Penner & Purves

05/20/2026

05/18/2026

If you are local to the Santa Barbara, Ventura, or San Luis Obispo tri-counties area, follow Penner & Purves on Nextdoor:

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05/16/2026

The highest level, intentional, most secure, and thoughtful families already have their estate plans completed (or updated within the last 10 years).

This includes young families.

These families have ensured that they have their own estate planning lawyer capable of educating them about the basics of how their legal planning works. So, they actually know the advantages that estate planning tools give them to take care of both themselves and their children. And they understand how paying the initial cost of the estate plan has saved them more than 100x the money.

This means these families know how to distinguish between what is worth spending their time on and what is less important, and how to prioritize and act accordingly.

This means that these leaders are strong, secure, and building the human, financial, intellectual, and spiritual capital of their families within their lives and their relationships.

If this isn’t you, then it should be.

Just find an estate planning lawyer who will:
(a) educate and enable you in clear, simple language;
(b) greatly decrease the time, work, and cost for you personally; and
(c) be ready, available, and quick to respond when the time comes that your family has a need or emergency.

So, the question is ... are you interested in arranging for you and your family to be in this top 30% of Americans?

Book a free estate plan consultation now by texting (805) 965-0085 or calling us at the same number during business hours, or alternatively reserve a time sl...

05/14/2026

“Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To lose good days, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.
Unhappy wight, borne to disastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendence spend.”
— Edmund Spenser

05/13/2026

Two of the essential skills of the legal professional are (1) the interpretation of history, and (2) employing a reliable, nonarbitrary standard of judgment between competing interpretations of history.

This means learning to interpret the chronological facts of the recent individual case.

This also means learning to interpret the historical facts underlying the law and the legal system.

Also, you can’t interpret history without knowing history.

This therefore means that good lawyers are deep readers of history.

Hence, to be a deep reader of history, you need to read books and you need a standard of measure and criterion of judgment—a way of judging what is and isn’t reliable, credible, valuable, or true.

And, guess what? That standard of measure exists.

Paul Blewett, senior associate attorney at Penner & Purves, quotes James L. Papandrea‭“It’s become fashionable in some circles to say that history is so obsc...

05/08/2026

A reminder from T.S. Eliot:

Information and data are not the same as meaning and knowledge.

And knowledge is not the same as understanding and wisdom.

Don’t mistake a subpart of a part for the whole.

Don’t put all your time, money, and investment into just a subpart, and then expect to achieve the whole.

This is a principle of universal application to any profession or vocation, but it certainly has its overwhelmingly practical applications to the legal profession and trial practice.

Emily Takaki, legal assistant at Penner & Purves, quotes T.S. Eliot.“The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.O p...

05/06/2026

Argument #1: Lawyers should study poetry as there is no other discipline that more deeply teaches how multiple interpretations of a text can be used, hinted at, meant, implied, contrasted, analogically compared, and rhetorically given at different levels as a matter of both art and science.

One must make the proper distinctions.

Another way of putting it is that it is ultimately poets and lawyers who can best practice the art of both/and instead of merely either/or.

By way of an illustration, there is certainly a place for either/or arguments, but the reality in which either/or arguments have their proper place is also the same reality in which both/and arguments can also sometimes be true.

To argue that you can ONLY epistemological have both/and arguments OR have either/or arguments is both self-contradictory and ironic.

Frances Mullen, paralegal at Penner & Purves, quotes George D. Gopan.“No. 1. No other discipline [besides poetry] so closely replicates the central question ...

05/05/2026

Our legal staff has been privileged to read law professor George D. Gopen’s four compelling arguments for why the most serious law students, top lawyers, and best judges need to regularly and consistently read and study poetry.

Here are all four propositions clearly stated.

Future videos to follow.

Best Preparation for Studying Law ~ George D. Gopen

05/05/2026

“We can use the matter of the king’s divorce to illustrate the point. Before marrying Henry, Catherine had been the bride of Henry’s brother Arthur, who had died almost immediately—perhaps without consummating the marriage: the point was contested. Was it permissible to marry a deceased brother’s wife? The validity of Catherine’s subsequent marriage to Henry hinged—or so it was assumed—on the answer to that question, which in turn hinged on the proper interpretation of scriptural passages ... Henry, and most of the nobles and prelates of England, had concluded that the controlling text was the one in Leviticus, and this meant that the marriage to Catherine had been invalid from the start ... More remarked to Meg that most of these men had previously held the contrary view, and he wondered what had happened to change their opinion. The heavy penalties imposed on anyone who refused the oath—the penalties he himself was experiencing firsthand—‘might hap make some men ... frame their consciences afresh to think otherwise than they thought.’

But he quickly added that it was not for him to judge what was in another man’s mind or heart. The important point was that, for More, it was not the opinion of English leaders that was determinative of the truth or of the requirements of his own conscience. Nor was it simply a matter of reading the verses and deciding for himself what those verses meant (well practiced though he was in reading both law and scripture). That was the approach that Luther had stood for at Worms.

Under More’s conception of conscience, by contrast, what mattered was the opinion of faithful Christians generally, including not only those outside of England but also ‘them that are dead before, and that are I trust in heaven.’ ... If Luther’s conception of conscience was strongly individualist in character, therefore, More’s was more communal. Conscience was not something that would lead you to challenge or defy the received body of opinion, as Luther and his English sympathizers were doing, but rather something that would bind you more closely to that body ... And for More, the individualist conception was hubristic — ‘proud, insane, folly.’ Who was Martin Luther — or, for that matter, who was Thomas More — to set up his own puny opinions against the collective judgments of Christians through the centuries?”

— Steven D. Smith, The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity, 2023

Teleological Ordering to the Good ~ Jennifer A. Frey

05/04/2026

Imagine a scenario where the real world consisted of persons who are made up of both mind and body, both spiritual intellect and physical substance; and then assume that there isn’t any absolute separation between the two.

In other words, the experience of living as an embodied being means that your mind affects your body and your body affects your mind. This would also mean that you are vulnerable, because having a body means that you can get hungry, thirsty, tired, hurt, sick, or disabled, that you have physical needs, and that your capacity to provide for those needs will be more or less at different times of life. Indeed, it turns out that the experience of being embodied is a part of the very definition of what it means to be a person who lives in the real world in the first place.

Next imagine that you write a set of laws to govern these persons, but do you so instead presuming a Cartesian Enlightenment philosophy viewpoint of the person, assuming not only that mind and body are separate, but that disembodied minds are ultimately what we really are. These laws posit an abstract unencumbered, free, individual mind; and then these laws even go further and prioritize the will as the highest part of a person’s mind, above that of the intellect, the capacity to reason, the affections, feelings, and all other psychological components of a person. The mere will determines all. Everything turns on did I will it? Did I choose it? Did I consent to it? If yes, then it’s good. If no, then it’s bad.

Then you base all your laws assuming the existence of this disembodied willing will definition of a person, and you prioritize the freedom of these individual willing “wills” as the highest possible good the laws are designed to protect.

It might be that using these laws within the reality of needing to govern actual embodied persons will cause some problems.

1 like. "Against a Disembodied Anthropology ~ Barbara Freres"