In 1988, Professor Heald found a lost manuscript of Steve Allen's groundbreaking television show, “A Meeting of the Minds.” In that episode, published in 6 J. of Law & Rel. 279, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Kelman, Blaise Pascal, and Richard Posner discussed the nature of law. While completing renovation of a house, possibly visited by Allen, Heald recently found another manuscript jammed on top of an old water tank. The present episode reveals a lively discussion of Columbine, the death penalty, and the nature of retribution between Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.), C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Jerry Falwell, and Milner Ball.
Prof. Heald's paper may be "unusual," but it's not entirely unprecedented. Richard Lanham, the English literary scholar and rhetorician, published a commentary in Houston Law Review set in "the Interminable Present of a TV talk show" (as Lanham notes in the article's reprint in his book The Economics of Attention), including conversants Boffin Pundit, J.D., Barbie, and others. Lanham's topic was copyright in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The commentary appears as Richard A. Lanham, Barbie and the Teacher of Righteousness: Two Lessons in the Economics of Attention, 38 Houston L. Rev. 499 (2001).
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