THE ADVOCATE 309
VOL. 80 PART 2 MARCH 2022
between U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin
Scalia”. It premiered in 2015 and includes the duet “We are different, we are
one”. Each named justice prepared a preface, with Ginsburg noting the
“one” was “in our reverence for the Constitution, the U.S. judiciary and the
Court on which we serve”. She also observed that her “grade school music
teacher, with brutal honesty, rated me a sparrow, not a robin. I was told to
mouth the words, never to sing them. Even so, I grew up with a passion for
opera, though I sing only in the shower, and in my dreams”. Scalia was more
assertive when describing his talents, at least going as far as to declare a “nagging
doubt that I could have been a contendah—or a divus, or whatever a
male diva is called”. He noted that “the utter peak of my otherwise uneventful
judicial career was an evening after the Opera Ball at the British Ambassador’s
Residence, when I joined two tenors from the Washington Opera
singing various songs at the piano—the famous Three Tenors performance”.
Though Ginsburg’s teacher apparently did not regard highly the singing of
sparrows, the nickname of the great Édith Piaf was the “Little Sparrow”.
In January 2022, Jim Gould of HHBG Lawyers became interim CEO of the
BC Nurses’ Union.
Shannon Salter has stepped down from her post as chair of the Civil Resolution
Tribunal, a post she held for eight years, to become Deputy Attorney
General for British Columbia. She replaces Richard Fyfe, Q.C., who retired
after more than ten years in the role.
In Lumley v. Wagner, 1852 EWHC Ch J96, the High Court of Chancery held
that it had “not the means of compelling the defendant singer to sing” at a
particular theatre, as she had contracted to do, but it could restrain her from
singing elsewhere. The defendant singer, Johanna Wagner, was an opera
singer and the niece of composer (not chief justice) Richard Wagner.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit observed in Re Da-sota Elevator
Co. v. Fm Da-sota Elevator Co., 939 F.2d 654 (1991) that “the locus classicus
or paradigmatic example of personal service is the celebrated English
precedent of Lumley v. Wagner”. Noting that the Lumley case “involved a
then prominent opera singer”, the court added that “a current example”
(which “comes to mind because some of the members of the Court during
the current session saw Pavarotti and his party leave the hotel for the hall
in two Mercedes Benz automobiles”) would be “a contract for Luciano
Pavarotti to appear in the Twin Cities”. The court explained that “the par-