*How to root your new ideas deeply in the verdant soil of antiquity*
*Publication Date:* November 2001
*Volume:* 37-3
*Author:* Richard Schenkar
*Categories:* Internet, Practical resources, Research
Have you ever looked for a set of words that magically communicate the
reason why your cause is just? Effective places to look for such words
are the statements of figures in history and philosophy whose works have
been hallowed by time. By discovering where their statements are
congruent with yours, you borrow their credibility. By rooting your new
ideas in this verdant soil of antiquity, you give them strength, power,
and stability that they cannot get any other way.
This process bolsters your credibility, puts judges and juries at ease
because they are familiar with the sources, and makes you more effective
by increasing your own confidence in your work product. Because it is
prudent and ethical to respect authors' intellectual property rights,
the safest way to implement this concept is to use materials in the
public domain. Public domain texts are those for which there is no
copyright pending because the copyright has lapsed.
There are several useful hard copy (published on paper) and online
resources that I will point out here, but before I do, we must
acknowledge a possible copyright infringement, liability-producing
problem in the use of these materials. Just because something is online
does not mean that you can freely download it and share it. (That
applies to this column, too.) The choice of an author to quote a classic
public domain text is part of the author's intellectual labor and is the
subject matter of copyright once that work is in a tangible (readable)
format.
Have faith that the public domain is large enough that you can find a
phrase that encapsulates your thoughts without invading someone else's
thought-capsule. It is essential that you keep excellent, honest, and
complete records of your search that allow you to distinguish between
your ideas and the thoughts of others. These records help you by
creating tangible evidence of your search that bolsters your
self-confidence in the search result, and will be of help later if there
is a question or litigation.
My favorite way of getting into this material is to use the "Great Books
of the Western World" set, published by Encyclopedia Britannica. You
start in volumes two and three--the "Syntopicon." The Syntopicon is an
index to the ideas expressed in the rest of the volumes. The rest of the
volumes include the full text of classic works of Aristotle, Plato,
Shakespeare, John Stuart Mill, and many of the documents that contribute
legal ideas like the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. The real
values of the Syntopicon are that
1) it is a human-created index by ideas and concepts-like TRUTH or
JUSTICE--rather than a machine-created key-word index;
2) the coverage is from antiquity to the present, so that you can follow
an idea through its developmental stages; and
3) the references are to the quarter of a page where your relevant issue
is discussed so that you do not waste time.
The best repository of public-domain classic texts online is Project
Gutenberg, at promo.net/pg/ or gutenberg.net
. You may search the Project Gutenberg files
by author or title. You can also get a compressed list of authors,
titles, or books on the web site.
For reference texts-including poetry, verse, and quotations, check
Bartleby at bartelby.com/. . There, you will
find four major categories of materials-reference, verse, fiction, and
nonfiction.
The Classic Bookshelf, at classicbookshelf.com
, indexes its material by author.
You will find some overlap when you compare the materials on these
sites. That overlap helps you because if one site is not available, you
have alternatives.