My Dear Brethren and Colleagues

I greet you in the name of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Perhaps those of you who studied land law still remember the following famous quotation in Denman D R and Prodano S “Land Use: an Introduction to Proprietary Land Use Analysis” Allen & Unwin, London 1971 Rev 1991:

    “Oaks scorn to grow where there is no freehold ….”

The oak is mighty and towering tree. It is revered and mythical in the English culture. Its gestation is long, taking perhaps a hundred years or more to reach maturity. For that reason, tenants of feudal English Landlords, who held leaseholds at the pleasure of their lords, refrained from investing in the oak tree for reasons that the lease could be terminated before the oak tree matured. Therefore, oaks largely stood on freeholds and scorned leaseholds.

I’d like to draw from this analogy and make a point about knowledge and ignorance. Wikipedia defines ignorance; “… as the condition of being uninformed or uneducated …” Where there is ignorance, knowledge is absent. Ignorance has been and is still a major cause of suffering currently. Just imagine the plight of tenant in the English landholding culture who plants an oak tree on a leasehold land only for the landlord to take away the land in 10 years time!

The Holy Bible is awash with instances where God’s people perished for lack knowledge or refusal to know. The Apostle Paul in Romans 1:18, 32 attributes ignorance of God to the unrighteousness of men who hinder the truth. On the other hand, information and knowledge makes matters certain. Information and knowledge enables decision-making and action-taking in a more reliable and predictable way. For this reason, knowledge shall forever rule over ignorance.

We now live and work in a world where information and communications technologies (ICTs) have increasingly become tools of information and knowledge acquisition. It is without doubt that organizations or individuals who have embraced these tools in order to acquire or process information/knowledge have improved in their businesses tremendously and optimized their work flows. It both imperative and compelling that ALA, as an organization, embrace ICTs, especially internet, in order to facilitate better knowledge acquisition and sharing.

We, as members of the honorable profession; as gatekeepers of justice; learned friends; witnesses of the marvelous grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, must now use this tool - the internet - that the Almighty Gods has given mankind: to network; to fellowship; to open opportunities for one another etc. etc. etc, etc. Otherwise “the Oak may Scorn to Grow.”

Welcome to http://www.adventistlawyers.org/

John Omo
LLB, LLM
Chair, Adventist Lawyers association, Kenya Chapter.