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17 Nova L. Rev. 669 (1992-1993)

handle is hein.journals/novalr17 and id is 701 raw text is: Fractured / Great / Moments in Courtroom History Charles M. Sevilla* I. INTRODUCTION Joseph Conrad described life as birth and death separated by struggle. For me, humor has been the lubricant to make the struggle a bit less rough, a survival instinct against life's rigors. Striving to see humor in the world in childhood helped me cope with my own manifest inadequacies: like catching a football with my mouth in the third grade (I not only failed to catch it, I lost part of a tooth), or getting picked off first base in Little League and not even knowing it, or having my fourth grade girl friend swear eternal love which lasted until the afternoon recess. You had to laugh so as not to cry. I did both. That was all long before law school. In fact, were it not for its pre-law honing, I think that whatever sense of humor I had would have been suffocated to extinction in the numbing, obscure and far too serious world that was my law school education. My first day of law school, I and a couple of other laugh-seeking tyros were mislead into thinking that the law might have much humor in it. Rumors swept the miscreant section of the first year class about X-rated cases which were must reads in the law library. My buddies and I descended upon the library and grabbed the books from the shelves. They were easy to find because unlike their pristine neighbors which seemed untouched by human hands, the spines of these books were dirty and tattered from clawing first year law student hands (all male) which had grabbed at them for a peek at their forbidden and naughty contents. One of us grabbed our quarry and hurled it to a nearby desk. It fell open to the desired page. We surrounded it. Our designated page-turner found the well-marked passage and gleefully read aloud the 1943 Florida Supreme Court case of Lason v. State. Mr. Lason was a seventy-six year * Attorney at law and partner, Cleary & Sevilla, San Diego, California. Formerly Chief Deputy State Public Defender 1979-1983. B.A., 1966, San Jose State Univ.; J.D., 1969, Univ. of Santa Clara; LL.M., 1971, George Washington Univ. 1. 12 So. 2d 305 (Fla. 1943).

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