On coincidences

Abraham Lincoln's speech in Edwardsville, Illinois, quoted in my last post, reads as an almost pitch-perfect counterpoint to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, TIA, FISA, "if you're not with us you're against us" and all of the other offenses against liberty that our President justifies by reference to September 11, 2001. Obviously, the quote turns out to be surprisingly relevant to today's headlines, not least because of Lincoln's later (controversial) decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. That's why I posted it.

But even as I was typing it in, I was struck by the truly random circumstance that brought it to my attention -- I was browsing in Barnes and Noble for a securities law textbook to assign to my graduate students this spring, and saw the "The Law Professor's Handbook", by Madeline Schachter, which is a book I had not heard of before and which was misfiled among the textbooks, else I would not have come across it. As you might guess from the title, the book is about how to teach law classes more effectively, which happened to catch my eye only because I just completed my first semester teaching a new course on Securities Law and Business Crime, and have for a few weeks been doing a sort of mental self-assessment of the semester (preparing to repeat the course in the Spring).

Anyway, the speech is quoted, rather incongruously, in a section about why people decide to teach, despite the fact that the quote has little, if anything to do with teaching.

But here's the weird part, particularly since it so neatly counters the "9/11 changed everything" argument of the Bush administration: As I was typing it into the blog, I happened to notice that that speech was delivered on September 11, 1858.

Cue theme music from The Twilight Zone...