Farr & Beyond: Lawyers for the Otherworldly.

• Author: Stern, Simon
• Position: Book review

Kenneth M. Smookler, Farr& Beyond: Lawyers for the Otherworldly (Toronto: Wall & Emerson, 2016), p 118, ISBN 978-1-895131-26-0.

The shelf of books devoted to legal humour is a capacious one, and the titles range across a variety of forms. Theobald Mathew's Forensic Fables (1) and A.P. Herbert's Misleading Cases (2) satirize the habits of lawyers and judges by offering up imaginary cases, and this has tended to be the preferred approach, sometimes focusing on the forensic activities surrounding these disputes (as with Mathew's fables) and sometimes producing the judgements themselves (as in Herbert's bemused jurisprudence). The latter genre also includes Alexander Pope's celebrated decision in Stradling v. Stiles, (3) the case of the "black and white [h]orses" (4) taken from Scriblerus's Reports. Another common tactic is to see what lies in the existing legal record. John B. McClay and Wendy L. Matthews' Corpus Juris Humorous (5) is based entirely on actual cases, while R.E. Megarry, in his three volumes of legal miscellanea, collects cases, doctrine, and lore. (6) Somewhere in between are the imaginary dialogues of litigants in real cases, as in Sir George Hayes' argument for pleading reform, embellished from the materials in Crogate's Case. (7) Indeed, arguments for procedural reform have spawned a whole subgenre of legal poetry, including most notably John Anstey's poem The Pleader's Guide, (8) which went through eight editions in thirty years.

Kenneth Smookler's Farr & Beyond (9) is a welcome addition to this shelf. Smookler's novel approach is to generate pleadings, memos, and letters concerning the protagonists of various fairy tales, fables, and literary classics. His turn to the world of fantasy (including myth and science fiction) is, in some ways, a logical extension of the satirical strain in earlier contributions to the field, while his resort to the bureaucratic forms that ground the lawyer's art serves at once to highlight the absurdity of the enterprise and to lend these efforts an eerie air of familiarity. If the file and the memo are the paradigmatic tools that lawyers use to tame uncertainty and to promote their own species of rationality, (10) Smookler's use of these forms shows how they can be pressed into service for nearly any end, how templates take on a life of their own that can make the most outlandish proposition seem plausible. While there has been a significant amount of writing on the gothic and the law, its...