MidLaw and Divers Items
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
The Mindful Board: Mastering the Art of Conscious Governance by Charlotte Roberts & Martha Summerville is just out.
It will take anyone involved in making decisions for a group or a system onto new ground. Good book. More here later.
Available at fine bookstores from one end of the World Wide Web to the other.
Roberts and Summerville are high-powered Guilford College trustees.
Sumac
MidLaw normally seeks to confine the Cahiers de Hoummous to hummus topics only and to dole them out at a measured pace. Just now though, we are sitting on not one but two slightly collateral tips that are questing to be free. The post-Thanksgiving interval seems a fitting moment to give them voice.
First: sumac. The argument is made that ground sumac should have an equal place on the table with salt and pepper. Agreed. Sumac is a characteristic spice of the Middle East. It is
commonly described as tart, sour or astringent — mild, but in the nature of lemon or vinegar.
Just try it. Get you some and see what you think. Sumac is a likely seasoning for hummus and many other foods: chicken, fish, rice, potatoes, fried foods, in soda to drink (seriously). Could be healthy. Who knows?
Mssabbaha with sumac
Second: boil an egg and serve it with your hummus. This can be for breakfast or with any other egg-appropriate meal, mezze or snack. Cook the egg for exactly 6 minutes and 50 seconds (per Momofuku). Fill a bowl with cold water and ice. When the eggs are done, transfer them immediately to the ice bath. After that, you know what to do.
For this, you will want your hummus creamy and your egg soft in the middle. (Remember: eggs are back. You can eat them now.)
You’ll be rocking and rolling soon.
The American Bar Association recently released its Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States. Not long afterward, the ABA House of Delegates refused to approve outside investment in law firms. The ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services contemplates state-by-state examinations of the issue, to be followed by local decisions state by state.
Last week, Axiom, a provider of “legal solutions” and “leader in the business of law,” announced opening an office in Charlotte.
Axiom is not a law firm. It is a business. It employs lawyers. It delivers legal services. It is an “alternative to the traditional law firm” — “more flexible, elastic, and commercially-minded”.
Axiom has begun hiring lawyers for Charlotte. It is hiring “elite talent that wants to practice in the Axiom mode.” And “looking at every practice area.”
So, there’s them that studies and them that does.
North Carolina Chief Justice Mark Martin represented the judiciary on the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services whose report was published earlier this year, and so Chief Justice Martin was interviewed recently by Ralph Baxter, Chairman of Thomson Reuters’ Legal Executive Institute, who asked the Chief (i) about broadening the scope of those who can participate in delivery of legal services (that is, who beyond licensed lawyers can provide legal services?); and (ii) about opening the door for non-lawyer investment in the business of legal services (can law firms issue stock?). Chief Justice Martin described the process by which such changes could come.
New proposals can come either through the ABA or directly at the state level. The ABA’s House of Delegates has already refused to approve outside investment in law firms. Even so, the Commission recommends that the states continue to consider the issue.
“So [non-lawyer investment in law firms is] one of those things that might happen,” Ralph Baxter observed to the Chief Justice in the video interview. The Chief’s response, a nonverbal chuckle, is the very model of making a noise without making a comment. Judicial and judicious. Worth the price of the (free) video.
Richard Mendenhall
William Horn Battle
OK – now I am fascinated.
In Memories of an Old-Time Tar Heel, Kemp Plummer Battle recalls a trip that he and his father, William Horn Battle, made to Asheville in the summer of 1848. Kemp was sixteen years old. On the way, they stopped at Jamestown where they spent an evening with Richard Mendenhall, “an old acquaintance of my father.”
Here is part of Kemp Battle’s account:
Near Greensborough we met an old acquaintance of my father, a refined and educated Quaker named Richard Mendenhall. On parting, he said courteously, “Come and see me, Kemp, and I will entertain thee for thy father’s sake until I know thee and can entertain thee for thy own.” I afterwards found this was a quotation from Swift’s Tale of a Tub.
While Mr. Mendenhall did not keep a hotel, he was willing to furnish meals to travelers at his house in Jamestown (pronounced “Jimston”). My father and I had dinner with him. Some friends had told me that he was fond of testing their knowledge of history. I determined to put a bluff on him. He began by asking me what was a giaour, the title of one of Byron’s poems. I happened to know that it was a name given by the Turks to disbelievers in Islamism. I answered his question and at once plied him with counter historical questions so fast that he refrained from catechising me further.
A nice story. Old-time Tar Heels, indeed. You can visit the Mendenhall home in Jamestown today and see where they were.
But how did William Horn Battle come to be acquainted with Richard Mendenhall? They were an unlikely pair.
William Horn Battle was born and raised in Battleboro (then) in Edgecombe County, a town founded by his grandfather. His family were farmers and slaveholders and founders of one of the oldest cotton mills in the state, which operated with slave labor. Battle himself was a lawyer, banker, judge and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice. He is acknowledged as the founder of the UNC Law School. Conservative at his core, William Horn Battle was the very embodiment of the antebellum establishment. He prominently opposed licensing women to practice law. Son, Kemp, among other roles, was president of the Chatham Railroad Company, Treasurer of the State, and president of the University of North Carolina.
Richard Mendenhall was born and raised in Jamestown in Guilford County, a town founded by his father and named for his grandfather who settled it. Mendenhall operated what is now preserved as the Mendenhall Plantation. He was a tanner, merchant, and educator. He was also an abolitionist and a founder and president of the Manumission Society of North Carolina. He led in transporting African Americans to Liberia and Haiti. He is said to have been a principal in the Underground Railroad. His younger brother, George C. Mendenhall, was a prominent lawyer, legislator, and UNC trustee. George was a large slaveholder, who formed companies of slaves that operated variously as builders, caterers, farm laborers, etc. Under Richard’s influence, George and his wife transported their slaves to freedom in the Midwest, thereby stimulating celebrated litigation. As a lawyer, George defended abolitionists and free blacks. Richard Mendenhall’s sons were a lawyer, bankers, investors in cotton mills, and leaders in building the North Carolina Railroad. His son, Nereus Mendenhall, served as president and kept Guilford College open through the Civil War and afterward. Guilford College, when led by Mendenhall, has been characterized as an “island of moderation, surrounded by a sea of fundamentalism.”
Both the Battles and the Mendenhalls were Whigs and unionists. But, when war came the Battles were ardent supporters of the Confederacy. The Mendenhalls, Quakers, stood aside from the war. Some were imprisoned and abused for refusing to fight. Nereus Mendenhall interceded with Jefferson Davis to arrange legal protections for Quakers and other pacifists.
So William Horn Battle and Richard Mendenhall seem unlikely dinner companions. An eastern planter and a Piedmont abolitionist. Each might rather have regarded the other as a Carolina giaour, than as a dinner-table discussant of literature and history. (Sixteen-year-old Kemp Battle later became professor of history at UNC.)
MidLaw’s theory is that Battle and Mendenhall may have become acquainted in Raleigh, perhaps in connection with Richard’s service in the General Assembly (if he did serve, as MidLaw believes he did).
Or, it may have been that William Horn Battle and Richard Mendenhall were simply a pair of civil, cultivated people, North Carolina leaders, from different backgrounds and with different points of view in what was becoming an increasingly divided society. Old-time Tar Heels.
MidLaw and Divers Items 