Cordas v Peerless Transportation Co.

If I ever write an opinion, I hope it has this much flair. There for a second I forgot I was reading a casebook! 


Here is an excerpt from Justice Carlin's opinion in Cordas v. Peerless Trans. Co.

Returning to our chauffeur. If the philosophic Horatio and the martial companions of his watch were ‘distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear’ when they beheld ‘in the dead vast and middle of the night’ the disembodied spirit of Hamlet’s father stalk majestically by ‘with a countenance more in sorrow than in anger’ was not the chauffeur, though unacquainted with the example of these eminent men-at-arms, more amply justified in his fearsome reactions when he was more palpably confronted by a thing of flesh and blood bearing in its hand an engine of destruction which depended for its lethal purpose upon the quiver of a hair?

In other words, if those guys were scared of a ghost, how much more scared would you be of a guy holding you at gun point!?