Douglas Whaley

  After any life-altering experience (in my case a heart transplant) it’s required by law that one start a blog.   My transplant was five years ago this Thanksgiving, and this December the blog will also be five.   But today the 300,000 th hit occurred, and I’m very pleased by that. My blog has not been either the usual “What I Did Today” nor a steady commentary on one particular subject.   Instead I’ve tended to write mini-essays on many different topics: gay rights, atheism, law, family stories, cats, etc.   I’ve published a lot of works in my life: numerous law review articles, seven textbooks used nationwide to teach various aspects of commercial law, three student guides that paid enough to be a major factor in getting my son through college, two novels, and even columns in minor publications, but nothing turns out to have been as important to me as this blog.   It contains my entire life: my history, my philosophy, my advice on many topics fr...

  1.   I Had a Heart Transplant. Of course, this is the obvious sentence to start with.   Only about 3,500 heart transplants are performed annually throughout the world, so there aren’t a lot of people who can say that they are walking around with someone else’s heart beating inside them. I had had a failing heart since 1999 when I developed atrial fibrillation and from that an enlarged heart. For the next ten years I was treated by a cardiologist at Ohio State University’s Ross Heart Hospital, and it was clear that my heart was failing. In January of 2009 I qualified for the heart transplant list, but because I was still able to get out and about, I was not high on that list. As recently as October of that year I was told that the transplant would likely take place in 2010, probably in the spring. It’s one thing intellectually to think you’re getting a heart transplant in 2010, and quite another months before that to receive a morning phone call (I was wor...

  It happens to all of us once a week or even more often.   We’re enticed to enter into some transaction on the web and before the requested services/goods will be forthcoming we’re given a lengthy document to read that contains the “take it or leave it” terms of the supplier.   Unless willing to abort the transaction at this point, writing off the experience as a waste of time, we uneasily click on the “I Agree” icon.     Do you, blog reader, read the terms?   Most people don’t.   They are mind-numbingly detailed, written in dense legalese, meant to be too dull to contemplate, all in all the sort of thing Mark Twain once called “chloroform in print.”   Writing this sort of legal mumbo-jumbo in such a fashion that it’s almost impossible to stay awake long enough to both decipher and appreciate, is a much valued legal art.   The lawyers who wrote it don’t want you to read it .   They want the task to overwhelm you so th...

 [The three women on the Court dissented] In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby , decided by the United States Supreme Court a few months ago, the Court’s five conservative—and Republican—justices (over the vigorous dissent of the four liberals) decided that a corporation like Hobby Lobby (the stock of which is owned by a very religious family) is protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause and thus could use religious beliefs to object to funding family-planning coverage for its employees.   Corporations are now “people” too and religious corporations can go to church just like other U.S. citizens! This was a natural enough extension of the Court’s infamous decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which declared that corporations were “persons,” thus entitling them to the full protection of the U.S. Constitution (with freedom of speech permitting them to spend as much money as they like: influencing elections, flooding us with billions of dollars to promote camp...

  David Ogden Stiers in M*A*S*H When I was living in San Francisco in 1983 the College of Marin, which is located just north of the city, announced that it was going to hold a “Bardathon” in which the complete works of William Shakespeare, both poems and plays, would be read on its stage without stop starting one Thursday night and finishing early the next Monday morning.   The College asked various community theaters to choose a play to read and also solicited actors in the area to come up with a group of their friends to do the same.   If I recall right, David Ogden Stiers, who played Major Charles Winchester on the TV show M *A*S*H, selected “Hamlet” for himself and friends on the theory that it would be his only chance to ever perform the part in public. One of the alums of the College of Marin was Robin Williams, who studied theater there.   When he was asked to participate he chose “The Comedy of Errors,” but he had a unique take on the play: he...