Similar fun fact: Harvard is immune to eminent domain, because the original constitution of Massachusetts ensured that all of Harvard's then-existing rights would remain in effect "forever", and apparently that includes a dusty old letter from King George or something stating that Harvard cannot be subject to eminent domain. Harvard has used this to reroute a subway tunnel that would otherwise have run under Harvard Yard. So the next time you're on the red line and wondering why the train slows to a crawl as it passes that sharp turn around the Harvard stop, now you know.
This is as far as the facts go, and only lore is left. Here, however, is how the story goes. When, in 1974, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority sought to extend the Red Line beyond Harvard Square, the state began plans to dig underneath Harvard Yard. They got so far as to build a platform approximately underneath Wigglesworth Hall. In fact, you may see the ghost station when you ride the T, on the right side of the train as it slows down and nears the platform at Harvard station. However, Harvard would not tolerate the thought of a tunnel below its sacred grounds, disturbing the scholarly peace and quiet of the Yard. Allegedly, Harvard hired a team of lawyers who took the MBTA to court. According to lore, they presented before the judge a glass encased letter granting Harvard exemption from eminent domain signed by General George Washington.
As for the veracity of the story, I have not found substantive proof other than repeated versions of the story told in forums. However, it is true that Harvard inexplicably convinced the MBTA to build around the Yard despite an astronomical increase in the cost of construction.
Harvard has three kinds of law people. First, it has its own lawyers. They're fine, but they're mostly not the court kind of lawyers. Second, it has law students. Those aren't lawyers, so you don't want them either. Third, it has law professors, who are generally well known or renowned for past deeds or theoretical legal philosophy, but mostly they're either out of practice, never practiced, or they've got insane (for example, Alan Dershowitz is a professor there). You don't want any of those folks nearby when courtroom stuff needs to happen.
Hogwarts has a similar problem, now that I think about it. Hugely powerful wizards defending a school from a tiny number of adversaries, they've got all the time in the world to prepare, and yet they're terrible at it. They build a huge multilayered vault that's bypassed by three unprepared kids. They should've brought in professionals.
I always hear this talk of condescension towards academics in favor of professionals but I don't get it. I've spent more than a decade in professional settings and """professionals""" screw up their jobs quite often and don't even experience everything there is to experience in their entire industry, so I don't get the sense of ascendancy.
Professionals screw up their jobs more than academics for the same reason that professional baseball players strike out more than couch surfers: they’re actually playing the game
You don't know that--it's possible (and in my experience this is the more likely cause) that they are not thinking enough on the abstract to recognize patterns across situations, which is why they keep making the same mistakes.
The best professionals I've ever worked with don't even bother making this artificial distinction between professional practice and the academe, and instead continue to educate themselves even as they get farther in their careers. Professionals who are incapable of elevating their practice into theory are just as devoid of knowledge as academics who don't put their theory into practice. We need to stop glorifying this notion of "pure" professionals just as people are skeptical of "pure" academics--otherwise this is just letting anti-intellectualism creep in on HN.
There is no ant—intellectualism here. Academics simply are not professionals. You can’t suddenly become good at something you don’t practice because you are a master at theory and being an academic doesn’t allow the time to practice.
Sorry if my joke came across as anti-intellectual. I think "law professor" and "lawyer" are really different jobs, though, in the same way a doctor does a different job from a PhD in medicine. Sure, those "head of research" MD-PhD folks running research labs are technically doctors, but you don't want them to be your doctor simply for the reason that they haven't actually seen any patients in a long time.
Industry and academia are totally different environments. I don’t see any indication that people in industry “screw up their jobs” more than academics. How do you even define “screw up” and “more?”
The academic’s job is to understand the state of the art well enough to improve on it, implementing a standard solution is below bare minimum.
In industry the goal is to get near enough an approximation to the state of the art such that the thing they are working on doesn’t provide the company a noticeable disadvantage vs the competition, and then move on to something else.
It's extremely common for many scientists (nuclear physicists, neuroscientists, biochemists, etc.) to spend a few years in the industry and either teach for a while or publish a paper on the side and then come back to full-time work when they feel like it again. This obsession on drawing a hard line between the two is utter nonsense and reeks of classic HN techbro simple-mindedness. You would easily make the mistake of dismissing a professional in the middle of an academic stint as someone who has no experience at all, just to feed your sense of self-superiority.
Err, did you mean to respond to a different post? I was pointing out that the jobs (not the people) are fundamentally different. As a result, denigrating academics for not “playing the game” makes no sense. They are “playing” a different “game.”
It is like complaining that Wayne Gretzky sucked at getting points — compare his scores to, like, any vaguely offense-focused basketball player!
It's because academics are spectacularly incompetent compared to professionals.
They have no actual practice doing anything. But worse, they think they know what they're doing.
Honestly, be thankful you've never worked with an academic, they're honestly the worst work experience you will ever have, arrogant, utterly incompetent and can waste huge amounts of your time by saying intellectually appealing things to management that are a practical disaster.
There is a good reason for spherical cow in vacuum to exist as a concept.
I have seen brilliant people pass through CS with flying colors and they enter their first job and don't know how to debug something.
Think of it that way - a material science professor will know everything there is about welding. And yet probably for a complex weld you will call a welder. Tricks of the trade matter.
The whole point of the academy is that you can abstract a bit the whole messiness of the world so you can focus on the grander things.
To be fair, my interpretation is that the multilayered security system was actually designed to be bypassed by precisely those 3 children, and the curriculum was designed to give them exactly the knowledge they'd need.
If you went far enough in the direction of professionalized warfare in the Harry Potter universe, I have a sneaking suspicion it would turn pretty stupid. People with enchanted sniper rifles and invisibility cloaks playing “don’t move first” or something boring like that.
You can definitely get pretty creative and interesting—for example, transmuting a pile of primed hand grenades into a handful of confetti and then tossing it over your enemy right before the spell wears off. That said, you're right, it's highly likely that boring strategies would dominate. However, the Harry Potter magic system is so fast and loose that you can always make up some new spell to cancel out whatever OP strategy; the author has almost unlimited leeway.
All wizards seem limited by the speed of sound. They hear/see spells coming and react by waving arms and saying things. Bullets are faster than wands. Only Jedi have the prescience to react prior to the bullet being fired.
Do they need to react though? Surely there's some sort of kinetic barrier spell they could use. Just checked and there's protego, a shield charm that blocks other spells and physical objects. A high mobility special forces wizard squad would have one person responsible for casting protego while all the others use avada kedavra on everything that moves. They could also use some sort of explosive spell to destroy cover, walls, obstacles and fortifications. All while shrugging off bullets, shrapnel and pretty much anything muggles could throw at them short of a nuclear missile.
We only really see up to, basically, the wizard version of a detective in Harry Potter. Maybe some of the aurors are like SWAT team members?
In general the wizard society imagined seems to actively reject the idea of professionalizing things and work more as a collection of hobbyists so I suspect “professional soldier wizards” don’t even exist in universe, and there’s no Wizard Raytheon to really optimize Wizard Radar. So it is hard to speculate about what it would look like.
That does not sound accurate. The 'ghost' station described is an original, pre-extension station. When the line was extended beyond Harvard Sq., they moved the station just up the street around a sharp bend.[1] Very MBTA. I respect the journalistic source, but it seems exceedingly unlikely anyone ever tried to cut off the existing station and run it through Harvard Yard, much less got so far as to construct a ghost station.
I'm skeptical. I looked at google maps, and I allow that it may not be perfectly accurate, but the line appears to follow surface roads in the area which allows for cheap and easy (relatively) cut and cover tunnels. Further, if the line already existed to Harvard Square, there is no reasonable alignment that would take an extension under Harvard yard. The line turns because the road turns and that is the direction they wanted to go. They also had to deal with the pre-existing station and tracks. It was probably determined to be the best option as trains would already be stopping at the station, anyway.
Yeah, it seems to basically follow Mass Ave from Harvard to Porter which makes perfect sense. (There's some one-way funkiness on the surface street--Boston/Cambridge, what can you say?) But given that the Hardware Square station existed at the time of the Red Line extension, I'm not sure why you would go under Harvard Yard. I'm willing to believe that Harvard Square station could have been located differently in a way that didn't require such a dogleg approaching Harvard Yard but that decision happened a very long time ago.
Actually, it's entirely possible. I have friends out in California who still have Spanish land grants that predate the US and California statehood. They have successfully prosecuted their rights (eg water) again & again.
For example, see the section about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on this wiki page:
See also Dartmouth College v. Woodward argued for Dartmouth by none other but Daniel Webster.
Among other things Supreme court chief justice "Marshall concluded that Dartmouth’s [royal] charter constituted a contract and that New Hampshire had violated this contract in attempting to replace the original trustees."
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/729/dartmouth-c...
Yes, generally the laws in effect before a colony or territory became a US state remained the same after they became US states. Contracts signed before statehood remained valid after. Property deeds remained valid. The criminal laws remained in effect. And so on, at least until amended by the new state legislature. Doing anything else would just be chaos, really. Louisiana is another example; its legal system has a distinctly French character to this day.
Here in NM, a significant number the original Spanish land grants were ignored and replaced by new grants to (generally) Anglo owners. Fortunately, some of them were sufficiently cogniscent of the paradox of colonialism overriding colonialism that the new grantees re-issued (smaller) grants back to the owners under Spanish or Mexican law.
Ironically, there were also some Spanish land grants that took so long to process, Mexico had already declared independence from Spain before the legal process was complete, and this left a number of them in a strange form of legal limbo at the time of the treaty.
In some cases, we do. I worked for a farmer who won an eminent domain action on the basis of a Dutch deed covenant. There’s a lot of crusty old law that protected the rights of landowners and others whose title predates the state or nation. In my boss’s case, his title predated both the state and country.
It worked in negative ways too. The Dutch setup a feudal system, but the state limited the ability of the landowner to collect rent in the 19th century. (Baltimore has a system like this too) In this case, the landlords abandoned the title, but many homeowners were in a legal limbo where they didn’t have a clean title.
> it is declared, that the President and Fellows of Harvard College,in their corporate capacity, and their successors in that capacity, their officers and servants, shall have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy, all the powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities and franchises, which they now have or are entitled to have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy: and the same are hereby ratified and confirmed unto them, the said president and fellows of Harvard College, and to their successors, and to their officers and servants, respectively, forever.
Chapter V, Section I, Article II:
> And whereas there have been at sundry times, by divers persons, gifts, grants, devises of houses, lands, tenements, goods, chattels, legacies and conveyances, heretofore made, either to Harvard College in Cambridge, in New England, or to the president and fellows of Harvard College, or to the said college, by some other description, under several charters successively: it is declared, that all the said gifts, grants, devises, legacies and conveyances, are hereby forever confirmed unto the president and fellows of Harvard College, and to their successors in the capacity aforesaid, according to the true intent and meaning of the donor or donors, grantor or grantors, devisor or devisors.
Whether or not that particular claim is apocryphal or not, it's well established case law that dusty old royal charters from King George III very much have legal credence.
> Throughout his life, Effinger suffered from health problems. These resulted in enormous medical bills which he was unable to pay, resulting in a declaration of bankruptcy. Because Louisiana's system of law descends from the Napoleonic Code rather than English Common Law, the possibility existed that copyrights to Effinger's works and characters might revert to his creditors, in this case the hospital. However, no representative of the hospital showed up at the bankruptcy hearing, and Effinger regained the rights to all his intellectual property.
There is something that seems at best underexplained in that narrative (which the Wikipedia article sources to the introduction to one of his works), since bankruptcy is handled by uniform federal laws, with state laws governing some exemptions, but copyrights not being generally exempt in most states (and the common law states not differing systematically from Louisiana on this point.)
> Early French and Spanish settlers influenced the legal system in Louisiana. Despite popular belief, it is incorrect to say that the Louisiana Civil Code is, or stems from, the Napoleonic Code. Although the developing Napoleonic Code influenced Louisiana law, the Napoleonic Code was not enacted until 1804, one year after the Louisiana Purchase. A main source of Louisiana jurisprudence may in fact be Spanish. The resulting system of "civil law" in the Louisiana does differ from the "common-law" systems in the other 49 states.
> Law in the state of Louisiana is based on a more diverse set of sources than the laws of the other 49 states of the United States. Private law—that is, substantive law between private sector parties, principally contracts and torts—has a civil law character, based on French and Spanish codes and ultimately Roman law, with some common law influences.
> Federal bankruptcy laws changed in October of 2005 when the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act took effect six months after President Bush signed it into law. This new law requires consumers who file bankruptcy to receive credit counseling in the six months prior to their filing for debt relief. It also mandated their completion of a financial management instructional course.
(interesting - the laws changed in 2005 - which may have been something sufficiently different... and he died three years before that law was changed)
> The most notable difference in procedure comes in the sphere of trust and estates law, real estate law, and inheritance. In Louisiana, we call this Succession and Donations, where it’s Trust and Estates in the rest of the country. Much of the legality surrounding the way land and property is passed down is unique to Louisiana.
> So, Louisiana and the rest of the United States reached a compromise: Louisiana could continue to follow its civil law practices for private law, which governs interactions between individuals like marriage and succession, and Louisiana would have to use common law akin to the rest of the United States for public law, like when a person goes to criminal court and is prosecuted by the state.
(bankruptcy and property would fall under the civil law at the time)
The US absolutely respects agreements prior to land becoming territory of the United States. Of course, it all depends on the agreement, so I have no idea if the Harvard story is correct.
But a good example are the ranchos in California. They were land grants by the Mexican government when it was Mexican territory. When the US acquired California after the Mexican-American war, the agreement was all such land grants were deemed valid going forward.
Those claims are about how the original land grants were respected, not if they were respected. That may sound like mincing words, but it's an important distinction.
Read the details, it's because proof of land grants wasn't exactly perfect. Lots of claims but sometimes no concrete proof. The article calls out instances of fraud.
I wouldn't say a few exceptions where challenges were faced mean the US didn't respect land grants. The paper itself says the vast majority has no issues.
Not at all uncommon. Allow me to direct you to Article XIII of the Minnesota Constitution, which states:
Sec. 3. University of Minnesota. All the rights, immunities, franchises and endowments heretofore granted or conferred upon the University of Minnesota are perpetuated unto the university.
Pretty sure all that means was that the land grant of the territorial legislature would still be in effect after the ratification of the Constitution (1851 vs 1857.)
Interestingly enough, Section 4 immediately following invests the state with eminent domain power.
My father was a real estate appraiser for the New York State Department of Transportation whose job was to appraise land taken under eminent domain.
There are plenty of parcels of land whose title is literally a pre-Revolution Crown Grant. That matters not a whit with respect to eminent domain. (OK - maybe not plenty but at least two.)
Someone else mentioned the story they heard was from George Washington, which would carry more weight I suppose. But it also implies it’s all a game of telephone.
To be a little pedantic, individual states maintained systems based on English common law, rather than the US as a whole adopting it. There’s famously no such thing as Federal common law.
This matters in Louisiana, which has a civil and not a common law system, dating from the French period.
That fact about Harvard sounds like multiple urban legends. For one thing Harvard began in the 1630s, yet in 1684 the King dissolved Massachusetts Bay Colony's 1628 royal charter because of their bad behavior (hanging of Friends). Anything about eminent domain would have had to be put in a 1691 new charter:
