On Becoming a Legal Person 117shouldn’t matter what your ethnic group is. Let me disillusion you just a
little.
Class: [[laughter]]
Prof.: One of the wonderful rules in interpreting common law cases is,
whenever you have a party whose name ends in a vowel, rule against that
party.
Class: [[laughter]]
Prof.: Watch carefully, see if that doesn’t work out in practice. There is
something rather interesting going on here. Okay, he’s a Greek, it
shouldn’t make a difference.The class discussion moves on from this humorous introduction to focus on ques-
tions pertinent to doctrinal issues: Had the Greek servant’s amorous feelings for
his employer’s wife constituted a breach of contract between servant and employer?
Could the employer’s estate use the servant’s behavior as a defense to the servant’s
eventual request for restitution damages? Did it matter whether the amorous feel-
ings had actually interfered with the servant’s performance of his duties, and so
on? Ethnicity is presented as a stereotypic background factor that might affect the
reaction of the court if it were to depart from a standard legal analysis, but this is
tangential to the systematic legal reading with which the class is centrally occupied:
Transcript 6.14 [5/10/3]Prof.: [... ] Why did they tell us he’s a Greek?
Mr. S.: I don’t know. I guess they were just interested in that.
Class: [[laughter]]
Prof.: Why are they interested in that? Why tell us that he’s a Greek? What if he
were French, what if he were Polish, would it make a difference? What is
it about Greeks? Yes, uh, Ms., uh?
Ms. C.: “C” [states last name]
Prof.: Ms. C.
Ms. C.: After reading Zorba the Greek, I would say maybe because of their
reputation as lovers or--
Prof.: --There’s this zest for life (.) There is something
going on and there’s all kinds of hideous things about the Greeks that the
Americans sometimes think. Indeed, there are horrible things to think
about virtually every ethnic group you can name. At least that was in the
good old days when you admitted that sort of thing. We don’t do it
anymore. But this court involved in the casebook, seems to feel it
necessary to tell us that Ganas is Greek. And you can bet that it was
plastered all over the opinion, right? There is this thing, we’ll say for the
moment, putting as neutral a face on it as possible, about Greeks in love.
Go on.There is no attempt to deny that a person’s social background might be decisive in
legal outcomes; indeed, this particular class provides one of the best examples in
the study of a direct discussion of the potential impact of such factors. In other