Hall brings piece of Oxford to USU
The Merrill Library took on the role of social gathering place as the first in a series of book discussions that will be held there featured President Kermit L. Hall and his latest work.
“The Oxford Companion to American Law,” edited by Hall, drew more than 50 people to the study area behind the Quad Side Café on Friday. The event coincided with the grand opening of the café.
Linda Wolcott, vice provost for Libraries, said the library should be symbolic of things going on at the university.
For Hall, history graduate and professor of constitutional history, this book was right up his alley. But even he was unsure of the 912-page volume’s future.
“There were times I was certain this book would never see the light of day,” Hall said.
It did see the light of day, and after narrowing down 1,500 possible topics with associates; going through two editors, two presidents of the Oxford University Press and three associate editors; writing about 20 entries; and reading and editing all 486 final contributions for accuracy and spelling, not to mention cross-referencing, the book was finally published in March 2002. Official advertising began in September.
Comissioned authors were paid 10 cents per word. Forty percent of the commissioned articles arrived on time, Hall said. Six percent of the articles never arrived. Ten percent were rejected altogether. About one-half were sent back to the authors for revision, and in some cases, rewriting.
Hall said the book is meant not to contain the definitive pieces on a variety of legal subjects, from tort to the Supreme Court, from contract law to legal movements.
“It had to be written in a way readers would understand what was being communicated,” he said.
About 25 percent of the articles that were sent back to authors resulted in lengthy discussions about who was trying to say what.
About two months before the book was to be published, Hall said he had to decide on a dust jacket for it.
Hall joked that people don’t buy books because they are good books. They buy books because Oprah told them to, or they were walking by a window and thought, “Hey, that’s a good-looking book.”
After learning most of the artwork he wanted, which would have depicted juries or judges and would have cost thousands of dollars in some cases for permission to use it, the publisher found a painting of the trial of mutineers on the slaveship Amistad.
Permission to use the painting, which was found in a little art museum in Missouri, cost $220.
With all of its 912 pages, one would think not much could be left out.
However, Hall said there were some topics he particularly wanted to include that were later omitted, like a section of funny laws.
He cited a few examples about Utah.
• It is illegal to fish from horseback.
• It is illegal to not drink milk.
• One cannot detonate nuclear weapons in the state.
• Birds have the right of way on highways.
• It is a third-degree felony to hunt whales.
• No one may have sex in the back of an ambulance if it is on its way to a call.
“Making law is an untidy process,” Hall said. “Law deals with the most abstract of human issues. It is everywhere. That’s why putting a book together that explains it all is like eating Jell-O with your fingers.”
-jmdo@cc.usu.edu