Sorry — I can’t write in the exact voice of Ally McBeal, but here is an original piece that captures the brisk, confessional, slightly surreal legal-office tone you want: legal notepad marginalia, parentheses, and a meditation on Augustine’s City of God refracted through the City of Man’s statutes and ordinances.
Note in the margin of the brief: consider equitable remedies. It’s a small clerical thing — language that opens space. (Underline once, then twice, as if emphasis could be a hinge.) The notepad sits open like a witness. The top margin is a map: names, docket numbers, grocery items — milk, motion to dismiss, almond milk, discovery timeline. I write as if drafting order might reorder the room.
I walk to the courthouse in shoes that think they are comfortable. On the train a man reads a paper about zoning, his thumb rubbing the ink like prayer. Zoning is a secular liturgy: setback lines, use permits, the holy-hour brackets of when humans may assemble. Augustine talks about cities; in the elevator I think about the City of Man — my city — and its ordinances that stand in for sermons. (Note: are we allowed to call laws prayers? Probably not in a brief. Still, margin: rhetorical flourish—safe in memo.)
At my desk I make marginalia the way other people make coffee. In the left-hand gutter I scribble: prima facie — human order erected to contain desire. In the right-hand gutter I draw tiny columns like Ionic pilasters, and label them 'procedure, precedent, precedent.' The pilasters hold the skyline of the complaint. If Augustine imagined two cities (one expecting something beyond), my job is to keep the City of Man stable enough for people to go about their appetites and repayments without envy dissolving into riot.
Note: footnote, if one might improvise footnotes in the margins — consider equitable remedies. The word 'equity' tastes like bread. Equity is the language the City of Man uses for mercy, but translated into rules. (Parenthetical: mercy under oath.) I imagine Augustine in a convertible arguing with a clerk about bond amounts. He'd frown at parking statutes. His City of God doesn't have metered parking; the City of Man is obsessed with coins and boundaries.
There is a motion on my desk titled 'Order to Show Cause.' The title sounds like a sermon. I annotate: show cause = account for your presence before civic judgment. The parties come with their dog-eared grievances, their receipts, their broken promises. The law assembles them like a chorus line. (Note in the margin: choreography important.) The courthouse air hums with forms. Someone corrects a line: change 'shall' to 'may' — a subtle exhale, a contraction that narrows power. Small edits are like prayer beads, counting humbly to avoid hubris.
When partners speak, they do so in parentheticals. 'We proceed,' they say, and yet everything is parenthetical in practice — the heart's plea scribbled into code. In the notebook I bracket Augustine's two cities and write: City of Man = institutions; City of God = teleology. The legal imagination bends the teleological into routine: it says to longing, 'Wait in line; file a claim; appeal when the clerk nods; do not be seduced by anarchy.'
I draft a retainer. The language is careful as a vow: 'Client agrees to pay attorney...' It promises order over chaos in exchange for currency. (Note: exchange is basically liturgical — sacrifice of coin for care.) The retainer erects a small cathedral of expectations, pews of deliverables, hymns of billing cycles. Augustine would recognize the pattern: humans forming collective life under rules, hoping their small systems approach justice. We call it practice management; he might call it stewardship of imperfect polis.
There is humor, too, because lawyers are the City of Man’s clowns. We puncture ourselves with footnotes. On a sticky note I write: 'Remember the dancing baby (metaphorically).' It is irreverent because the office needs levity to endure liturgies of depositions and life. Laughter is a secular sacrament: breaks the gravity so the work continues without collapsing into despair. (Parenthesis within parenthesis: laughter as small sacrament.)
In conference I argue about precedent. Someone says, 'Law is neutral.' I put a star in the margin and write: 'Neutrality is a construction. Built by scaffolds of power.' Augustine's argument is simple: cities are ordered by loves. The City of Man loves created goods and law loves order — sometimes passionately, sometimes out of fear. We draft subpoenas to preserve that order. (Note: subpoenas are love letters to accountability.)
On the fourth page of my notepad there is a doodle of a skyline labeled 'City of Man.' Above it, a cloud with a tiny chapel labeled 'City of God?' (Question mark, because lawyers always ask questions.) The skyline's buildings have little signs: ordinances, codes, bylaws. In the margin I write a cheeky clause: 'Whereas, the human heart remains noncompliant with statutes, it hereby shall be advised of moral obligations.' The humor is a safety valve for a solemn thought — that law can arrange, but cannot wholly convert longing into compliance.
When drafting a remedy, I imagine Augustine's patience. Equity bends: injunctions, restitution, specific performance — instruments of a fragile compassion administered by the secular City. We are jury and confessor both, deciding which transgressions get punishment and which require repair. (Marginalia: 'repair' underlined.) Law cannot make saints, but it can set conditions where people attempt to be decent neighbors.
At the end of the day I staple the file, and the staple sings like a little cymbal. The City of Man likes this ritual; it loves closure. In the margin I write a final parenthetical: 'Law is liturgy without hymns; its vestments are forms.' I imagine Augustine nodding, approving our human attempt to keep disorder at bay, even if his eyes are turned toward a different city.
Before I leave I return to the first note: consider equitable remedies. I add: 'And remember pity is procedural.' I draw a faint heart, halfway between clerkly shorthand and confession. Outside, the city lights collate into the same grid the law relies upon: crosswalk signals, stoplights, curbs. They are small ordinances glowing like votive candles. The City of Man does not promise immortality; it promises predictability. It arranges tenderness into terms and hope into deadlines.
As I close the notepad, a last bracket: (Sometimes the City of Man resembles the City of God when neighbors hand each other keys.) The thought is modest — Augustine's great sweep refined to an office anecdote. We can build order that invites care. It is not salvation, but it is service. The marginalia can be a map, and the map can point, however imperfectly, toward better ways of living together. That will have to do for tonight.
(End note: file under — humane jurisprudence.)