Yesterday was good, but largely uneventful. I have an interview scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9:30 over Teams, which is exciting. On a whim, I decided to sleep on the couch instead of my bed. I awoke this morning to sunbeams faintly piercing through the powder gray-blue curtains; it really was quite nice. The allergic reaction from the weekend has gone away, praise be to the Lord God Most High, and I had Property this morning at the usual time. We’re behind, and we’re still behind, but today we covered Rosengrant v. Rosengrant, 629 P.2d 800 (Okla. Ct. App. 1981). So, Mildred and Harold Rosengrant were an elderly, profoundly sickly couple without children of their own, but plenty of nieces and nephews. One such nephew, Jay Rosengrant, cared for his aunt and uncle and their farm alongside his wife. Accordingly, they wanted to repay his kindness and leave the farm to him when “something happened.” The Rosengrants had a friend, J.E. Vanlandengham (what a surname!), the local banker, and in 1972 Vanlandengham presented Jay with a deed to the farm prepared according to Harold and Mildred’s instructions that he could claim when “something happened.” The euphemism is important to the outcome.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” quoth the cliche. Vanlandengham was more knowledgeable than the Rosengrants but was a banker, not a lawyer (and, according to the Points For Discussion afterwards, probably wasn’t even that good a banker). In 1978, about a month after Harold kicked the bucket, Jay’s siblings (led by his brother Walter) petitioned to have the deed canceled and set aside. There are two questions: whether the deed was legally delivered to Jay during the elder Rosengrants’ lifetimes, and whether the deed was a will and testament (and void under the Statute of Wills). For the deed to have been delivered, Harold would have had to relinquish his rights to it. Neither Harold nor Vanlandengham could be reached for comment, seeing as how both were dead by the time of the trial.
Here’s where Vanlandengham screwed up: he wrote Harold’s name on the envelope containing the deed, meaning Harold did not relinquish his rights to it. At any time, he could have changed his mind. The Court recognized the elder Rosengrants’ donative intent and that Jay and his wife treated them with exceptional kindness. However, they didn’t actually donate the property; it was a symbolic gesture, and they tried to use that symbolic donation as a will, which can’t be done under Oklahoma law. If you want a will, you need to make an actual will. Shocking, I know. So the property was split among the six nieces and nephews, with Jay purchasing his siblings’ interests and living on the farm for the remainder of his days.
During lulls in the lecture/discussion, I read through about three-fifths of Aldous Huxley’s (better known for other work) Ape and Essence (1948), a screenplay thinly framed by a novel, and I’m currently down to the last two dozen pages. As the bulk of the text is an unabridged script for a nonexistent movie, I will be ignoring the framing device for brevity’s sake.
Ape and Essence (as written) is an unfilmable movie, albeit one that my film-buff friends and I would almost certainly praise as True and Honest Kinography. The premise is that a century after the Third World War, some scientists from New Zealand (spared the Horrors™ by virtue of strategic insignificance) sail across the Pacific on an expedition to Darkest California. The audience’s viewpoint into this brave new world is that of Alfred Poole, botanist: late thirties, unmarried, with a domineering mother back home, a neurotically normal man. He quickly gets captured by some locals and only narrowly manages to avoid getting buried alive.
And by locals, I mean graverobbing devil-worshipping mutants with norms best left undescribed on a website my future employers may read.
The climax of the movie comprises a long dialogue (really more of a monologue) between Dr. Poole and “His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood” as the Belial’s Day… festivities occur. I found parallels between this dialogue and the one between the Savage and Mond in BNW, in that the story’s themes are smashed over the reader’s head with the subtlety of a dinosaur-killing asteroid. I wanna discuss the themes in more detail, but I just checked the time, and I wanna have this entry up before Crim today. Maybe later.
Afterwards, I went to the First-Generation Law Society’s 3L panel and feasted on pizza. I got some good advice on how to network and whatnot. I have Crim with Prof. McGrain in half an hour, always an interesting time.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 