Shanghai 4

Is this what you expected to find in China?

Shanghai 3

The 30’s were good (for some).

Shanghai 2

Former consulate in the French Concession.

Shanghai

 

Looking out the window of the Crowne Plaza in the old French Concession.

No to Electronic Communications in the Courts

E-service Requirement
I read with interest the article “Move underway to require e-swapping of documents” in the February 15 News. I would like to express my concern about the proposed rules from both a historical and technological point of view.

There is no question that the advances in technology have made communication among attorneys easier. The problem is the reliability of the systems. I am not referring to the occasional downed systems or power outages. I refer to the fact that with spam filters and the like, it is not always possible to know if an e-mail has been received. This is less of an issue in litigation, because if a scheduled event has not occurred, one can always check with opposing counsel, such as when interrogatory answers are due. In fields that are not so predictable, it is often impossible to tell whether the addressee has received a document. There is simply no reliable equivalent for certified mail.

There is also an archival reason why e-mail should not entirely supplant paper. The court system does not exist as a private forum for dispute resolution. Because ours is a precedential system, even casual decisions often affect many more than the litigants before the court.

Paper and electronic systems are complementary: Each has different advantages. We know that paper lasts for at least 100 years and perhaps more. Retrieving an e-mail written in the early 1990s is an adventure. Hard drives are mechanical and fragile; other currently available storage media have similar disadvantages.

The rules allowing for a certain number of days before responses are required were not established solely because of the length of time it took to deliver mail satchels by horseback. Part of the reason was to allow counsel a sufficient time to prepare a considered, reasoned response.

It is ironic that in these days of case dockets in the thousands and trial delays of up to four years that attorneys are pushing not only for instantaneous communication, but to eliminate reliable archives.

Michael O’Kane
Miami

Arabic Looking Over my Shoulder

 

Lawyers love to define terms at the beginning of a contract, and then identify the definitions with capital letters as if they were proper nouns. So you might see a contract which defines “Annual Management Plan” as a management plan which is created or modified on an annual basis. I question the need for specially defining terms which have a well-understood meaning. Even in the case of a term which needs definition, the problem in the legal environment in the Gulf is that the contract has to be translated into Arabic. The English language text will specify that the Arabic language version is controlling in accordance with Saudi law. So while in the English version, the term “Major Maintenance Agreement” will use initial capital letters in all subsequent appearances of the term, doing so in Arabic is impossible. Arabic has no capital letters. As a solution I suggested using a bold Arabic font, but the translators were apoplectic. No matter, I got back at them: while the Arabic version is controlling, I included a provision that says that in case of any discrepancy between the Arabic and English versions, the English version shall be used as a guide to interpret the Arabic version.

El pueblo

 

 

Here is a copy of my novel El pueblo.  If you have paperbak software, you can convert this picture back to a pdf file. Or, you can print out this picture and save it. Paper lasts for a long time, how long do digital files last? No one really knows…

My Kawada Wikipedia Contribution

 

 

 

 

Jun Kawada was a Japanese poet who died in 1966. He gained a good deal of notoriety in Japan after the war because he stole the wife of one of his disciples. He did this when he was 68 years old, and lived with her for almost two more decades. In a poem about the relationship, he wrote, “to an old man facing the grave, love holds no fear.” I came across this quote in the book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton, 1999, p. 155). The Wikipedia article is at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun_Kawada.

Contract Language for Unix Time Clock Crisis

 

The Y2K problem turned out not to be a problem at all. Still, before the clocks struck 00:01 on January 1, 2000, there was a great deal of consternation about what might happen. Software engineers worked double shifts trying to avoid doomsday scenarios that had airplanes falling out of the sky due to non-compliant software. Fortunately, none of the dire predictions came to pass.

Because of the way Unix systems calculate dates, we are in the middle of another countdown which will end on January 19, 2038. As with the Y2K crisis, no one knows what will happen. My guess is that a simple fix will be found well in advance. Meanwhile, lawyers must put together contracts which anticipate problems such as these. There was some good Y2K contract language around, but most of it has fallen victim to the <Del> key and is no longer around. So my gift to a lawyer tasked with having to write something in 2037 is this bit of language salvaged from 1999:

 

1.1 Year 2000 Compliance. The Developer represents and warrants to Owner that the Work and the Facility Assets which include any software applications, computer chips or date sensitive components have been, or will prior to the Operations Date be, properly tested in order to confirm that they conform to Year 2000 date criteria. The Developer further represents and warrants to Owner that such Work and Facility Assets are, or will upon the Operations Date be, fully Year 2000 compliant, in that they shall:

(a) have no inherent dependencies on date/time;

(b) continue to be compliant with all valid date and time combinations as supported by the underlying operating systems/hardware;

(c) not be adversely affected by the internal computer clock turning to January 1, 2000;

(d) accurately process date data (including, but not limited to, calculating, comparing and sequencing) from, into and between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including leap year calculations, without a decrease in the functionality of such Work or Facility Assets; and

(e) are designed to be used prior to, during and after the calendar year 2000, and that they shall operate during each such time period without error relating to date data, specifically including any error relating to, or the product of, date data which represents or references different centuries or more than one century.

In the event of a breach of the foregoing representation and warranty herein, and notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Agreement, the Developer shall assume all risks and responsibilities inherent to such warranty and shall indemnify and save harmless Owner and its customers, tenants and subtenants, and any other Person who may have a claim against Owner, from and against any and all claims, demands, suits, actions or causes of actions, of any kind whatsoever, for direct or indirect damages, losses, costs, injuries, death, property damage, claims and/or expenses, resulting from any breach by the Developer of its representation and warranty contained in this Section 6.2, and shall also include all judiciary and extra-judiciary costs incurred by Owner arising from such breach.

 

(The picture shows Venice in 1999. During the time of the Venetian Republic, State executions took place between the two pillars shown.)

Moscow to Caracas

The Venezuelan Air Force has one Airbus 319 CJ with a range of 11,000 nm.
The distance between Moscow and Caracas is 5365 nautical miles. The range of the A319CJ with 8 passengers’ payload and four auxiliary fuel tanks is 6,000 nautical miles.
So it would be near the aircraft’s limits, but hardly impossible.