Friday Frivolity: Frank Snyder, Channeling Bob Dylan, on Hadley v. Baxandale

Each year, the International Conference on Contracts (KCON) honors a member of the profession with the Lifetime Achievement Award. At KCON XVIII in Gainesville, we honored Bob Scott. This year, we also added the Distinguished Service Award, and it will be hard to top the accomplishments of our inaugural honoree, Frank Snyder (below).

If you have ever attended a KCON, you have Frank to thank for that, because he was the prime mover of that institution. If you have ever found material on this Blog that was helpful to you in your teaching or scholarship, you have Frank to thank for that as well, because he founded the Blog.

I owe special thanks to Frank. I can’t remember how he discovered my Limericks, but he sent me an e-mail, saying something along the lines of, “If you are the kind of person who likes to write Limericks about contracts cases, you may also be the kind of person who might want to write for the Blog perhaps once a week or so.” That was over twenty years and thousands of blog posts ago. Eventually Frank moved on from blogging and I slid into his position as editor. Now, blogging has become my way of keeping atop new developments in the field in which I do the bulk of my teaching. It also provides a creative outlet for me and sometimes even sparks bits of writing that are as close as I come to doing actual contracts scholarship.

One of the highlights of KCON this year was Frank’s live rendition of his poem and song for the case that started all the KCONs. It occurred to Frank that the 150th anniversary of Hadley v. Baxandale was imminent, that the mill that was the site where the facts of the case developed was undergoing renovations, and that the University of Gloucestershire was setting up a law faculty. The confluence of events led Frank to conclude that there ought to be a conference to commemorate the confluence of events.

So KCON was born. This poem displays Frank’s enthusiasm for the case, as well as his lyrical gifts.

THE SHAFT:
THE HADLEY v. BAXENDALE SONG

Franklin G. Snyder

[to the tune of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone’]

Once upon a time, well, things were fine
The mill wheels whine, you’d make a dime
Didn’t you?
Grain would come and you’d grind some
And really, chum, you’d soon become
Wealthy, too.

Then one day, the mill shaft broke,
The big smoke stacks stopped belching smoke.
Now the grain, it isn’t ground
Now the workers, they just stand around
And you know, you’ve got to
Get it fixed.

CHORUS:

How does it feel?
Ah, how does it feel?
Does it drive you daft?
Or make you want to laugh?
To see the lawyers’ craft
Give you the shaft?

So you’re up a creek, the shaft’s unique
Things are looking bleak, you’ve got to seek
The Pickfords man.
Because you know, shaft’s got to go
To Greenwich, oh, but not go slow
And Pickfords can
Get it there the next day if
It’s there by eleven, the young clerk sniffs.
So you get it there by ten.
You sign the contract with your pen,
And he says, “Two pounds, four-
And we’ve got a deal!”

CHORUS

So you sit around, stare at the ground
Pet your hound, wait for the sound
Of Pickfords van.
But it don’t show, and home you go,
And then, you know, you’re full of woe
‘Cause Pickfords’ man
Says the shaft has gone astray,
“Don’t worry, it will turn up any day!”
But the flour mill is closed,
And you know that you are hosed-
You’re losing money-
Every day

CHORUS

So you’re losing loot, you figure, shoot,
On this dispute you should bring suit
For profits lost
The problem, though, with getting dough
You’ll have to show, did Pickfords know
What would be the cost
Of what would happen if the ball were dropped?
Could it foresee that the mill was stopped?
If not, you’re out of luck.
With your own losses you’ll be stuck.
And next time you better-
Have a spare ….

CHORUS

Franklin G. Snyder, Introduction, The Shaft: The Hadle y v . Baxendale Song, 11 Tex. Wesleyan L. Rev. 239 (2005)
Available at: https://doi.org/10.37419/TWLR.V11.I2.2