On any given day in the larger legal scheme of things, it was easy to miss: a small, graceful homily to mortality built on a passage from Shakespeare in a federal appellate ruling on an Alabama asbestos case.
“In return for the loan of life, we each owe God a death,” wrote Edward Carnes, chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit at the outset of Bobo v. the Tennessee Valley Authority. “Payment in full is a non-negotiable term of the debt, but the timing and circumstances in which remittance is made varies.”
