The Goodson Blogson

As the legal fallout over Elon Musk's bid to purchase social network Twitter continues to unfurl, the Wall Street Journal recently explored the situation from an unusual perspective: what would Charles Dickens think of it all? In a story for the paper's humorous A-Hed section , Ellen Gamerman notes the parallels between Twitter v. Musk and Jarndyce v. Jarndyce , the all-consuming inheritance dispute at the center of Dickens's 1852 novel Bleak House (available to the Duke community in a variety of formats) . Although Gamerman is careful to note that the lumbering Chancery Court of the Dickens tale (described at one point in the tale as "being ground to bits in a slow mill") bears little resemblance to Delaware's Court of Chancery today, she quotes a few fans and even one Dickens descendant who express amusement at the prospect of a modern-day chancery case playing out, should the parties fail to settle the dispute before the November trial date. Gamerman br...

Monday, October 10 is a federal and state government holiday, although the holiday differs depending on your jurisdiction. While many states continue to call the second Monday in October "Columbus Day," a number of others have renamed the holiday a variation on "Native Americans' Day" or "Indigenous Peoples Day," or observe the newer holiday in addition to the old one. Celebrations of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus's 1492 landfall in North America have occurred in various American locations as early as the eighteenth century, and October 12 (later moved to the second Monday in October) was established as a federal holiday in the 1930s. However, Columbus Day has sparked protests by Native American communities and others, who have highlighted the impact of colonization on indigenous people in the Americas, and the related history of violent conflict and forced assimilation. As noted in Smithsonian Magazine , South Dakota was the first state ...