A lifetime of legal craft can feel squandered on procedural motions

Evidence

Late at night Facher would sit in his war room, in the cavernous space on the twenty-first floor that Hale and Dorr used for storage. From his chair at the wooden table in the center of the room, in a pool of lamplight, he could look out the windows and into the darkened offices of the skyscraper across the street. He had just turned sixty. One of his cats, his only and beloved companions at home, was dying of diabetes. “Life is so short,” he said not long after his birthday. “It seems foolish to devote it to motions to dismiss, but that’s what I’ve done.” — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1507

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Facher’s line about life’s shortness and devoting it to motions to dismiss reads as hard-won, slightly rueful life wisdom about where a career’s hours actually go.
• XREF: connects to: Judges resolve far more civil cases through motions than trials do — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1089; Actual court practice was freer than written procedural manuals suggest — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 803

Broader Connections

• Actual court practice was freer than written procedural manuals suggest #complicates (0.90) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 803