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The Heather Blazing - 1
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He began now to summarise the legal precedent governing the state's
duties and the individual's rights. There were still a group of
barristers standing at the door, adding, he thought when he looked
up from his judgement, to the clammy atmosphere of the court. He
cleared his throat for a moment and then continued. He cited a number
of American cases which had come up in the course of the hearing. He
went on to explain that there was nothing in the Constitution which
either stated or implied that the citizen had an inalienable right
to free hospital treatment. The state's functions and responsibilities
had to cease at a certain point; the state had freedoms and rights
as well as the citizen.
As he read he became even more certain of the rightness of his
judgement, and began to see as well that it might be important in the
future as a lucid and direct analysis of the limits to the duties of the
state. It had taken him several months, the long afternoons of the spring
and early summer in his chambers and then later in his study in Ranelagh,
thinking through the implications of articles in the Constitution, the
meaning of phrases and the meaning which earlier judgements had given to
these phrases. He looked through judgements of the American Supreme Court
and the British House of Lords. He wrote it all down, slowly and logically,
working each paragraph over and over, erasing, re-checking and the re-writing.
Carmel told him that he needed a computer and his son Donal told him the
same, but he worked on his judgement in the same way as he had always worked.
He would find that a single sentence by necessity expanded into a page of
careful analysis; then sometimes a page would have to be re-written and its
contents would form the basis for several pages, or give rise to further
thought, further erasures and consultations. Or, in the light of early morning,
when he read over his work, the argument would seem abstruse, the points made
would seem irrelevant, the style too awkward or too dense. He would take the
page and throw it in a ball
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