First English Redux: A Kafkaesque Encounter in Court

Abstract

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court loosed what this journal likened to “a lightning bolt hitting an open sea” (39 LUL/ZD No. 8 at 3 [1987]), the California Court of Appeal rendered its decision on remand. Those who have already heard the punch line to this story will perhaps forgive First Church for feeling like a character in Charles Dickens's Bleak House or in any of a number of the novels of Franz Kafka: the journey to justice seems unending, and the twists and turns along the way unfathomable.