New York City
December 19, 2000

Dear Readers,

Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it difficult to read Paul Maliszewski’sletter today, about his lawsuit against his former landlord, and not think about another recent legal proceeding: the matter of Gore v. Bush. When Paul writes that he and his girlfriend, Monique, “invested in the law a great deal of our most abstract hopes about the eventual and satisfying triumph of right, reason, justice, and fairness over wrong, illogic, injustice, and iniquity,” one can’t help but recall certain abstract hopes that many of us invested in the U.S. Supreme Court a week or two ago – an investment, as it turned out, with uncommonly lousy returns.

“We had traveled to the law to seek a decision that would hopefully right the wrong that had happened over in our world,” Paul writes. “What we received, in fact, was a decision limited strictly to the narrow world of the law” – which is, I suppose, more than one can say about the majority decision in Gore v. Bush. Paul and Monique, in the end, got off easy.

Paul is the author of three previous open letters that have chronicled, one by one, his and Monique’s journey from Syracuse, New York, to Durham, North Carolina. In the first, they sold all of their possessions. In the second, they drove a twenty-four-foot moving truck several hundred miles. In the third, they were allegedly screwed over by their landlord, and went looking for a new place to live.

We managed to convince Paul to let us make available to the public his “awe-inspiring” legal brief. Just like on msnbc.com, with the Supreme Court documents, you can download Paul’s brief, via PDF, to your computer: Just clickhere.

Also: Today is the six-month anniversary of our first day of publication: On June 19, we published Chana Shvonne Williford’s open letter about falling in love. Happy half-birthday.

For the holidays, we’re easing up on our hectic publishing schedule a little, and so we’ll leave Paul’s trial letter up for until Thursday, or maybe Friday.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough