Sublime

To sum up: An ounce of well-grounded personal trust in a business partner based on demonstrated generosity is worth many pounds of contractual guarantees and surety bonds.

The requests were answered—with a thoroughness that would have been familiar to Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones, whose high-school debate coach had taught them that if you took care of all the minor details, if “you did everything you could do—absolutely everything—you would win.”

When the law favors your position, identify it and return to it again and again.

E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century

The English and American lawyers investigate what has been done; the French advocate inquires what should have been done; the former produce precedents, the latter reasons. A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English dr an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; whilst the reverse occurs

Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering.

only virtue can be counted on to benefit unconditionally and only vice counts as harmful in all possible circumstances.

The law is what legislators and judges have written. In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise; they need to be well briefed.

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.