Those who follow my own blog will know that I was fortunate enough to accept an offer to clerk for the Delaware Court of Chancery in 2005-06 on Monday. In announcing the good news, I noted that it's kind of hard to explain what such a useful court is actually doing in Delaware, adding that it's kind of as if the British Panel on Takeovers and Mergers sat in Taunton, a smallish county town to the West of London, and home to university buddy Lewis*. My gentle ribbing of both Taunton and Wilmington evidently struck a nerve, because a few hours later I received the email excerpted below from OJ Wooding, an Oxford student with his own blog at Dayorama. May all small towns have such an enthusiastic defender.

* My apparent obsession with small, out of the way, towns that house unlikely institutions will have to be dealt with in more detail later, I think.

I think the comparison between Wilmington and Taunton is grossly
unfair.Taunton is a beautiful market town with a pleasant train station, a decent mix between large and small shops (including one of the best butchers in the world, the other being in Tavistock) and a delightful cricket ground. I spent a semester last year as a student at Princeton, and played a lot of rugby and did a lot of travelling. For a variety of reasons I ended up going through Delaware about 6 times in 3 months, which frankly is enough for anyone. Wilmington struck me as a pretty depressing place, with a lot of brown buildings. To be fair, this is a fact that was gained either from being on an Amtrak going through the place, or (usually drunk) on a rugby team bus. But one can still be on a train or drunk (but preferably not both) in Taunton and marvel at its beauty.

Anyway, moving on to (more important) food related issues. Taunton is home to the wonderful Castle restaurant, a one Michelin star place that does a particularly fine rack of lamb. It was home at one time or another to, amongst others, Gary Rhodes and Phil Vickery. That it has such a fantastic range of local farms to buy from is probably the key to its success, but it does have a fair imagination as well. About 8 years ago they spun off a brassiere (called Brazz), which was reviewed by The Guardian and caused outraged letters to the local paper when the reviewer (I forget his name)suggested that "the farmers would be unlikely to appreciate it, and would have nowhere to park their tractors". Now with the average American SUV being roughly the size of a British tractor, and with Wilmington having such wide roads and large parking lots, this is surely proof positive that Taunton is a far, far nicer place. :)

From John Marshall's opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland:

A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and coculd scarcely be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked . . .

[An] idea is that amendments, at least detailed as opposed to general amendments, are objectionable because they “clutter up” the Constitution with highly specific rules— causing the Constitution, in John Marshall’s words, to “partake of the prolixity of a legal code.” Here again the nirvana illusion is at work. The real alternative to a prolix formal constitutional code promulgated by the amendment process is a prolix informal constitutional code promulgated by judges. Whatever may be said about the value of the latter, it is not “the intelligible Constitution” of general principles that the objection seems to contemplate. Consider the notoriously intricate and code-like character of judicially-developed free speech law, or the tangled underbrush of Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure law. Part of the reason these bodies of law are so highly reticulated is that the underlying texts (“the freedom of speech,” “unreasonable searches and seizures”) are so skimpy. The judges have had to fill in their content, but would not have had to do so had those texts been more expansive and detailed, as other amendments are. A complex society will produce complex constitutional law; the only real question is whether it is good to outsource constitutional complexity from the amendment process to the adjudicative process.

The exciting things our LEXIS training guy has shown us:

U.S. ex.rel. Mayo v. Satan [54 F.R.D. 282]

Plaintiff ... alleges that Satan has on numerous occasions caused plaintiff misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff's downfall. Plaintiff alleges that by reason of these acts Satan has deprived him of his constitutional rights. ...

the Court has serious doubts that the complaint reveals a cause of action upon which relief can be granted by the court. We question whether plaintiff may obtain personal jurisdiction over the defendant in this judicial district. The complaint contains no allegation of residence in this district. While the official reports disclose no case where this defendant has appeared as defendant there is an unofficial account of a trial in New Hampshire where this defendant filed an action of mortgage foreclosure as plaintiff. The defendant in that action was represented by the preeminent advocate of that day, and raised the defense that the plaintiff was a foreign prince with no standing to sue in an American Court. ...

We note that the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United States Marshal for directions [**3] as to service of process.