It’s the run-up to Christmas (and Boxing Day!) and I’m also in the thick of a flurry of grant proposal deadlines, so the small core of regular readers I’ve earned might see a temporary decline in activity here. I won’t reduce the frequency or even the essential quality of my posts. Length and originality will plummet, though.

For today, two thoughts from Nicholas Katzenbach, the sixty-fifth Attorney General of the United States of America, on two favorite topics of this blog. Katzenbach was appointed to the attorney-generalship by LBJ in 1965, only to resign it twenty months later after losing a fight with J. Edgar Hoover over the FBI’s unauthorized wiretaps of activists like Martin Luther King, Jr.

Katzenbach on lawyers, the laity, and justice:

It does not take a lawyer to right every wrong. It does not even take professional training. It takes only a human being with the capacity to recognize and respond to injustice.

And on public legal education and poverty law:

One of the threshold problems in this new area is simply to make rights known. Laws do little good unless people know about them. For a poor person to hold rights in theory satisfies only the theory. We have to begin asserting those rights—and help the poor assert those rights. Unknown, unasserted rights are no rights at all.

(Emphasis added.)