Legal Latin Quotes

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.” She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. “If you can say it in plain English, you should,” RBG says. Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.

Please feel free to use any of my arguments against any conservatives in your life. Free of charge (well, free of additional charge). Indeed, I’ve tried to use as little legal jargon as possible to explain why conservatives are almost always entirely full of shit (full of shit being a term of art derived from the Latin: Borkium shittialis).

The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.

Dear Miss Hummingbird,
 The leaves are turning green now, but not with envy. But they should be envious, because I, Jarod Ora Kintz, son of a thousand question marks, now have what every unemployed American most covets: a cat. Oh, and I’ve also got a new job. Almost forgot to mention it. “What will you be doing?” you may be wondering, and “Is it legal?” Those answers, as you can imagine, are gray. But so are elephants. Gray, I mean. Elephants are gray, not illegal, even though a certain political party in this country that’s represented by an elephant mascot certainly does things that to the normal citizen would be considered illegal. But I digress.
 Turns out that right under “Mayor of Orafouraville” on my resume, I can now add “Concierge at the Five-Star Hotel.” Concierge is just a fancy term that means something similar in Latin, I’m sure.
 My job will be to arrange activities for hotel guests for everything from opera tickets to dinner reservations to even organizing the burial of a loved one—though not if the disposal of the body is to be kept secret because a murder has occurred. Murder is such a ghastly (and ghostly) way to spoil dinner reservations for two, wouldn’t you agree? Or, rather, wouldn’t you not disagree?
 This job will allow me to meet interesting people from all over the planet, and possibly even other planets (like Pluto, if that’s still even a planet).
 It’s a full-time job, at least part of the time (40 hours per week out of a possible 168 hours). I’ll be expected to wear a shirt and tie. And, of course, pants—but that goes without saying. What also goes without saying are guests, but I hope some at least say goodbye before they go. 


On your left you can see the Stationary Circus in all its splendor! Not far nor wide will you find dancing bears more nimble than ours, ringmasters more masterful, Lunaphants more buoyant!” September looked down and leftward as best she could. She could see the dancing bears, the ringmaster blowing peonies out of her mouth like fire, an elephant floating in the air, her trunk raised, her feet in mid-foxtrot—and all of them paper. The skin of the bears was all folded envelopes; they stared out of sealing-wax eyes. The ringmaster wore a suit of birthday invitations dazzling with balloons and cakes and purple-foil presents; her face was a telegram. Even the elephant seemed to be made up of cast-off letterheads from some far-off office, thick and creamy and stamped with sure, bold letters. A long, sweeping trapeze swung out before them. Two acrobats held on, one made of grocery lists, the other of legal opinions. September could see Latin on the one and lemons, ice, bread (not rye!), and lamb chops on the other in a cursive hand. When they let go of the trapeze-bar, they turned identical flips in the air and folded out into paper airplanes, gliding in circles all the way back down to the peony-littered ring. September gasped and clapped her hands—but the acrobats were already long behind them, bowing and catching paper roses in their paper teeth.

In North Korea, the state built an education system to inculcate propaganda, but was unable to prevent famine. In colonial Latin America, the state focused on coercing indigenous peoples. In neither type of society was there a level playing field or an unbiased legal system. In North Korea, the legal system is an arm of the ruling Communist Party, and in Latin America it was a tool of discrimination against the mass of people. We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions—extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.

How this complicated mosaic of [citizenship] statuses [among those who came under Roman control] had originated is again hard to know. Roman writers of the first century BCE, followed by modern legal scholars, tended to treat them as part of a highly technical, carefully calibrated system of civic rights and responsibilities. But that is almost certainly the product of later legal rationalisation. It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a 'Latin' colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity. The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one's home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word 'Latin' so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and 'belonging' that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and 'nationhood'. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches. It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In the case of the French curés, the crucial story was that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church. According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed, ‘Hoc est corpus meum! ’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine. In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated. When in 1896 Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.

Amor significa cierto orden, y no es orden el que uno quiere cuando te has acostumbrado a vivir tan contento en el caos

The vast majority of workers had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally defined rights and often did not possess legal title to the land or houses they occupied. Throughout Latin America and many other parts of the developing world, the informal sector constitutes perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the entire labor force. Unlike the industrial working class, this group of “new poor” has been notoriously hard to organize for political action. Rather than living in large barracks in factory towns, they live scattered across the country and are often self-employed entrepreneurs.

that is from a legal viewpoint what is technically referred to in the Latin as de minimis” and, in the equally technical language of common sense, as “batshit crazy.

Beginning in the late 1960s, some activists managed to establish illegal, clandestine structures committed to nonviolent action. (...) This nonviolent underground had several expressions to aid those in danger: the two most common were to help ferry draft resisters and antiwar soldiers out of the country and to provide safe abortions for women in need before the practice was legalized in 1973. In the 1980s, much of this infrastructure was revived and expanded to provide sanctuary for refugees fleeing repressive, U.S.-backed military regimes in Latin America. The experiences of these nonviolent revolutionaries disentangle militancy from violence and violence from clandestinity.

In yet another bizarre example of German jurisprudence, Professor Robert Hepp, a University of Osnabrueck professor of sociology, was found guilty in 1998 of contravening the law by writing a sentence in Latin, appearing as footnote number 74 in a 544-page book lauding the career of German historian Hellmut Diwald. The book under investigation, Helmut Diwald: His Legacy for Germany, had been scoured by state prosecutors for passages that might constitute a violation of “Holocaust denial” laws. The offending footnote condemned by the court referred to claims of systematic extermination of Jews by means of cyanide gas at Auschwitz as a “fable” [fabula]. The court ruled that this sentence constituted ‘incitement’ and vilified the memory of the [Jewish] dead, thereby resulting in a breach of “trust in legal security of Jews living in the Federal Republic [of Germany], and considerably diminishing their mental-emotional ability to live in peace and freedom.

Educators often refer to communication skills as rhetorical skills. Scholars focus on both oral and written rhetoric. Oral skills are often taught through speech and debate classes, and are sometimes called forensics. Forensics, derived from the Latin word “forum,”as in court of law, actually means pertaining to legal proceedings or argumentation. Popular television shows have changed the meaning to something related exclusively to scientific investigation, as by a forensic pathologist. The term is actually much broader, as forensics implies researching an idea and then comparing it to things known by the audience in order to persuade them to one side of an argument or the other. Hence, the term “rhetoric”is closely tied to the idea of oral, documented, or physical evidence explained to the appropriate audience.

Expressio unius, also known as inclusio unius, is a Latin name for the communicative device known as negative implication.

W.A. was taking classes both as a college freshman and a first-year law student, studying Latin, Greek, and geometry along with his legal contracts.

 mid 16th cent.: extension of obsolete practitian, variant of PRACTICIAN. Linked entries: PRACTICIAN prae-   prefix (used esp. in words regarded as Latin or relating to Roman antiquity, e.g., praenomen) equivalent to PRE-.  from Latin. Linked entries: PRE- prae·ci·pe   n. [LAW] an order requesting a writ or other legal document.  HISTORICAL a writ demanding action or an explanation of nonaction.  Latin (the first word of the writ), imperative of

Started in Argentina, escrache has spread to other Latin American countries as a popular movement to oust, shame and ostracize retired generals, politicians and other powerful figures who have committed unpunished crimes. After locating the criminal in question, the organizers would inform his neighbors that here lives a state-sanctioned mass murderer or torturer, or a looter of public funds. Later, thousands of people would converge on this man's house to publicly indict the blood-drenched fat cat. Though this Latin American version of a Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush or Obama is never physically attacked, the monster will be shunned by many of his neighbors, with local businesses even refusing to sell him a meal or a newspaper. Critics of escrache have denounced it as a form of vigilante justice and, as the outburst of an angry mob, something that should be declared illegal, but the protesters are only reacting to acts that are themselves clearly illegal, not to mention outrageously immoral. The protesters' public harassment does not compare to their targets' torturing and/or raping, then throwing their victims from airplanes into the ocean, or kidnapping their children and erasing their identities. Too often, the state will use the legality argument to bind its opponents, while doing whatever it pleases, legal or not. Not satisfied with a monopoly on violence, the state also wants to be the sole interpreter of what's right and wrong, as implied by the often-bandied-about legality question, and the more criminal the state is, the more illegal, the more it will shriek about the need for everyone else to walk the straight and narrow, according to its own power-drunk markings. Talking to Borzutsky's class, I asked the students to consider escrache in the North American context. Who are our criminals in high places and what should we do about them? Unlike our southern neighbors, we have neither the clarity to identify our enemies from within, nor the courage or unity to confront them. To be fair, though, our top criminals don't move among us, with many never even being mentioned by our obfuscating media, as great a killer of brain cells as any, and worse than any glue. Even when not anonymous, however, the most malignant Americans are hidden behind guarded gates, bulletproof glass or acres of real estate, so that it would take considerable enterprise to target them. When faced with an illegal and ultraviolent enemy, we must resort to any and all tricks, be extra clever and strike hard, for real, but most of us are too tightly bound to our bifurcated harness to do more the jiggle, every once in a while, an electronic voting machine. Geez, I wonder who they'll let us pretend to vote for next time, if there's a next time?

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches. It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In the case of the French curés, the crucial story was that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church. According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus meum! ’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine. In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated.

Although for several centuries the Roman Catholic Church was the only legal religion in Latin America, its popular support was neither wide nor deep.5 Many huge rural areas were without churches or priests, a vacuum in which indigenous faiths persisted.6 Even in the large cities with their splendid cathedrals, mass attendance was very low – as recently as the 1950s perhaps only 10 to, at most, 20 per cent of Latin Americans were active participants in the faith.7 Reflective of the superficiality of Latin Catholicism, so few men entered the priesthood that all across the continent most of the priests had always been imported from abroad.

Until well into the twentieth century there even were legal bans on the sale of Bibles in most nations of Latin America, which led to the widespread belief that only Protestants accepted the Bible.

Dear Feliks . . . I consider that we must as soon as possible move to a more “liberal” form of Soviet rule: fewer repressions, more legality, more discussion, more self-rule (under the party’s guidance naturaliter [Bukharin liked to use Latin]), etc. . . . That is why I sometimes speak out against proposals to widen the rights of the GPU, etc. Understand, dear Feliks (you know how much I love you) that you have no reasons whatsoever to suspect me of any

This is why people began collectively to imagine the existence of limited liability companies. Such companies were legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them. Over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination. In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’, which is ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack. Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings. And

Soon after Barnabas and Saul set out on their first journey, Saul dropped his Jewish name and started using his Latin one, Paul (as a Roman citizen he had to have a legal Latin name). The Roman name sounded better to Gentile ears.

narrative. The beginning of the rule of law4 – it is often said, and is largely true – in Britain coincides with the signing by King John of the Magna Carta (the Big Charter)5 in 1215. This has two key chapters, which make clear that a person cannot be punished without due process, and that such a process cannot be bought, delayed or denied. These are critical principles in our judicial system today. As it happens, Magna Carta was in force for precisely two months (when Pope Innocent III annulled it on the grounds it had been obtained by compulsion, calling it ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’), and did not directly lead to modern jury trials in any significant way. As an articulation of principles of justice, it owed much to existing texts, such as the coronation oaths of Anglo-Saxon kings and the law codes of Henry I. The Pope also called Magna Carta ‘void of all validity forever’. He was wrong. It has survived as both a romantic gesture and a useful precedent6 to cite as our courts became more professional and individual rights became more established. The more significant, but less heralded, legal development came a couple of centuries later with the articulation of the principle of habeas corpus. The full phrase is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum: ‘may you bring the body before the court’, which sounds pompous or funereal. What it means, though, is that everyone has a right to be tried in person before being imprisoned. If someone is held by the state without trial, a petition using this phrase should get them either freed or at least their status interrogated by a judge. Two Latin words contain the most effective measure against tyranny in existence. As time progressed in this country, then, we see

The more legal terms and Latin that were thrown about, the more solicitors were trying to bury something ripe.

Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere. The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks. („Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia) There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia. He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.” He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier. Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes. In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend. Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.

For every difficult question of her childhood, for instance about sex or cancer, her father had answered legally accurately (preferably with Latin) and using obscure medical terms (‘lesion’ for tumour, ‘procedure’ for operation). So although he could never be accused of lying he could also never, quite, be understood.

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source.60 Many of the early English Orientalists in India were, like Jones, legal scholars, or else, interestingly enough, they were medical men with strong missionary leanings.

Derived from the Latin forensis, the word’s root refers to the ‘forum’, and the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political or legal gathering. In classical

For decades, indeed centuries, the English legal system had been decried for its unfairness. The lists of its short-comings varied, but most included the sheer time it took to resolve any case and the eye-watering cost in lawyers' fees of legal action. This indefinite imprisonment of debtors and the power of the central courts in London were also causes for repeated complaint, as was the fact that the law was a closed shop, conducted in Latin and French, to the absolute exclusion of non-professionals.

In Pecos County, the county commissioners banned people of Latin American descent from using community swimming pools reserved for whites. Attorneys for the consul-general of Mexico informed Governor Stevenson that the Pecos ordinance was unlawful because under federal law, a segregation ordinance could not be enforced in a government-owned facility. Segregation ordinances were legal only if they involved private property. Because the swimming pools in question were owned by the county and the ordinance had been passed by county officials, the commissioners were clearly violating federal law. Furthermore,

The two [Greco-Roman and Latin] worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today’s Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization.

Since the Protestant Reformation, it has been understood that there are two apparently opposite mistakes or errors into which you can fall so as to lose your grasp on this biblical gospel and its power. They are called “legalism,” the view that we can put God in our debt and procure his blessing with our goodness, and “antinomianism,” the idea that we can relate to God without obeying his Word and commands. Both words, derived from the Latin and Greek words for “law,” miss a crucial aspect of how the gospel functions.

squatters are using land that they have no legal right to occupy or use. The phenomenon is so common that it is arguably the largest property rights problem in the region.

Language Barrier We use Latin terms To make us feel smart and sharp (Nobody else cares)

in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them. It was a historical rhyme of what had happened a century earlier, when losing the war led Southerners to glorify Dixie and the Lost Cause. After the Civil War, historians started calling the decades before 1861 the antebellum era—for many white Southerners, a word connoting fantasies of a perfect Old South. Antebellum is Latin for “before the war”—any war. After the wars of the 1960s—after Vietnam, “the Negro revolt,” the countercultural explosion—plenty of Americans mythologized the 1940s and ’50s and early ’60s as their own late lamented antebellum era.

Romans often found the Christians offensively irritating in court—not without reason, if the acts of the martyrs are to be believed. The Christians spat, metaphorically and literally, in the face of Roman legal process. In one famous trial, a martyr named Sanctus responded to every question with “I am a Christian.” A Christian author records the event with great approbation. “With such determination did he stand up to their onslaughts that he would not tell them his own name, race, and birthplace, or whether he was a slave or free; to every question he replied in Latin, ‘I am a Christian.’ This he proclaimed over and over again, instead of name, birthplace, nationality and everything else, and not another word did the heathen hear from him.”42 The “heathen” were less approving of this behavior and the presiding governor promptly had him tortured some more. What should Pliny do with these odd people?

Dr Dowson stirred. ‘I think most of you already speak Latin, but I’ve put together an Idiot’s Guide for refresher purposes, plus, I’m available for private conjugation should anyone feel the need.’ Markham blinked. ‘Is that even legal?

In 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law that made illegal immigration a state offence, but the prospect of even one American state taking illegal immigration seriously was anathema to Hispanic groups. The National Council of La Raza said the Arizona law reflected “the rhetoric of hate groups, nativists, and vigilantes.” MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) said the law “launches Arizona into a spiral of pervasive fear.” The president of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), Rosa Rosales, called it a “racist law,” and an official with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said it would “open the door to discrimination and racial profiling.” One of Arizona’s congressmen, Democrat Raul Grijalva, called for a boycott of his own state. The law, of course, said nothing about race; it merely paralleled largely unenforced provisions of federal immigration law. The people of Arizona were tired of playing host to an estimated half million illegal immigrants no matter where they came from. Hispanic groups were furious because they feared fellow Hispanics might be deported. We can assume they would have had no objections to the law if most illegal immigrants were Irishmen or Poles. There was irony but nothing unusual when Hispanics, who were acting out of pure racial solidarity, accused Arizonans, who were trying to enforce federal law, of racism.

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.

Greek was the language of most citizens of Constantinople, but the commission’s product was in Latin, Justinian’s native language. The Corpus Juris Civilis, as the whole codifying work came to be called, had no effective competition in the West for thirteen hundred years, and the Roman Empire survived in Justinian’s Byzantine legal incarnation.