June 02, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
District Court is the Trial Court
Instances of son succeeding his father’s
post in higher judiciary is the most visible form of nepotism that is a common
area of resentment in the legal fraternity specially among the advocates
aspiring to hold the position of judge in higher judiciary.
That was that about the Indian judiciary
and we shall stop at that for now.
The smaller states of the United States
such as Connecticut (in contrast to the larger state such as California) have
just one federal judicial district that matches with that state border.
The discrepancy between the number of
federal judicial districts and the number of states becomes obvious when you
see their numbers in totality.
The 50 states, a federal district, five
major territories and various minor islands of the United States share among
them a total of 94 federal judicial districts.
Each federal district have at least one
court house but in reality there are generally more than one as we saw in the case
of Northern California.
It was in such a district court that the various
parties concerned in the Amistad case filed property claims concerning both the
slaves and the schooner.
Even though most of the parties involved in
this case were against the liberty of the slaves and even worse wanted to punish
them on charges of revolt of murder the slaves themselves were not totally
alone and helpless.
You will remember that the incident aboard
La Amistad occurred in 1839 and the American Civil War over slavery started in
1861 barely 22 years later.
The abolition movement to end slavery in
the United States by ending the Atlantic Slave Trade and setting the slaves
free was very much established by the early nineteenth century though the
movement had begun much earlier.
In fact the Parliament of the United
Kingdom had passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807 which in legal parlance was
known as An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
In addition in 1833 the same Parliament
passed yet another Act known as The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 which actually
succeeded in abolishing the slavery throughout the British Empire.
Even this noble law was passed with a subtle
caveat of devilish cunning in the form of a footnote “with the exception of the
Territories in Possession of the East India Company” that kept it legal to own
Hindu slaves in South Asia in British India.
The English poet and hymnodist William
Cowper (1731-1800) wrote a number of anti-slavery poems one of which was
supposed to be sung in a form of ballad.
“The Negro’s Complaint” was published in
1788 which achieved great fame and was even later, much later, used and quoted
by Dr. Martin Luther King Junior for his civil rights movement that started
with the seminal Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott incident of 1955.
Yet another poem that Cowper wrote in 1785
goes something like this:
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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