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Is It Possible That Some Possibilities Are Unreasonable?
Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Section 5342(e) of the California Corporations Code requires a nonprofit public benefit corporation to provide, upon the request of a member, to either allow inspection and copying of all members' names, addresses or voting rights or provide an alphabetized list of the  names, addresses, and voting rights of those members entitled to vote for the election of directors.  In either case, the statute requires the corporation to act "as soon as reasonably possible to allow the member to communicate with other members regarding the proposed amendment".   This is likely a dogberryism because possibilities are neither reasonable nor unreasonable.  Something is possible or it isn't.  I expect that the drafters of this statute had intended "practical" rather than "possible".  I doubt that they, like Shakespeare, were aiming for comic relief.

A weightier question is what does it mean for something to be possible.  Stephen Dedalus pondered this question in the second chapter of Ulysses:

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away.  Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.  But can those have been possible seeing that they never were?  Or was that only possible which came to pass?  Weave, weaver of the wind.

(Pyrrhus, known for his hard-won victories against the Romans was killed after being struck by a rooftop tile thrown by an old-woman (aka a beldam). 

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