A COSMOPOLITAN LAWYER: JUST SOME READINGS I HAVE ENJOYED LATELY

First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (Food for thought regarding legal education: "In his first months town, John Quincy Adams barely had time to look up for the reading mass of legal texts he was obliged to master--William Blackstone's four-volume Commentaries, surveying English law, Sir Edward Coke's Institutes of the Law of England, Sir Michael Foster's Crown Law, and the like. Fortunately for Adams, Theophilus Parsons was an unusually erudite attorney, a serious dabbler in botany, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as a master of the classics. He assigned his charges words of history and ethics in order to ward off the 'universal skepticism' that comes of 'defending indiscriminately the good and the bad.'" Id. at 51.).