earle of Craven Henry Lord Arlington Anthony Lord Ashley Sir John Robinson Sir Robert Vyner Sir Peter Colleton Sir Edward Hungerford Sir Paul Neile Sir John Griffith and Sir Phillipp Carterett James Hayes John Kirke Francis Millington William Prettyman John Fenn and John Portman That they and such others as shall bee admitted into the said Society as is hereafter expressed shall bee one Body Corporate and Politique in deed and in name by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay and them by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay one Body Corporate and Politique in deede and in name really and fully for ever for us our heirs and successors doe make ordeyne constitute establish confirme and declare by these Presentes and that by the same name of Governor & Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay they shall have perpetuall succession etc. etc. (it actually goes on for twelve pages).

In return, all King Charles the Second asked for was the

Yeilding and paying yearley to us our heirs and Successors for the same two Elkes and two Black beavers whensoever and as often as Wee our heirs and successors shall happen to enter into the said Countryes Territoryes and Regions hereby granted

Not a bad deal. I think it’s sad that the Bay changed its name on the federal corporate registry from The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay AKA Hudson’s Bay in French Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson to Hudson’s Bay Company in December 2004.

Of course, none of this is on my Corporations exam, but if it were wouldn’t that make it a much more interesting course?

Crazy fog, bright sunny days, now snow – Vancouver is trying to turn itself into Calgary for me!

This has been such a horrible essay-writing month. First I had to do an essay on a topic that seemed so important I was too anxious to start working on it until the last minute. Now I’m trying to write an essay on a topic that's so dull I can’t stand it to think about it, even though it’s well past last minute.

I read my essay out in class last week

There were some objections that my position was not "logical" or "plausible," which yeah, I know, it's not. My response was that it was a position, one which I decided to take, not one that I was claiming as necessarily valid.

It's fun to watch yourself turning into a lawyer, even though an incompetent lawyer.

Above all, law values consistency and tradition. It must look backwards for its validity. The method of law is reduction, which always involves the suppression of multiplicity in the service of authority. Law can never resist closure.

Poetry is exactly what law is not.

I have two new chapbooks out:

Dirty Work from the mysterious NO Press. I haven't seen this one yet, but I'm very excited about it. You can be too.

and

The writing that should enter into conversation from rob mclennan's above/ground press.

Thanks rob and mysterious NO Press person!

Tripped up last night in my corporations law reading by a delightfully odd sentence:

He knew that what he had said would consternate the Keevils.
-Teck Corp. Ltd. v. Millar (B.C. 1973)

It's not just that Keevils is a funny name, or that "consternate the Keevils" sounds like a deviant board game, it's the string of small words delaying content, then crashing into the solid mass of "consternate."

I try to be an obediant law student, but I keep getting snagged on these bits of language.

Why is it that after a BA in English, an MA in English, and half a Law degree, I still have such a hard time writing essays? It’s not just the usual procrastination, worrying about topic and focus, incomplete research, etc. I am terrified of writing. There’s such a breach between the chaos of thought and reduction into words, sentences, paragraphs. So much is lost. Actually, I’m sure nothing is lost: an idea that can’t be articulated was never an idea, probably just the feeling of having an idea hovering just beyond reach. I think I have a lazy mind. I just wish I didn’t keep entering degree programs that involve so much writing. I’m trying to write about indeterminacy, but I keep panicking then giving up…it all seems so… fucking… indeterminate.

Now literature is only a means, devoid of cause and purpose; in fact, that is what defines it. You can of course attempt a sociology of the literary institution; but you can limit to act of writing by neither a why nor a wherefore. ... To ask oneself why one writes is already an advance over the blissful unconsciousness of "inspiration," but it is a despairing advance -- there is no answer. Apart from demand and apart from success, empirical alibis much more than real motives, the literary act is without cause and without goal precisely because it is devoid of sanction: it proposes itself to the world without any praxis establishing or justifying it: it is an absolutely intransitive act, it modifies nothing, nothing reassures it.
-Roland Barthes, "Kafka's Answer," Critical Essays (NWU Press, 1972).

But now in Alberta, we have a government that is unwilling to govern (this whole $400 reward decision was made behind closed caucus doors and announced in front of TV cameras because the legislature has not been opened since its summer break). We also have a government that wishes individuals to make decisions of how to redistribute the communal wealth.

Considering how unemployed and debt-ridden I am, you’d think I’d be happy to get random cheques from the government, but I’m not; I’m livid. I’m tired of Klein declining to fulfill his democratic duties and I’m sick of his cynical maneuvers to buy our complacency. What to do? Refuse to cash the cheque? Take the money and mail 400 postcards of complaint to the legislature? Give 400 loonies to 400 homeless people?

Giving the money to a charity would be a nice gesture, but it would also reinforce the government’s contention that the non-profit/charity sector is better suited to deliver social services that the government is unwilling to concern itself with. I think the government can deliver services more efficiently, and I think that its history of cutbacks combined with its reticence to regulate and/or organize non-profit activity has resulted in an overloaded, inefficient and unsustainable charitable sector that must attempt to fulfill the demands of a society whose needs are not met by the institution charged with the responsibility of meeting those needs.

Any use of the money seems inadequate in comparison to the way in which it should be used: by the Alberta government, for the people of Alberta, through government programs. Health, education, affordable housing, legal aid… any of these could use more funding.

This seems like an opportunity to make some kind of statement, but despite all my ranting, I’ll probably just spend my share on rent or food.

There's a wonderful Barthes essay about the pain of revision called "Flaubert and the Sentence" in his New Critical Essays (Hill and Wang, 1980):

...Flaubert subtracts, erases, constantly returns to zero, begins over again. Flaubertian sequestration has for its center (and its symbol) a piece of furniture which is not the desk but the divan: when the depths of agony are plumbed, Flaubert throws himself on his sofa: this is his "marinade," an ambiguous situation, in fact, for the sign of failure is also the site of fantasy, whence the work will gradually resume, giving Flaubert a new substance which he can erase anew. Flaubert qualifies this Sisyphean circuit by a very strong word, "atrocious," the sole recompense he receives for his life's sacrifice.

Also:

...style for Flaubert is absolute suffering, infinite suffering, useless suffering.

Why writing poetry is hard:

For it is indeed a matter of vertigo: correction is infinite, it has no sure sanction.

Why writing fiction is worse:

I have a narration to compose; now the story is something which is very wearisome for me. I have to send my heroine to a ball.

Man, I love this stuff.

Starting to see a way out of the procrastination-paralysis of the last month and a half. Rather than reading and preparing for exams, I’ve been worrying about what to write for the two papers I have to do this term. My philosophy of law class has been a real worry, because most of what we read and discuss has to do with the question of whether law and morality are separate. I can’t seem to become invested in that question. I just don’t see how it matters. What interests me is the construction of law, how it’s linguistic and textual. The problems of language and the problems of texts (indeterminacy, ambiguity, desire for closure) are the problems of law.

The light for me at the end of this particular tunnel is Barthes. I’m going to try to discuss the genres of legal texts in terms of the readerly/writerly distinction. Maybe I’ll also throw in some Saussure and discuss the difference between speech and writing and try to argue that because writing is inferior so is law...

Hmm. Yeah, this probably won’t work. But whatever, I get to read Barthes again, Yay!

How little thought patterns matter.

A sentence like this is comforting because I feel that its absurd complexity relieves me of any obligation to understand it.

And during the period of twenty-one years from my death if the said Lilian Aspinall shall live so long to accumulate the surplus if any of such income at compound interest by investing the same and the resulting income thereof in any of the investments aforesaid by way of addition to the capital of such fund as aforesaid and so as to be subject to the same trusts as are hereby declared concerning the same and during the remainder of the life of the said Lilian Aspinall in case she shall survive the said period of twenty-one years to pay or apply such surplus income (if any) to the person or persons or for the purposes to whom and for which the same would for the time being be payable or applicable if the said Lilian Aspinall were then dead.
In Re Smith, England, 1928

Slightly shocked today to see the Post-Prairie anthology all spiffy on display at the university book store. I've had the experience a few times of seeing a publication I'm part of in a bookstore before receiving my contributor copy in the mail, and I always have the same reaction. Curiosity, pride, etc. but also a horrible cringing regret, a desperate desire to take the poem back, rewrite it, erase it, burn it. There's such a crushing finality to words on paper. I tend to have to acclimate myself to publication -- leave it around the house for a while, flip through it a bit, read some of the other contributions -- before I can stand to look at my poems in print.

It's an interesting and absurd neurosis: I hate not being published, but whenever I am published, I feel like I've misrepresented myself.

Anyway, the anthology looks amazing, I can't wait to read it, and I am thrilled to be part of it. Go buy.

Law is mind without reason.
-Aristotle

I don't understand this quotation. I find it completely impenetrable. Granted, I read it out of any context, or rather in the random context of a webpage of quotations about law or reason or whatever. But still. What is mind without reason? What is law without reason? Everything in law is reasonable. That's a joke, ha. Well not ha, more blah. The answer to any question anyone can ask in law school is "reasonable." What is the standard of care to which a tortfeasor is held? The standard of the reasonable person. What kind of notice is required to avoid a claim of wrongful dismissal? Reasonable notice. Why can't I think of any better examples? No reason. In fact, I'm doing pro bono research for a civil liberties project looking at tenants' right, focusing on a particular piece of legislation that provides for a reasonable standard. My job is to figure how the standard would be applied were the provision to be adjudicated. My guess is reasonably.

My god. Law is not really this boring, I swear.

With absolute, overwhelming conviction, he didn’t believe it.
- Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

I’m enthralled with the paradox in that sentence, but I’m not sure why. I read it in one of the texts for a Law and Literature mini-course I took last year. I remember at the time I thought the sentence reflected the theme of the story quite powerfully; now I don’t remember the theme of the story anymore and I don’t really care.

I took the course because I figured it would provide me with some familiar ground in an unfamiliar environment, but it was an incredibly disappointing class. The focus was on the themes of law, justice, and criminality within science fiction. Not really my cup of tea, but I’ll read anything with a narrative. The class discussions, however, were mind-numbing. They went from quick plot summaries of the short stories to the question, how does this theme relate to what we already know about law in the world? From there, no-one ever returned to the stories themselves, except to refer to the actions of the characters in a decontextualized way, as though the experience of a character in a short story and one’s own experiences are discursively equivalent.

I guess I shouldn’t criticize too much; there’s no reason why a class of law students should conform to the expectations of a literature class. But it seemed that the course was indicative of the practice of the burgeoning “law and literature” movement. Apparently some legal academics are starting to recognize the relevance of narrative within the law. How facts, evidence, issues are framed by narrative, and how narratives about law (like Dickens’ Bleak House, which seems to be the main object of study) can offer lawyers a way to examine the legal system and its flaws. Fair enough, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I think a law and literature movement should look at not only novelists, but also poets and theorists: writers who recognize the complexity and inadequacy of language; who can shift the question from what does this mean to how can this mean?

I had hoped to make some kind of poem out of phrases from the Magna Carta, but so far it’s just not happening. Maybe it’s better to just enjoy the language for its own absurdity.

There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges.

All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.

All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters and warreners, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the country, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.

All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.

No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.

Style is a very simple matter: all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words.
-Virginia Woolf

Too much has been left to unsafe conjecture and frequently that which might have developed into proof has become arrested on the border of suspicion.
-Clarkson Co Ltd. v. Zhelka, Ontario, 1967

Nice. I wonder if there's a course one can take to learn how to write like a judge?