WIGS AND “REAL” NAMES: The person writing what follows signs off as Dr. Guy Standard which is not a name I was born with. I wish understood what I have, always, understood, that if one purports to address some public, that way of speaking has to be formal, and, further, never so formal as when purporting to appear friend-to-the-court. One is, at those time, supposed to be expressing one’s sense-of–the-meeting on-going, just then, and perhaps compelled to make a motion, which, being privileged, requires no second. It is, simply, assumed that one is aware of sensibilities other than one’s own, which nonetheless one works to be speaking through. there is the best of reasons why robes are worn to court, and wigs, and one might be excused for taking another name, as if it were a title recognizing one’s existence. Holmes himself (a self not terribly attractive_ admitted as he admonished Learned Hand that it was not his job to “do justice” — it was, rather, to apply the law.

There is a very real sense, then, in which a judge sitting to a case, or a lawyer arguing before that judge “are not themselves,” but are instead, or purport to be something more inclusive, whether it includes their private self, or not. One need only remember that when Madison, Jay, and Hamilton wrote The Federalist Papers they signed themselves “Publius,” that is, an abstraction requiring them to put aside self and speak to a generally defensible notion of governance which would take into the account, ultimately, all that conditioned and informed all that was best about the 18th century’s British and American political sensibility: “Publius.”

We get to see that best come through in the once-famous Letter of Josiah Quincy to his father; we see it in the ruling of Judge Jesse Carter in the Rochin case, and that best could come through only as some self was set aside.

In compressed fashion that purports to inform the abstraction that is here called Dr. Guy Standard and which would lead the abstraction to ask of Mr. Gohmert that he go to his copy of Black’s Law Dictionary and give us his understanding of the term laches, and which would lead Dr. Standard to ask courteously of Ms. Bachmann that she go to her Robert or Sturgis and tell us all what it means to Rise to a Question of Privilege that one might make a motion requiring no second, namely, that as good order has been tainted, it must be set aright again. As Mr. Clay asked, at a memorable tipping-point: “What’s my name?”