LAW & LIFE An Inquiring Mind Is Often Rewarded iStock The Bequest T he boxes arrived in Nick’s office on a Friday morning. Inside the one designated “1” on the outside was a short letter from the executor: Dear Mr. Adams: With this letter please find four boxes which Mr. Robert Maxwell instructed in his will be sent to you. Best regards. Nick sighed. Bob Maxwell was a friend of his father’s, from when they were undergrad roommates at the University of Oregon. Bob had stayed on to attend the school of law in Eugene, while Nick’s fa- ther moved back to New York after gradu- ation to start working in the Adams fam- ily business. Nick had met Bob with Nick’s dad a few times over the years when Bob’s law practice required trips to New York. It was Bob, a soft-spoken and polite native Oregonian who had never married and who took a liking to Nick, who had first encouraged the inquisitive Nick to con- 36 OREGON STATE BAR BULLETIN • JULY 2016 By Lawrence Savell sider a legal career. And when Nick had said he was thinking of putting law school off for a couple of years after he got his B.A., it was Bob who persuaded him not to delay but to seize the moment, as things had a habit of slipping away. Three years later, Nick became the first lawyer in the family. Nick had not seen Bob since Nick’s father passed five years before, and he was surprised and touched that Bob had re- membered him in his will. Under the letter, the box, like its three traveling companions, was full of books. There were several treatises, nearly all a bit long in the tooth. Nick presumed that Bob had remembered Nick was a his- tory major in college and might appreci- ate them more than other lawyers. But they also contained two other chair, put his feet on his desk, and opened the lowest-numbered volume. It had been a while since Nick had opened a book of case decisions, since he was part of the generation which conducted nearly all of its case research via online databases like Lexis and Westlaw. Indeed, Nick’s firm, like many others, had in recent years do- nated or tossed all its case report volumes, as anachronistic relics of the predigital world taking up valuable office space that could be put to more profitable use. He turned through the pages and saw the spectrum of subject matters that one would expect addressed in the reported cases: contracts, torts, matrimonial, wills, etc. There was nothing out of the ordi- nary. He was about to put the book down when he saw something. About a third Indeed, Nick’s firm, like others, had in recent years donated or tossed all its case report volumes, as anachronistic relics of the predigital world taking up valuable space that could be put to more profitable use. things — a large folder of copies of filed briefs, and various weathered volumes of the Oregon Reports. Sending the volumes of old Oregon decisions was strange, Nick thought, as they would be of little use to a New York lawyer. Nick took out all the Reports volumes and arranged them sequentially. There were 32 in all — a small fraction of the full series. There were thus many gaps in the number sequence. Nick was intrigued. He poured himself a tall black coffee from the office kitchen. He returned to his of the way into the volume, at the right margin of a page, was a pair of handwrit- ten pencil marks. The first, at the begin- ning of a long paragraph, consisted of a horizontal line about a quarter of an inch long, joined at a right angle by another line of about the same length going down. At the end of the paragraph again at the right margin was another mark, this time with the vertical line meeting the hori- zontal at the bottom, like a backwards “L.” The marks surprised Nick. He would never — even in pencil — think of de-