The ICANN social event was a buffet in the hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia. The Ospedale di S.Spirito in Sassia was presented as the oldest hospital in Europe, constructed at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, a long hall with an incomprehensibly high ceiling. Jeff Neuman (NeuStar) and I (ex-NeuStar) sat together and kibbitzed, along with Javier Sáenez and Marwen Radwan, responsible for the the Spanish and Palestinian ccTLD registries, respectively. A few days later I returned to S.Spirito to find the hall being used for the regional congress of the Forza Italia, the party founded by Berlusconi, which reminded me of our caucus in Portland. I'll write more on ICANN later.
Then succeeded Ina to the kingdom of the West-Saxons, whose kin goeth to Cerdic, and reigned thirty-seven winters.
Ina succeeded Ceadwalla in 688 to become King of the West Saxons. In 728 he went on pilgrimage to Rome and founded the Saxon school. The school was endowed by a tax of a penny from each householder, the romescot (later "Peterspence") by Offa, King of Mercia. Ina's laws, Offa's laws, and Aethelbert's laws were incorporated into the laws of Alfred, and that brings us into the current term of the Supreme Court of the United States in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow. Sorry about the nosebleeds.
I've written about the problem Oliphant presents, the sudden, absurd fiction that a pushing match between two men in 1977 was sui generis, utterly without precident, because it took place within tribal jurisdiction, and one of the men was not an Indian, and one was, and therefore this Constitutional Question required an inquisition by the Rehnquist Court -- a work of simply staggering fiction and non-scholarship that lives on in series of mindnumbingly stupid cases. What if the two men were both Indians, but not members of the same tribe? What it if wasn't a pushing match, but a dispute over a dog? What if ... How fine can the territorial jurisdiction of an occupied territory be shaved with mere pieces of paper?
The Rehnquist Court will hear arguement, assuming it does not first decide that a parent's standing in case or controversy arising from the First Ammendment is conditional and completely determined by "custody", on the general question: Is Christianity part of English Common Law?
Thomas Jefferson wrote that the doctrine [that Christianity was part of the Common Law] was a sort of judicial "forgery", that judges had "stole this law upon us," He described the doctrine as "the most remarkable instance of Judicial legislation, that has ever occurred in English jurisprudence, or perhaps in any other." In this letter he cited the long road back ... to Ina, and the room an Indian, a Jew, a Spaniard, and a Palastinian politely dined and discussed technology over wine and bottled water.
The laws of England, in their progress from the earliest to the present times, may be likened to the road of a traveller, divided into distinct stages or resting places, at each of which a review. is taken of the road passed over so far. The first of these was Bracton's De legibus Angliae; the second, Coke's Institutes; the third, the Abridgment of the law by Matthew Bacon; and the fourth, Blackstone's Commentaries. Doubtless there were others before Bracton which have not reached us. Alfred, in the preface to his laws, says they were compiled from those of Ina, Offa, and Aethelbert ...
We do not simply live in the present. Rob Williams (no relation) wrote on the origins of Federal Indian Law. He traced the roots of current law to the correspondence between Innocent IV and Guyak Khan in the middle of the 13th century, to the origins of the doctrine of "Natural Law", and of necessity, of Objectivism, necessary to observer correctly the workings of that Natural Law in human affairs. It is from this thin slice of lemon, the untested claim of Innocent IV that Guyak Khan and the Golden Horde would be destroyed by a Diety intent upon the preservation of "Natural Law" if they continued towards Rome, that we know that Christian Europeans are the better interpreters of the natural order of things.
This session the Bill and his Gang will decide if Ina was a Christian, or a King, and supply their own supporting evidence, carelessly overthowing the change-of-life of pilgrimage to Rome and establishment of the Schola Saxonum, and the great chain of reason from Ina to Offa to Aethelbert to Alfred to Bracton to Coke to Bacon and finally to Blackstone. The history of the Kings of England will be sacrificed to a vision of Christian Integralism as fierce and bloodyminded as any, Reform or Counter-Reform, that framed the Wars of Religion in Europe. We do not live simply in the present.
Posted by at March 23, 2004 12:35 PM | TrackBack