I have been spending time this week getting ready for my sermon/message on Sunday about the intersection of law and justice and whether one can get justice in the courts. Early next week, I will either send a copy of my address or (perhaps) a link or something to a recording of it. New Unity streams its services and, I think puts Andy’s messages on line. So you will see something.

It is typical to have reading or two before the sermon in Unitarian or UU congregations. I assume this takes the place of the Bible readings that would have a part of the service in more Christian services. So I have picked two readings to sort of set the tone for my talk and I thought I’d share them with you all.

The first reading is from the first chapter “Bleak House”. It has a special meaning for me beyond the fact that it is an amazing piece of Dickens. My Civil Procedure Professor at Emory Law School read it at our first class with him. I can’t imagine, looking back, what he was thinking. Here it is:

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.…

The Lord High Chancellor [sits there] with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.

On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar … are mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretense of equity with serious faces, as players might.

On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, are ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.

Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank!

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

I really do love this. It is such a pretty powerful indictment of the law. But I’m not as disgusted by the law as Dickens was and that is not my message. (I’m sure a Dickens scholar would know what happened to him to cause this implacable enmity.) So I decided to follow this with a a more positive reading. (These are harder to find than I expected.) My second reading it from Atticus Finch’s jury summation in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and goes as follows:

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest Justice of the Peace court in the land, or this honourable court, which you serve. Our courts have their faults as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

It’s a great lead-in to my sermon. I might say that I  recognize that there is a danger in having wonderful readings preceding my remarks–that anything I say afterwards will seem clumsy. We will see.