The Law School

Astounding – June 1958

(1958)*

Theodore L. Thomas

Law, generally speaking, results from codification of experiences ... and there's nothing like experience to make a man interested in studying law ...

AS soon as the rocket landed the police threw a cordon around it and five of the biggest and strongest of them went in through the open port. As it turned out, five were not enough. Those waiting outside soon began to hear the most terrible noises. Yells, grunts and thuds were clearly discernible to those in the vicinity. It might be that the ship actually rocked slightly on its fins but that seems a little incredible. Before long it became apparent that the five cops inside were not doing so well, so the sergeant sent in three more.

The ruckus inside the ship picked up in tempo for a minute or two and then suddenly died down. Another minute, and four policemen appeared at the port supporting a tall, stocky man with his arms handcuffed behind him. His black hair was ruffled and his nose was bleeding and his clothing was torn. But with it all he looked better than the eight policemen who hauled him over to the wagon, climbed in with him, and drove off to the station.

They wasted no time when they got there. They charged him with assault with intent to kill, aggravated assault and battery (nine counts), mayhem (nine counts), resisting arrest, malicious mischief, disturbing the peace, affray, riot, escape, obscene and profane language, and blasphemy. In short, they threw the library at him.

The trial of The United States v. Hogan started right off and it immediately became apparent that Frank Hogan was not unduly impressed with judicial processes. He objected to the five officers of the law who stood tightly around his seat with their hands on the butt of their revolvers and there was some slight altercation when the officers tried to make him stand up when the judge came in.

Judge Witmer was an experienced lawyer with a strong feeling for the innate dignity of man. He carried his sixty-six years as though he enjoyed them. He had been on the bench for fifteen years and had built a reputation for being much more interested in justice than in law.

Judge Witmer sat down and cast a practiced eye over Hogan's brawny figure and the tense circle of men around him.

"All right, Officers," said the judge. "Please take seats on the other side of the bar."

One of them started to protest, but the judge waved him quiet. When they were seated the judge glanced at the list of charges in front of him. Then he looked up at Hogan and asked: "Do you have counsel, Mr. Hogan?"

"No," said Hogan in a surprisingly small voice for so big a man. "And what's more, I don't want any. I don't trust these shysters."

The judge sighed and said: "Mr. Hogan. I am going to appoint counsel for you. Whether you like it or not you are going to be represented by counsel at this trial. The penalties you face are too heavy to be so lightly treated. We will take a half-hour recess while we find a lawyer for you." He banged the gavel and walked out of the courtroom.

Back in his chambers Judge Witmer got out the list and looked it over. He ticked off a name. And that is how Ellis Centerton got started.

Ellis Centerton was a new lawyer. High in his class at Georgetown University Law School, he had spent a year with the firm of O'Hoolihan & Stuart. But Centerton was a man that liked to reach his own opinions. He went along with the rules of precedent as long as he was in law school because it was necessary to get a degree and be admitted to the bar. But once out he insisted on going his own way. He was one of those rare lawyers that was constantly ready to fight for the way the law should be rather than the way it was. This was admirable, except that the firm of O'Hoolihan & Stuart had to foot the bills. With the firm's lucrative practice in some jeopardy, it was mutually, amicably, and firmly agreed that Centerton should get the hell out and stay out.

And so he sat in his own office waiting for clients, the varnish hardly dry on his own shingle. Judge Witmer called him to ask him to take the Hogan case and in five minutes he was at the courthouse.

Centerton and Hogan held a brief caucus in the back of the courtroom, and then the trial started again. When Judge Witmer re-entered the room he glanced over at Hogan and saw how respectfully he was standing alongside Centerton. And the judge grinned slightly.

Centerton stood slightly taller even than Hogan and the heavy shock of sandy hair made him look still taller. But where Hogan was thick-set and heavy-built Centerton was lean and flat. Hogan moved with ponderous deliberation while Centerton moved with a quick lazy grace, carrying himself on the balls of his feet as behooved a collegiate boxer and an amateur mountain climber. But what made the judge grin was not so much the bigness of the two men as the expression on each of their faces. There was identity between the two. Each had the lower jaw thrust out, the eyes narrowed, the lips thinned, truculence in every line of the face. The judge gathered his black skirts around him and prepared to sit on what promised to be the liveliest case in many a day.

Centerton waived a trial by jury and did not even make the usual remarks about how he knew the judge was wiser than any jury and would see to it that a better caliber of justice would be meted out than a jury could dispense anyway.

The prosecutor ran eight freshly bandaged policemen through the witness chair. One after another they told of the horrendous things that had happened inside the spaceship when they went aboard to get Hogan. When they were done the prosecutor put on a couple of spaceship personnel who told of a short fight between Hogan and an astronomer on the flight down from the Station.

Then last, the astronomer himself testified. It was hard to hear what he said in view of the bandages round his face; and a broken jaw doesn't help one's speech under the best of conditions. The astronomer told how he had been having a quiet discussion with Hogan aboard the ship and how Hogan had all of a sudden up and belted him one. "Hogan seemed a little bitter about his work on the Moon and I told him that what he needed was a cause to believe in. Then he hit me. That's all I said. 'You need a cause to believe in.' That's all I remember."

The astronomer stepped down and the prosecution rested.

Centerton got up and announced that the only witness for the defense would be Hogan himself. Hogan took the oath and sat down. Centerton crossed over to him and said, "State your name, age, and occupation."

"Frank Hogan. Thirty-three. Mining engineer."

"Do you have a job now?"

"Well, I think so."

"Would you explain that please?"

"Well, I was working at Number Four mine—Keating's mine, on the far side of the Moon. I'm supposed to go back there but I'm not sure I want to. After this I may not be able to anyway."

"Mr. Hogan, perhaps you had better go back to the beginning and tell us everything that led up to the fight on the spaceship."

"O.K." And Hogan shifted to a more comfortable position in the chair. Centerton turned his back on him and walked over to his seat and sat down.

"Well," said Hogan, "there's forty-one of us up there. We all rotate on the different jobs to keep everybody on his toes in all the work. We run a lot more than just a straight mining operation. It costs so much to get the hafnium back to Earth that we have to refine it right on the spot, and that's quite an operation. So anyway, it was my turn to take the dust off the inside of the dome. But I'd had trouble with one of the condensers and had been on my feet for twenty-one hours so I asked ..."

"I object," said the prosecutor. "This testimony is all irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the charges this defendant is being tried under."

Centerton was on his feet. "Patience," he said quietly. "Patience. This will all become germane to the issues in due time. It does relate to the trial."

The judge said: "I will overrule the objection. But this testimony will be disregarded if it is not later shown to be relevant. Proceed, Mr. Hogan."

"Well," continued Hogan. "I was so tired that I couldn't hold my head up. I asked Joe Rogers if he would do my job of dust-scraping for me. We switch off like that every once in a while. All forty-one of us did it. Now there's nothing wrong with that, is there Judge?" And he turned around to look up at Judge Witmer.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about yet," said the judge. "Please continue."

Hogan grunted and faced front.

"Well, anyway," he said, "Joe Rogers said he would remove the dust for me. I went over to a corner to have a smoke so I saw everything that happened. I saw Joe climb up and go to work. He's up on the scaffolding scraping away for about two minutes when he lets a shovelful of dust get away from him and it happens to drop right on the head of Hank Aden who happens to walk underneath the scaffold at that moment."

Hogan stopped to shake his head, and then he continued. "Hank is a good-natured guy as a rule but I guess he wasn't feeling so good that morning. He looked up at Joe and I could see he was mad. Even then it probably would have been all right. He called up at Joe and asked him what was the idea. Joe looked down and for the first time he saw that he had hit Hank with this shovelful of dust. Hank was a sight. And then Joe did it. He laughed. Everything would probably have been all right, but Joe laughed."

Hogan leaned forward and said: "You should have seen Hank. He went up that ladder like I never saw anyone move before, even in low gee. He got to the platform at the top and he didn't even slow down. He sailed right into Joe and the two of them started a real slugging match up there at the top of the scaffolding. Quiet, too; they fought real quiet. Now let's see."

Hogan thought for a moment, then said: "Yes. Bud Boyer saw them. He was switching the seats of a dozer around. He knew that if there was one thing Jud Westgate—he's the chief engineer—wouldn't stand for it was a fight. He reared back with the seat he was holding and heaved it up at Joe and Hank. It missed and sailed clean across the dome and caught Frank Harrison right between the shoulder blades, knocked him flat. Frank rolled over and looked around and saw Joe and Hank fighting. Now normally nobody says anything when a couple of the boys have a little brawl. But Frank must have been a little dazed from being hit with the seat; he must have thought there was a riot or something. He hollered out at the top of his voice 'Fight.' "

Hogan shook his head again. "That was a bad thing to do. It just gets everybody excited and it makes sure that Jud Westgate learns about the fight and that makes him awful mad and then somebody is in trouble. But this time it was worse than ever. Frank yells 'fight.' Harry Robinson was working across the dome and up to that time he didn't know that anything was going on; it had been pretty quiet up to then. Several of us had thought that Harry was getting hard of hearing, and now I know it. When Frank yelled 'fight,' Harry thought he yelled 'fire.' So what does Harry Robinson do but start running around screaming 'fire' at the top of his lungs. Somebody pushed an alarm button. And, brother, that started it"

Judge Witmer and the prosecutor were looking at Hogan in open-mouthed amazement. Centerton sat there with a half-smile on his face. There was a short period of silence and then Centerton said, "Please go on, Mr. Hogan."

Hogan nodded and said: "Well, it all happened so fast I couldn't do anything to stop it. Those engineers are a bunch of tough boys, but if there is one thing that will scare them to death it's a fire. You can see why. Things are rough enough at the mine, but a fire could easily kill us all. All our equipment has been carefully planned so that we have what we need and no more. If some of it were destroyed, we couldn't live. We were out of touch with Earth, too, so we were completely on our own. If a fire burned a hole through the dome, we were dead, like that." And Hogan snapped his fingers. Then he went on.

"The boys came boiling up out of the shaft, out of the shops and labs and refinery, and some of them came staggering out of the sleeping quarters. That fire siren will wake the dead. We have fire drills once a week and everybody knew what to do. The trouble was that everybody seemed to be across the dome from where he was supposed to be. So they were racing around grabbing up the fire-fighting equipment and knocking each other down.

"Toward the end when they were getting organized and beginning to look around for the fire the Hofferth brothers came running up out of the deep shaft where they had been working and jumped on the dozer they were supposed to man during fire drill. They got the motor going full tilt before they got seated and the dozer lurched right out from under them. The thing plowed through the boys who were lined up ready to march off and fight the fire. It's a good thing the blade of the dozer was down otherwise somebody might have been killed. As it was most of the boys got pretty badly messed up. Doc Wertz had to let the refinery furnace go for a day while he splinted up arms and legs and treated pulled muscles and tendons and sewed up some nasty cuts.

"Well anyway, things finally quieted down enough for me to explain that there was no fire and that it was all a mistake. This all happened inside of about thirty seconds so I couldn't do anything about it before. I can tell you, everybody was pretty mad. Out of the forty-one guys there, only me and Andy Harness came out of it with a whole skin; Andy'd been standing by the back entrance to the dome during the fire drill. So those guys were plenty mad at me and Andy even though we had nothing to do with it."

Hogan leaned back and took a deep breath before he continued. "Jud Westgate was fit to be tied. Our schedule was shot and it would be a while before things got back to normal. After everybody got patched up we did the best we could to keep production going, but our efficiency wasn't what it might be. And then Jud opens an investigation to try and find out who was responsible for the whole mess. That was something. It almost wrecked the complete mining operation. We'd sit around discussing who did what and two of the boys would get pretty hot. But they didn't dare do anything in 3 front of Jud Westgate so they'd meet later in a lonely spot and try to beat each other's brains out. There must have been thirty fights during the first two days of the investigation, all of them quiet so Jud wouldn't learn about them. They're a rough bunch of boys, but not one of them wanted Jud down on him.

"You see, for over a week Jud had been waiting for somebody to pull a boner. We had been having trouble with our food concentrates. The concentrates were plenty nourishing all right but after a while you just couldn't eat them. The boys were losing weight and getting stomach cramps so Doc Wertz says we have to send a man back to Earth to work with the food people and get some decent concentrates or food up here. But that meant traveling around to the Earthside face of the Moon to board the rocket that puts in every three months. We only get one every nine months. And that's a rough trip. You have to do it in a small caterpillar and you need to carry so much fuel you can't take enough food and water. That trip can kill a man so nobody wanted to make it. And Jud said that whoever was responsible for that mess about the fire was going to be the man to go back to Earth. So you can see why the boys were arguing about who was to blame."

Hogan leaned forward again. "We argued for two days and we couldn't figure out who to pin it on. It didn't seem right that Joe Rogers should get the blame for dropping that shovelful of dust because all of us dropped dust on that job. We thought we had it pinned on Hank Aden for starting the fight with Joe but he pointed out that he thought Joe had done it deliberately; after all, Joe had laughed at him. Hank said he thought he was going to get it again so he went up to protect himself, so we let Hank off the hook. And that's the way it went right down the line. Everybody had just made some tiny mistake, the sort of thing all of us up there did all the time. We didn't know who to blame. Then Harry Robinson found something that solved it for us. Oh, he solved it fine.

"He was reading a microfilmed history book on his off-shift and he found a sentence that was supposed to be used by lawyers to figure out who was to blame when a whole lot of things happened. It sounded like just the thing we were looking for. The only trouble was it was written in Latin. But FB never forget what it said. Causa causantis causa est causati. That's what it said. Causa causantis causa est causati. It stumped us until we found that Andy Harness knew Latin. He translated it for us. He said it meant: The cause of the thing causing is the cause of the effect. Is that right, Judge? Is that really what it means?"

The judge looked over at Centerton and the prosecutor and said, "Yes, that's exactly what it means. That doctrine was stated in an old case ... let me think—" He leaned back in his chair for a moment and closed his eyes, then he opened them and leaned forward: "Yes. It was a Massachusetts case, an old one. Marble v. The City of Worcester, that's it. Of course the causa causantis doctrine isn't used anymore."

"No," agreed the prosecutor. "I think the Palsgraf Case would be controlling here."

Centerton nodded agreement and said, "Yes, the test of forseeability would control."

The significance of the remarks of the lawyers sank in on Hogan. "Wait a minute," he said. "You mean this causa causantis thing isn't right? You mean that ain't the way the law is? Why those dirty dogs! They picked ME. They said that I was the guy that started it all off by asking Joe Rogers to do my work for me. If I hadn't done that, it never would have happened, they said. If I had been up there doing my own work, this whole shambles would never have got started, they said. So under this causa causantis thing I was to blame, they said. So YOU are the one to go back to Earth, they said. Why, those dirty dogs! Judge," Hogan rose half out of the witness chair, "tell me, who was responsible for that mess up there? Who should have come to Earth instead of me? Tell me who it was and when I get back there I'll ... I'll—"

Hogan's high-pitched voice broke. He recovered himself and continued: "I like to died on that trip around the Moon. They had to pull me out of that caterpillar; I was only half conscious. All because of that causa causantis thing. I got on the rocket still so weak I could hardly stand, I'm mad as hell about this causa causantis business anyway. Then I talk to this guy"—he pointed at the astronomer who had been a witness against him—"and he tells me I need a 'cause' to believe in. So I smashed him in the jaw. That's all there is to it. Now you come along and tell me that I shouldn't even have been blamed for everything that happened at the mine. If I'd known that, I might have killed that guy. He doesn't look any too strong to me." He pointed at the astronomer again and then sat quietly.

Centerton looked over at the prosecutor and said, "Any cross-examination?"

The prosecutor shook his head. "No. I think the picture is complete."

Centerton heaved himself up on his feet and said, "Your Honor. I think we can all see what happened here. This defendant was in an extremely unstable state of mind. The unfortunate remark of one of the complaining witnesses triggered the whole chain of events that led to the charges he is faced with here. We recognize that his state of mind does not excuse his conduct, but we do think that his state of mind should mitigate against the normal punishment in a case like this. Let us now do justice to this man as it was not done for him up on the Moon. He has paid a price that was not his to pay. It is not his fault that they do not have lawyers on the Moon, even though they seem to have needed one badly up there. We should not penalize this man for society's fault in not supplying legal knowledge where it is needed. I ask that the Court sentence this man to six months in jail, and then suspend the sentence. I also ask that the prosecutor join me in this recommendation." And Centerton looked over at the prosecutor.

The prosecutor got slowly to his feet, rubbing his chin reflectively. "Well," he said, "in view of the peculiar nature of this situation, I'm inclined to go along with counsel for the defendant. It is incredible to me that this defendant should have been blamed for that fiasco at the mine; the majority opinion in the Palsgraf Case is so clear. If the—"

"Who should have been blamed?" said Hogan from the witness chair. He stood up in front of the chair. "Tell me who it should have been. Come on now. Who was it?"

Judge Witmer banged his gavel and said, "Sit down, Mr. Hogan. It doesn't matter who was to blame. The point is moot; it's all over. Sit down and be quiet."

Hogan sat. The judge leaned back and looked at the ceiling. For a long moment there was absolute silence in the courtroom. Then the judge leaned forward and said, "Mr. Centerton, I'm inclined to go along with you, too. But there's one thing that disturbs me. How are we going to correct the basic situation? Those men on the Moon are fine men, fully qualified to do a difficult job. But they are completely ignorant of the law. Their numbers are growing. Soon the same type of man will be on the other planets. I wonder where this is going to lead us as far as the law is concerned. Must we put up with good men who harm other good men because they don't know or don't care about the law? I certainly hope not."

Again there was silence in the courtroom.

The judge spoke again, this time looking fixedly at Centerton. "Tell me, Mr. Centerton, can you think of any way to help me overcome my doubts about the future if I let this defendant go?"

Centerton stared back at the judge; his eyes widened. Centerton spun on one toe and paced back and forth a couple of times. Then he turned and faced the judge and said: "All right, Judge. I will go up and spend some time with those men if you will follow my recommendation as to this defendant."

Bang went the judge's gavel. "So ordered," he said.

And Hogan walked out a free man.

Well, Centerton went up to Keating's Mine with Hogan when he returned. Nobody has ever said what happened after he got there; they just won't talk about it. We can learn from the day-to-day records at the mine that Doc Wertz had to improvise on splints when he ran out of them. We also know that the Doc had to order up a special supply of sutures. But the records don't show much else. And we know that when Keating's Mine finally petered out two years later all those mining engineers and Centerton came back to Earth together.

Well, that was fifteen years ago. Judge Witmer was right. We've now got men on five planets and eighteen satellites. Men have really started to expand through the solar system. New legal problems arise every day, but nobody worries much about them. Whenever a legal problem comes up they just turn it over to Centerton's law firm and it solves it. Most of the time the problem never even gets into the law courts.

That's quite a law firm. Ellis Centerton is probably the best man in the firm but his partners are no slouches either. They're all big men who like a lot of action, but they're all highly skilled lawyers, too, all forty-one of them.

The End