Law and Magic Blog

Unusual Weather Forecasting in North Dakota

The AP reports on an elderly North Dakota man who uses the internal organs of pigs (specifically pig spleens) to forecast the weather.

"It looks like a normal year with no major storms," said the 84-year-old cattle rancher, peering at two of the brown, glistening organs on his kitchen counter like a Gypsy gazing into a crystal ball. "That's what the spleens tell me."

Gut reactions? The editor of the Old Farmer's Almanac says she knows of one other user of this method of weather forecasting, but he's passed on. And a local meteorologist is willing to live and let live. As for the rancher's remaining pigs, we don't know what they think.

Click and Clack and the Key Question

Last week's Car Talk Puzzler was vaguely magical (and Click and Clack selected a winning answer from someone in Las Vegas) so I thought I would post it here. It has to do with the KGB, which is no longer around. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the order that vanished it, replacing it with something called the FSB (Federal Security Service). Here's the puzzler.

Imagine you have a friend who lives in Russia where the KGB spies on everyone and everything and you want to send a valuable object to this friend. So you have a box which is more than large enough to contain the object and you have several locks with keys.

Now this box, I suppose you could call it a strongbox, has a lock ring which is more than large enough to have a padlock attached to it. In fact it's large enough to accommodate several locks. But your friend does not have to the key to any lock that you have. Now you can't send a key in the mail because the KGB will intercept it and they will copy it. And you can't not lock the box, because the object is very valuable. So you have to send it through the mail. You can't hand deliver it. You want to lock it so that your friend can open it, but the KGB can't.

The question is, how would you do it?

Here's the answer. Of course, you can click on the link, but try clacking out a few solutions first.

Murder of a Druid

This week Britain's Channel 4 is broadcasting Sex, Magick, and Murder, a film about "[t]he murder trial that...became the longest in Cornwall's history, with experts in magic, paganism and spell-casting taking the stand." The victim was a parish councillor, Peter Solheim, found drowned in 2004 in the waters off the coast of Cornwall. The acccused was his lover, a fifty-ish grandmother named Margaret James. Mr. Solheim was a known practitioner of paganism. What can have been the motive or motives for this crime? Read more at Channel 4's website, and here in articles from the Daily Telegraph, the BBC, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail. Now that someone has done a movie, can a book be far behind?

"Scientist, Alchemist, Priest, Atheist"--And Charged With Murder

I found this sad little story in the New York Times archives from 1910.

Arrest a Magician as Slayer of Boys: H. J. Dennison, Former Vaudeville Performer, Suspected in Shibley-Lomas Murder Case

Through the arrest of Herbert Jerome Dennison...yesterday afternoon, police believe they have found the right man in connection with the death of the Shibley and Lomas boys, after they had been shot at Highbridge on Jan. 12. The police also believe that Dennison can explain the shooting of John Hendricks on Jan. 8.

The writer goes on to explain that someone claims to have seen the shooting of the two boys and can identify the assailant. Mr. Dennison admitted that he had a gun of the same kind used in the shooting, that he had used in his magician's act. His mother had taken him to a barber immediately after the shooting. He also had a tattoo on his chest, reading "Scientist, Alchemist, Priest, Atheist," and had apparently been in and out of mental institutions. He was arraigned before a magistrate on the charges, and held without bail. I couldn't find anything more on the internet, but with all that circumstantial evidence against him, I don't think it can have turned out very well for Mr. Dennison.

Witchcraft and Law in Indonesia

For the bookshelf: Herman Slaats and Karen Portier, Sorcery and the Law in Modern Indonesia, in Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Modern Southeast Asia, at 135 (ed. C. W. Watson and Roy Ellen, University of Hawaii Press, 1993).

Gender Rights Insensitivity in Rudolph, School Violence in A Charlie Brown Christmas, and What's With That Beast in How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

Mary Beth Ellis finds the legal and social issues in those children's Christmas specials here on MSNBC.com. Worth reading--it sucks all the fun right out of Frosty the Snowman and A Charlie Brown Christmas. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Right on, Mary Beth!

Criminal Profiling and Magic

Psychologist Karen Franklin discusses the writing of magician Ian Rowland and a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell at her blog In the News: Forensic Psychology, Criminology, and Psychology-Law. Among her comments:

Writing in the Nov. 12 New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell presents a crash course in how such time-worn magic tricks have convinced the world of the scientific legitimacy and deductive powers of forensic profiling.

Like a fortune teller's prognostications, the profiles generated by famous FBI profilers John Douglas and Robert Ressler are "so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that [they] can support virtually any interpretation." The magic lies in the fact that police detectives and laypersons alike do not realize this without the aid of detailed, sentence-by-sentence analyses.

Gladwell cites the research on profiling, which shows they are accurate enough to lead to an arrest in only a tiny fraction of cases, less than 3% in one study by the British Home Office.

Read more of Dr. Franklin's interesting post here.

That Uri Geller Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

I sent a email to the EFF about two weeks ago asking for an update on the Brian Sapient/Uri Geller lawsuit but have received no response. The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow...

Law in a Magical World

Dave Hoffman of the blog Concurring Opinions posts an interview with writer Pat Rothfuss here. Among the questions:

Can you imagine creating and writing explicitly about a world where magic and a litigation-based, common-law system, co-existed?

Absolutely. In fact, I've written such a world. You don't see much of it in this first book, but there is a working common-law system in my world. I don't think that the rule of law and magic are mutually exclusive at all.

Thanks to Sydney Beckman of Charleston School of Law for alerting me to this post.

The ABA Journal BLAWG 100

The current issue of the ABA Journal (see page 35) lists this blog as one of the ABA Journal Blawg 100. Thanks for all your interest and support!