I’ve often been asked why I haven’t written a book about bankers and tradesmen, since I’ve proven myself to be a leading analyst of such peculiar creatures.
The problem, for the most part, is length. I’ve become so accustomed to writing 700 words or so about the great banking, real estate and assorted financial services issues of the day that I worry about my patience for writing a book, which I’ve been told must be considerably longer.
When I write 700 words, I’m sort of done. What if that’s not even long enough to be a chapter? I could, of course, ask for help from the legal community, which often writes 700 word sentences, let alone newspaper columns.
Speaking of law and lengthy commentary (see how easy it is to write 700 words?), the state Supreme Court in Indiana has just announced that it is now filled with a bunch of tweeting fools, offering up 140-character maximum wisdom per tweet on cases to be heard and opinions rendered and what the chief justice thought of the chicken salad sandwich in the court cafeteria.
This should really catch on across the legal and financial services community.
When the SEC gets around to deciding whether stockbrokers and insurance agents and assorted, helpful financial planners owe their clients a “fiduciary” responsibility to love them very, very much, will we be more likely to understand the 8,741-page document – or will we do better if some 23-year-old law clerk tweets, “way cool; put client interests first”?
The legal community has long recognized the value of rhetorical shorthand. Prior to Twitter, the lawyers simply spoke in Latin, to avoid the tedium of actually having to listen to each other. A little bit of “venire facias de nova,” and “locus delicti” prompted both sides to settle things in a hurry.
Pithy Prose
The potential for Twitter in legal matters is huge. What if the U.S. Supreme Court was limited to a tweet for its opinions? Think about it. The high court has issued 6,908 pages of opinions on whether or not a crèche at Christmas time at city hall is OK, as long as a reindeer balances the Baby Jesus, and the menorah is lit sufficiently bright to compete with the Christmas tree. One tweet couldn’t be any worse – and it would be much more efficient. You could get through law school in six months.
Imagine if Eisenstadt v. Baird, the 1972 Massachusetts contraceptive case that staggered up to the U.S. Supreme Court, had been decided with a tweet?
Do a married person and an unmarried person in Massachusetts have different needs for a doctor’s prescription for contraceptive stuff, even if it’s sort of an over-the-counter kind of product?
The high court went on and on about “equal protection” and that the right “must be the same for married and unmarried alike.” Leave it to the Supreme Court to make sex boring. The Twitter decision would have been: “Go to it, you young singles. We’re jealous.”
And what about the excruciating Massachusetts Board of Retirement v. Murgia, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 dealt with the question of whether requiring state cops to retire at age 50 was discrimination against old folks?
By the time the justices were done expounding on “rationality” and “strict scrutiny,” and why it was OK for the state to be dumb, as long as it was rational, you wanted to borrow a gun from one of the retired cops and shoot yourself. How much better the tweet decision would have been: “Hey, pop, you’re a cop. Move to Florida.”
Even before there were electric typewriters and Buick Park Avenues, the high court could have used a tweet or two.
In an 1830s eminent domain case involving the Boston Water Power Co., Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw (who was from Massachusetts) had this to say: eminent domain power “must be large and liberal…and it must be so constrained as to secure effectually the rights of the citizens….
Large and liberal, yet constrained and controlled? Lemuel needed the discipline of Twitter. His decision would have read; ‘Damned if I know.”
I’m over 700 words. I’ll tweet you the rest of it.
