Who says judges don't have senses of humor, or aren’t widely read? Royce C. Lamberth, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, offered an amusing but apt assessment of the Medicare statute in a recent opinion on a hospital reimbursement dispute before him.
The judge began his opinion by stating: "Picture a law written by James JoyceFN1 and edited by E.E. Cummings [sic]. Such is the Medicare statute, which has been described as 'among the most completely impenetrable texts within human experience.' Rehab. Ass'n of Va. v. Kozlowski, 42 F.3d 1444, 1450 (4th Cir.1994).”
The footnote elaborates: “FN1 The Court clarifies, however, that by making this analogy, it is referring not to Joyce's early work, such as Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but his later period, specifically Finnegan's Wake."
The case, Catholic Health Initiatives-Iowa, Corp. v. Sebelius (U.S. Dist. Ct., D.C., No. 10–cv–411 (RCL), Jan. 30, 2012) involved a hospital seeking payments it believed are owed for providing care to low-income patients.
We leave it to our readers to decide whether Judge Lamberth was unfair to James Joyce (left).
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