My 11-year-old-son Nick, a sixth grader, has been bringing home some, well…unique assignments from school. Now, I don’t know where his teachers were trained or what their personal interests are outside the classroom, but there seems to be an unusual flair to his recent projects.

In January, he was given an assignment to develop a biographical report on the man who first invented the pencil eraser. He resisted, and tried to play the “lack of relevance” card. In my role as a parent, I suggested that he stop the Johnny Cochran routine and just do the assignment. He demurred, wrote the “Eraser-Head” report with a #2 pencil and, to make a point, erased every third word before he handed it in. Luckily, his teacher had a dry sense of humor and gave him an “A+”, but erased the “+”.

In February, he was asked to design and build a working model of a solar-powered steam iron, using only materials found around the house. “WHOSE HOUSE ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE?” I asked. Although I am a pack-rat by nature, the best I could do was to come up with three Popsicle sticks, an old analog cell phone, and a broken 5-iron that I once wrapped around a tree on the 13th hole at Pebble Beach. Now if I was Albert Einstein, or better yet, Steven Spielberg, I could have probably “E-T’d” it and turned this pile of scrap into a device to contact creatures on other planets. Sometimes reality is a hard concept to swallow.

My son finally gave up and wrote a report on the guy who first figured out how to jam a fragile piece of pencil lead up that little hole in the #2 pencil. A pencil fetish, to be sure, and not real exciting stuff. But at least I got to keep my 5-iron.

Then, last week, Nick asked for some help with a project on a guy by the name of Hammurabi. “I’m sorry, was that Hammerhead? Hammer-who?” I asked to stall for time so I could quickly search my right brain for some vestige of a memory of a name I barely recognized from my elementary school career. Then, after coming up empty-handed in my search, Nick and I went on an Internet tour and found dozens of sites dedicated to “Hammurabi” and his “code.”

For those of you who are as far removed from your elementary school years as I am, Hammurabi was a king from 1780 to 1727 BCE. His name remains known today because he had the insight to write out a series of “codes of conduct” or laws governing behavior in his kingdom. Or maybe his lawyer wrote it. Either way, it was eventually labeled as “The Code of Hammurabi” and contains a surprising relevance in today’s drive for professional accountability. For example:

“If a judge try a case, and reach a decision; if later error shall appear in his decision, and it be through his own fault, then he shall: pay twelve times the fine set by him in the case, and be removed from the bench, never again to sit there to render judgment.”

I’d be willing to bet that one wasn’t written by his lawyer.

Most importantly, a significant portion of Hammurabi’s laws dealt with “Rules Governing Contractors.” These ancient “moral building codes” make it clear that there is nothing new under the sun: Law #228:

“If a builder builds a house for someone and complete it, he shall give the buyer a fee of two shekels for each scar of surface.”

I would like to have been a fly on the wall during these walk-throughs. Now we know where the “zero-item walk-through started.”

Law #232:

“If a builder does not construct a house properly, and the house which he built fall in and ruins goods, he shall make compensation for all that was ruined and shall re-erect the house from his own means.”

And in the ninth year of ownership, it came to pass that the lawyers went door-to-door searching for defects and ruined goods, and willfully petitioned the Hut Owner’s Association (HOA). Hammurabi later exclaimed his surprise as his builders began to lose interesting building attached huts.

Law #229:

“If a builder poorly constructs a home, and the house which he built fall in and kill the owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”

Law #230:

“If it fall and kill the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death.”

Hammurabi obviously grew up in the State of California.

Ancient laws? Certainly. But this quick study of an ancient king points out that little has changed with regard to every society’s insistence on accountability for homebuilders.

And, most importantly…it’s not going away.