On Blackacre

“Blackacre—with its echoes of Bleak House, of black-letter law, of blight taken to gothic extremes—is an inside joke among lawyers, a password marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination.”

“I think of each “____acre” as a landscape, a legacy—the allotment each of us is given to work with, whether that allotment is a place, a span of time, a work of art, a body, a destiny. We never start with a blank slate—each acre has been previously tenanted, enriched and depleted, built up and demolished. What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given?”