I started picking another jury in a state court proceeding this week. After two days, we had selected three jurors. We need three more, not to mention the alternates. Odds are, it will take another three days to select the eight people necessary to hear this case. Question: Why take five days to do work that could just as easily and well be done in one day?
I have raised that question on these pages before. Near as I can tell, no one listened. I am not hopeful anyone will listen now either, even though the state’s budget crisis continues to linger. But why not change a jury selection system that is time-consuming and wasteful?
As near as I can tell, Connecticut is the only state in the nation that requires individual sequestered voir dire. We question each potential juror outside the presence of all other jurors ad infinitum. In criminal cases, the case law requires a judge to supervise the tedium; in civil cases, the lawyers are left alone with a potential juror, a judge called in only as need be to sort out disputes. Jury selection in even the most routine case takes two to three days.
In federal court, by contrast, a jury can be selected in half day. I am not endorsing the federal system as applied in most courtrooms in the state, mind you. Voir dire by oracle is not very impressive: in many federal courtrooms, the judge conducts voir dire of a all jurors assembled together in one room. It is an unedifying and unillimunating prospect: scare the Bejesus out of a group of ordinary people by tossing them into a courtroom. Place a man or woman in a black robe behind the bench and sit them on high. Then have this authority figure ask in a clipped and hurried tone whether everyone can be fair. This is less voir dire than indoctrination into judicially sanctioned hypocrisy.
What makes sense is permitting lawyers to conduct group voir dire. We need not sacrifice the right of a party to have his or her counsel ask meanigful questions. Let the lawyers inquire of the group, however.
I have conducted voir dire under both and individual and group method. I discern no appreciable difference in the quality of the jury selected or the results obtained.
One common refrain in support of individual voir dire is that jurors are less inhibited when questioned alone. Frankly, I doubt that. Put a person in the witness box alone and place them in a courtroom of strangers. That is an ostensive definition of stress. Potential jurors are more relaxed in a group setting where they sit with other people in like situation. What’s more, lawyers selecting jurors get a sense of group dynamics, how jurors interact with one another. And when well conducted, a lawyer can use the answers of one venireperson to ask other jurors respond. My sense is that voir dire may be a little better when conducted in a group setting: the responses are freer and franker because other jurors can identify with what other laypeople are saying.
I suspect that a good deal of support for individual sequestered voir dire comes from those lawyers who believe that voir dire is a good place to indoctrinate jurors about a theory of the case. I leave aside whether that is a proper role for voir dire. I note, however, that indoctrination to themes can take place with a group as easily as it does with individuals.
Group voir dire will save court time, save expense, move dockets more quickly and serve the interests of justice. There’s time to prepare draft legislation to advance this objective before the next session of the General Assembly. I hope someone will do so and will hold public hearings on the topic. The time has come for change.
Reprinted courtesy of the Connecticut Law Tribune.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Hacker Alert!
Well, I knew I'd stirred a hornet's nest by writing about the Trial Lawyers College. But refraining from writing has stirred an even bigger nest, and attracted this blog's first hacker.
I received a note today from an apparently friendly alum asking why I had seen the need to label a certain ex-staffer as rowing without oars in the water. I was puzzled by the note. I know the staffer to whom the writer referred, and there is no question that this person was not the target of my ire. I had done no such thing.
As I was preparing to write on another topic, I noticed that the IP address of my cowardly lion, the person who writes half a dozen times a day or more to express chagrin at me, was in a different typeface than previously. I clicked on the address, and was directed to the log in page for another blog page.
I am naive about the ways of hackers, but someone out there is not. I have been hacked. To avoid future harm to the reputation of a friend, I have eliminated the IP address from the earlier post. "Lunatic Fringe, I Know You're Out There ..." When this IP address is run on Google, it lists only servers and stray comments on bizzare stuff.
My, my, my, what twisted souls struggle to be heard. One would think that if they had something to say, they'd start their own blog page, rather than trying to sabotage another's. But thank you for reading, caring and sharing, even if what you've offered is twisted.
I received a note today from an apparently friendly alum asking why I had seen the need to label a certain ex-staffer as rowing without oars in the water. I was puzzled by the note. I know the staffer to whom the writer referred, and there is no question that this person was not the target of my ire. I had done no such thing.
As I was preparing to write on another topic, I noticed that the IP address of my cowardly lion, the person who writes half a dozen times a day or more to express chagrin at me, was in a different typeface than previously. I clicked on the address, and was directed to the log in page for another blog page.
I am naive about the ways of hackers, but someone out there is not. I have been hacked. To avoid future harm to the reputation of a friend, I have eliminated the IP address from the earlier post. "Lunatic Fringe, I Know You're Out There ..." When this IP address is run on Google, it lists only servers and stray comments on bizzare stuff.
My, my, my, what twisted souls struggle to be heard. One would think that if they had something to say, they'd start their own blog page, rather than trying to sabotage another's. But thank you for reading, caring and sharing, even if what you've offered is twisted.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Lunatic Fringe, I Know You're Out There ...
Go ahead and keep sending nasty posts. I am not going to publish them. Neither are several others folks we both know. I recommend you start your own page.
Note: IP address removed. See above: Hacker alert!
Note: IP address removed. See above: Hacker alert!
Illinois v. Medill School of Journalism: A Different Take
Prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois, want answers about the students associated with the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University. I say, the state should get those answers, but only if it agrees to provide like information to criminal defendants seeking information about police officers.
Here is what is at stake. Students at Northwestern University's journalism school are pressing for a new trial for a man named Anthony McKinney. The students say they have developed information that McKinney is actually innocent of the 1978 murder of a security guard. The students have marshaled evidence sufficient to get the matter into a Cook County court, no easy feat.
Prosecutors have issued a subpoena for records relating to the school. The subpoena asks for records relating to the student's grades. grading criteria. class syallabi, expense reports and e-mail messages. All this information is necessary, prosecutors say, to determine whether, among other things, students had a grade-related interest in the outcome of their investigation. "Our position is that they've engaged in an investigative process," said Sally Daly, a spokesman for the Cook County State's Attorney's office, "without any hostility, we're seeking to get all of the information they've developed, just as detectives and investigators turn over."
This sounds even handed, but it is not. Virtually every state prohibits defendants from discovering the contents of a police officer's personnel records on the grounds of privacy. In Connecticut, for example, subpoenas for such information are routinely quashed; the requests are called mere fishing expeditions. A defendant seeking such information must make a particularized showing of need for the material. It is not enough to rely on such truisms as officers are engaged in the often competitive business of solving crime, and I therefore want to see what interest in the outcome officers had in this case.
The Cook County subpoenas of the students' information is just such a fishing expedition. Are Cook County prosecutors announcing by means of this enterprise that there will now be an open file policy regarding the personnel records of Chicago police officers? If that is the case, I am all in favor of it. I think that defendants should be able to learn what dirty linen is tossed onto the floor of investigating officers.
But what of the students' right to privacy under federal law? And what of a journalistic privilege?
I am no fan of a testimonial privilege for journalists. It is to0 easy for an unnamed source to use journalists for means fair or foul. Justice does not require that a journalist be able to shield his or her notes and or sources from scrutiny. If there is a claim of tortious conduct, then the tortfeasor ought not be able to hide his or her tracks. And if the investigative leads developed by a journalist are material to a court proceeding, their notes and sources should be discoverable. Even prosecutorial immunity gives way in those cases where a prosecutor steps outside her functional role as advocate to become an investigator.
The right to privacy enjoyed by students is a far different and more difficult issue. I distrust government, and believe its reach should be limited whenever possible. There is no cause for subpoenas of a student's grades or attendance records in cases in which the student has not put his or her credentials at issue. But here, where students seek to intervene in the criminal justice process by working at investigation of an actual case, it seems anomalous to permit the right to privacy to frustrate discovery rights.
So here's my challenge to Cook County: Open the files of all police officers on the demand of any defendant seeking discovery of an officer's employment history. If you are not willing to do that, withdraw the subpoenas for the Medill students. Doing anything else smacks of hypocrisy and a rank desire to intimidate students whose only crime is trying to do justice.
Here is what is at stake. Students at Northwestern University's journalism school are pressing for a new trial for a man named Anthony McKinney. The students say they have developed information that McKinney is actually innocent of the 1978 murder of a security guard. The students have marshaled evidence sufficient to get the matter into a Cook County court, no easy feat.
Prosecutors have issued a subpoena for records relating to the school. The subpoena asks for records relating to the student's grades. grading criteria. class syallabi, expense reports and e-mail messages. All this information is necessary, prosecutors say, to determine whether, among other things, students had a grade-related interest in the outcome of their investigation. "Our position is that they've engaged in an investigative process," said Sally Daly, a spokesman for the Cook County State's Attorney's office, "without any hostility, we're seeking to get all of the information they've developed, just as detectives and investigators turn over."
This sounds even handed, but it is not. Virtually every state prohibits defendants from discovering the contents of a police officer's personnel records on the grounds of privacy. In Connecticut, for example, subpoenas for such information are routinely quashed; the requests are called mere fishing expeditions. A defendant seeking such information must make a particularized showing of need for the material. It is not enough to rely on such truisms as officers are engaged in the often competitive business of solving crime, and I therefore want to see what interest in the outcome officers had in this case.
The Cook County subpoenas of the students' information is just such a fishing expedition. Are Cook County prosecutors announcing by means of this enterprise that there will now be an open file policy regarding the personnel records of Chicago police officers? If that is the case, I am all in favor of it. I think that defendants should be able to learn what dirty linen is tossed onto the floor of investigating officers.
But what of the students' right to privacy under federal law? And what of a journalistic privilege?
I am no fan of a testimonial privilege for journalists. It is to0 easy for an unnamed source to use journalists for means fair or foul. Justice does not require that a journalist be able to shield his or her notes and or sources from scrutiny. If there is a claim of tortious conduct, then the tortfeasor ought not be able to hide his or her tracks. And if the investigative leads developed by a journalist are material to a court proceeding, their notes and sources should be discoverable. Even prosecutorial immunity gives way in those cases where a prosecutor steps outside her functional role as advocate to become an investigator.
The right to privacy enjoyed by students is a far different and more difficult issue. I distrust government, and believe its reach should be limited whenever possible. There is no cause for subpoenas of a student's grades or attendance records in cases in which the student has not put his or her credentials at issue. But here, where students seek to intervene in the criminal justice process by working at investigation of an actual case, it seems anomalous to permit the right to privacy to frustrate discovery rights.
So here's my challenge to Cook County: Open the files of all police officers on the demand of any defendant seeking discovery of an officer's employment history. If you are not willing to do that, withdraw the subpoenas for the Medill students. Doing anything else smacks of hypocrisy and a rank desire to intimidate students whose only crime is trying to do justice.
Wants: Carlyle and Carlyle, Two Down, Four To Go
I broke down the other day and bought two volumes of a six volume set I have simply not been able to find in any bookshop or on line. I have been looking for years, and the volumes simply seem to have vanished.
I found volumes three and four Carlyle and Carlyel's "A History of Medieval Political Thought In The West", published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1915, at a used bookshop in Edinburgh a week or so ago. I was going to walk away from them. After all, what good is a broken set? But I bought them nonetheless. So now my search is confined to volumes one, two, five and six.
When last I posted about this, someone found a facsimile edition. Thanks for the tip, but I am looking for the hardcover edition published in 1915. If anyone finds one of these volumes, please let me know.
I found volumes three and four Carlyle and Carlyel's "A History of Medieval Political Thought In The West", published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1915, at a used bookshop in Edinburgh a week or so ago. I was going to walk away from them. After all, what good is a broken set? But I bought them nonetheless. So now my search is confined to volumes one, two, five and six.
When last I posted about this, someone found a facsimile edition. Thanks for the tip, but I am looking for the hardcover edition published in 1915. If anyone finds one of these volumes, please let me know.
Chatter, Chatter. What's The Matter?
Is the Internet killing meaningful communication?
Today's New York Times book review contains an essay written by Ben Yagoda on John Freeman's The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. One line from the review leaped out at me: Email "is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces." What is the consequence of insta-speak?
A good argument can be made that it dumbs down a culture. When the barrier between thought and expression is reduced to an instant, thought vanishes. Speech becomes mere verbal ejaculation. Mike at Crime and Federalism published a link this morning to a blog I had never heard of before, the Last Psychiatrist. The writer suggests that Internet does far more harm than good. With the world at our fingertips, there seems to be little value to sustained and critical reflection. Do regular users of the Internet lose the capacity to read meaningfully and well? Check it out: http://www.crimeandfederalism.com/2009/10/the-last-psychiatrist.html
I suspect that is the case. And the consequences aren't confined to reading and thinking. I believe that the Internet is changing the character of lawyering as well.
The Rules of Professional Conduct governing lawyers are undergoing a transformation in many jurisdictions. Just what constitutes reasonable communication between lawyer and client? The old paternalistic model of practice, which regarded the lawyer as captain of the ship capable of making autonomous judgments about how to advance a client's interests, is being replaced by an informed consent model, which imposes on the lawyer an obligation to consult on matters well beyond the objectives of the litigation. Just how does one draw that line?
Grafting medicine's informed consent requirement onto the law makes little sense. While a patient visiting a physician should be made aware of the risks of physical harm incident to a medical procedure, that is not analogous to a lawyer's decision about how to respond to a motion or otherwise advance litigation. The two simply aren't equivalent.
In a significant number of cases, enhanced communications requirements press lawyers into roles for which they are not suited: counselors required to validate the feelings of clients. Over at Simple Justice yesterday, Scott posted a piece called "The Troll Tax" and associated comments on the piece. One comment was particularly insightful. After writing that he did not feel obliged to post every response to a piece he had written, a writer wrote privately to express disappointment. Failing to post each piece might deprive a writer of the therapeutic effect of validation. Didn't Scott see that? Check out: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/10/24/the-troll-tax.aspx
Of course he did. But he noted that validation of everyone's feelings isn't his role. That, I presume, is the role of loved ones, or, in hard cases, of mental health professionals. If we all dropped everything each and every time someone's feelings needed validating, the world would grind to a halt.
And so does the practice of law grind to a halt in many an office encumbered by both the perceived need to validate the anger, fear and frustration client's in litigation experience and the expectation that this need be met instantaneously. How many of you have received an email in the morning raising a concern only marginally related to the case you are working on, with a follow-up hours later on why the first e-mail wasn't answered? I simply do not know how to cope with the avalanche of human need that inundates my firm, so I have paralegals, associates, clerks to help shoulder the load. Yet even with this assistance, there are some folks whose needs seem never satisfied.
I envy lawyers in a bygone era, when communication was by post and writers were required to take the time and care to put their thoughts in writing, and then to make a decision about the marginal utility of posting the communication, presumably by incurring the cost of postage and the effort to deliver the letter to a receptacle. The effort to think, to mobilize the resources required to send a post, must have screened many a communication. Today, it is far to easy to pick up the phone or press a send button. And lawyers who spend their days in court practice at their peril when they cannot respond instantaneously to the ever-present need for validation.
This is a problem rarely acknowledged in the legal profession, but it affects all lawyers. Just last week, I was speaking to two prosecutors about a criminal case. They expressed exasperation about the rage, anger and ever-present need of victims who were trying to transform the criminal justice system into a tool of private vengeance. The prosecutors bemoaned the impact of new victim's rights laws that required them to consult victims before exercising their judgment. These prosecutors were raising the same complaints I hear from members of the private bar: There simply isn't time to walk or training to walk clients through the valley of the shadow of anger.
I no longer check the inbox of my computer each day. There simply isn't time. And days go by when I am unable to retrieve phone messages. I suppose operating in such a manner puts me at risk, but better that risk than the loss of the ability to do what I am retained to do: think.
Today's New York Times book review contains an essay written by Ben Yagoda on John Freeman's The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. One line from the review leaped out at me: Email "is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces." What is the consequence of insta-speak?
A good argument can be made that it dumbs down a culture. When the barrier between thought and expression is reduced to an instant, thought vanishes. Speech becomes mere verbal ejaculation. Mike at Crime and Federalism published a link this morning to a blog I had never heard of before, the Last Psychiatrist. The writer suggests that Internet does far more harm than good. With the world at our fingertips, there seems to be little value to sustained and critical reflection. Do regular users of the Internet lose the capacity to read meaningfully and well? Check it out: http://www.crimeandfederalism.com/2009/10/the-last-psychiatrist.html
I suspect that is the case. And the consequences aren't confined to reading and thinking. I believe that the Internet is changing the character of lawyering as well.
The Rules of Professional Conduct governing lawyers are undergoing a transformation in many jurisdictions. Just what constitutes reasonable communication between lawyer and client? The old paternalistic model of practice, which regarded the lawyer as captain of the ship capable of making autonomous judgments about how to advance a client's interests, is being replaced by an informed consent model, which imposes on the lawyer an obligation to consult on matters well beyond the objectives of the litigation. Just how does one draw that line?
Grafting medicine's informed consent requirement onto the law makes little sense. While a patient visiting a physician should be made aware of the risks of physical harm incident to a medical procedure, that is not analogous to a lawyer's decision about how to respond to a motion or otherwise advance litigation. The two simply aren't equivalent.
In a significant number of cases, enhanced communications requirements press lawyers into roles for which they are not suited: counselors required to validate the feelings of clients. Over at Simple Justice yesterday, Scott posted a piece called "The Troll Tax" and associated comments on the piece. One comment was particularly insightful. After writing that he did not feel obliged to post every response to a piece he had written, a writer wrote privately to express disappointment. Failing to post each piece might deprive a writer of the therapeutic effect of validation. Didn't Scott see that? Check out: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/10/24/the-troll-tax.aspx
Of course he did. But he noted that validation of everyone's feelings isn't his role. That, I presume, is the role of loved ones, or, in hard cases, of mental health professionals. If we all dropped everything each and every time someone's feelings needed validating, the world would grind to a halt.
And so does the practice of law grind to a halt in many an office encumbered by both the perceived need to validate the anger, fear and frustration client's in litigation experience and the expectation that this need be met instantaneously. How many of you have received an email in the morning raising a concern only marginally related to the case you are working on, with a follow-up hours later on why the first e-mail wasn't answered? I simply do not know how to cope with the avalanche of human need that inundates my firm, so I have paralegals, associates, clerks to help shoulder the load. Yet even with this assistance, there are some folks whose needs seem never satisfied.
I envy lawyers in a bygone era, when communication was by post and writers were required to take the time and care to put their thoughts in writing, and then to make a decision about the marginal utility of posting the communication, presumably by incurring the cost of postage and the effort to deliver the letter to a receptacle. The effort to think, to mobilize the resources required to send a post, must have screened many a communication. Today, it is far to easy to pick up the phone or press a send button. And lawyers who spend their days in court practice at their peril when they cannot respond instantaneously to the ever-present need for validation.
This is a problem rarely acknowledged in the legal profession, but it affects all lawyers. Just last week, I was speaking to two prosecutors about a criminal case. They expressed exasperation about the rage, anger and ever-present need of victims who were trying to transform the criminal justice system into a tool of private vengeance. The prosecutors bemoaned the impact of new victim's rights laws that required them to consult victims before exercising their judgment. These prosecutors were raising the same complaints I hear from members of the private bar: There simply isn't time to walk or training to walk clients through the valley of the shadow of anger.
I no longer check the inbox of my computer each day. There simply isn't time. And days go by when I am unable to retrieve phone messages. I suppose operating in such a manner puts me at risk, but better that risk than the loss of the ability to do what I am retained to do: think.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
My Blog, My Editorial Decisions
I have an anonymous reader who in recent days has posted dozens of times. I stopped publishing him or her when it became apparent the person pressed some sort of existential rewind button and was sending messages with the same theme over and over again. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what he or she is talking about.
Here is a message I received last night:
"Gee, on the latest Blue Fairy chapter, not much on TLC, past the email from Rex.(10/21/09)Suck the rubes in, then if any get too pointed block their posts, slant the board, run to Simple Justice get them to run "confront the cult", and then get the dupes to pump you for some liason to TLC for the Alumni. What a piece of work you are.Maybe you are proving some point, TLC is filled with some very naive people,(Confirmed by Mike) do they boarder on being suckers ?
Some of; oh please lets be friends, can we cry on your sholder, we were cut loose by the Price, the Earl, and the Duke of Teton.Most of the people Spence smeared in his 1996 book were dead when he wrote it, like the ex Dean of the Law School, where Spence ran some Number....You say there was no body of law taught at Spence's TLC, just how to be a drama-rama, lama. Why should it even qualify for any CLE( emphasis on the L(law) credits, it might apply for some acting gig thing.In any event, you are wrapping up to limit comments, close it down form the restless natives, seek to gain approval from you PALS, like Rex, as your suck 'em in tactic seemed to back fire on you(MIKE, ET AL.).Some quasi method, but who is getting sucked in now, after the lights on the mirrors were in bright beam modes. "
I passed this along to two friends to see if they could discern some meaning in it. One sent back a link to an essay on thought disorders; another just threw up hands in despair. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder.
Until recently, I published virtually every comment I received, anonymous or not. In the past week, I have become more selective. Two writers in particular have been rejected: One is a former client from whose case I was permitted to withdraw for reasons best left unstated. The other is this fellow or a close kin.
The decision I made to walk away from TLC posts isn't a product of fear of the college or its emissaries. There was no secret deal. Their is no cabal. I stand by what I have written and if newbie board members or Rex or anyone else wants to now strut, huff and puff: God Bless them. They can look in someone else's mirror. Mine's closed on the topic. I'm shaking the dust off my feet and moving on.
I may well elect a policy against publication of anonymous posts, but I am not there yet. I do reserve the right to reject posts I don't understand, or that I think reflect the sort of rage best left to a psychiatrist. If you don't like it, don't read.
Here is a message I received last night:
"Gee, on the latest Blue Fairy chapter, not much on TLC, past the email from Rex.(10/21/09)Suck the rubes in, then if any get too pointed block their posts, slant the board, run to Simple Justice get them to run "confront the cult", and then get the dupes to pump you for some liason to TLC for the Alumni. What a piece of work you are.Maybe you are proving some point, TLC is filled with some very naive people,(Confirmed by Mike) do they boarder on being suckers ?
Some of; oh please lets be friends, can we cry on your sholder, we were cut loose by the Price, the Earl, and the Duke of Teton.Most of the people Spence smeared in his 1996 book were dead when he wrote it, like the ex Dean of the Law School, where Spence ran some Number....You say there was no body of law taught at Spence's TLC, just how to be a drama-rama, lama. Why should it even qualify for any CLE( emphasis on the L(law) credits, it might apply for some acting gig thing.In any event, you are wrapping up to limit comments, close it down form the restless natives, seek to gain approval from you PALS, like Rex, as your suck 'em in tactic seemed to back fire on you(MIKE, ET AL.).Some quasi method, but who is getting sucked in now, after the lights on the mirrors were in bright beam modes. "
I passed this along to two friends to see if they could discern some meaning in it. One sent back a link to an essay on thought disorders; another just threw up hands in despair. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder.
Until recently, I published virtually every comment I received, anonymous or not. In the past week, I have become more selective. Two writers in particular have been rejected: One is a former client from whose case I was permitted to withdraw for reasons best left unstated. The other is this fellow or a close kin.
The decision I made to walk away from TLC posts isn't a product of fear of the college or its emissaries. There was no secret deal. Their is no cabal. I stand by what I have written and if newbie board members or Rex or anyone else wants to now strut, huff and puff: God Bless them. They can look in someone else's mirror. Mine's closed on the topic. I'm shaking the dust off my feet and moving on.
I may well elect a policy against publication of anonymous posts, but I am not there yet. I do reserve the right to reject posts I don't understand, or that I think reflect the sort of rage best left to a psychiatrist. If you don't like it, don't read.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Fairy Tales: East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Where is home, and whence our destination? The questions are basic. We conceive for ourselves beginnings and ends, but our goals remain forever contingent upon forces beyond our control. We owe a death at the moment of birth. Our hopes and dreams, it seems, repose east of the sun and west of the moon.
Where is that and how do we get there?
Andrew Lang recounts a fairy tale entitled "East of the Sun and West of the Moon:" A beautiful young woman lives with her family oppressed by poverty in a forest. One day a white bear knocks on the door and asks if he can have the young girl. The father relents, after being promised wealth and ease if she will go with bear.
Bear and girl arrive at a castle filled with opulence. Each night, when the lights are out, a man comes to the girl's bed. He is the white bear. She longs to see him, and she is homesick. She begs to go home to see her mother and her father.
The bear relents, but upon the condition that she never speak with her mother alone about the life she shares with bear. She agrees, but, of course, once home, tells her mother of the mysterious man-bear with whom she lives. The mother counsels use of a candle to sneak a peak at the man at night.
Once back in the castle with the bear, the girl looks at the sleeping figure and discovers he is a handsome man. He awakens and some of the wax from the candle stains his shirt. He is crestfallen and explains that he has been bewitched, condemned to live for one year as a bear by day and a man by night. Because the girl had looked at him, he must now return to castle of the witch who cast a spell on him. The castle is far, far away, east of the Sun and west of the Moon. The man-bear must now marry a woman with a nose three ells long. The girl cannot go with him. He vanishes, and the girl finds herself now alone in a forest, with no family, no friends and no one on whom to rely.
The girl searches for the man-bear. She enlists help of strangers, and then trusts her fate to the winds, arriving, after a long and exhausting journey, outside the castle where the man awaits his wedding to a woman he does not love. The girl's journey spent even the power even of the North wind, the most powerful force of all.
She longs to see the man-bear, but his captors deny her access to the castle. The man-bear is enchanted with a toxin each night to keep him from hearing the girl's forlorn weeping.
Finally, moved by the sound of her weeping, strangers tell the prince about the girl's presence. The prince avoids the toxin and resolves a plan. He is to marry the hideous long-nosed woman on the morrow. He decides his only hope is a ruse. He announces he will marry only the person who can clean the bed-shirt stained with wax from the tallow the girl spilled on him long ago. Of course, only a Christian can succeed in this task, trolls cannot. His betrothed tries to wash the shirt, but soils it further. The girl cleans the shirt, however, and the two marry, and set captive those poor souls held captive at the castle.
The tale is rich in symbol and frustrating in complexity. Device upon device is piled upon one another. Belief must not merely be suspended to follow this tale from beginning to end; normal moorings must be abandoned altogether, lest the story's incredible nature leave the reader cold. And yet, belief is so easily suspended; the heartache of the girl and her hope for comfort and love sustain and nourish the reader. When she searches for what she has lost, and rides the winds in search of her love, we are comforted by the very form of the genre: in fairy tales, dreams do come true: it is only really a question of how the the girl will find her hope redeemed. And what is that hope in the end? Simply love. Or, perhaps, a little bit more: faith, hope and charity, the great gifts Paul wrote of in his letter to believers in Corinth.
I've read this tale a few times before writing about it. My normal style is scornful in tone. It as though I no longer want the seduction of hope. I am old enough now to realize that illusion is necessary, and, yet, somehow, I don't want to succumb to the illusionist's siren song. But I must, as must we all. The simple facts of the life-cycle are too difficult to be borne: from nothing we come at birth, we acquire share and form during youth, we spend our energies in our prime in search of goals and dreams most often only inchoate in form, and then, as energy wanes, we sit quietly facing and inevitable and incomprehensible end. The bare bones of existence require more than this bleached out truths; we require hope. We are, really and truly, such stuff as dreams are made of.
Thus the appeal of those simple words that summon us to suspend critical moorings and float alone to silent hopes: "Once upon a time ..." Those words have power.
East of the Sun and west of the moon is nowhere and, hence, everywhere at once. It is where we find ourselves amid the poverty that comes of simple being: sentient beasts born to die, we require more, and so we hope. Like a white bear, illusions offer solutions. We accept these solutions because we must, and test them because we survival requires it. Yet, once tested, the illusions vanish, and then, alone, we are cast to a wide, wide world buffeted by strange winds and filled with omens and portents. If we are lucky, we find our way back to our illusions, although now we do not accept them at face value: a bear is not a bear, after all. With faith and hope and charity, we seize the truth behind our illusions and remember that without the gift of love, there is nothing. So we love those whom we find willing to accept our gifts, and go on, never really forgetting the painful truths that make fairy tales necessary, but accepting with an open heart the sting the world delivers, realizing, finally, the the truths worth knowing come from within. The wise among us, and I do not claim to be such, can truly say "come sweet death."
Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book.
Where is that and how do we get there?
Andrew Lang recounts a fairy tale entitled "East of the Sun and West of the Moon:" A beautiful young woman lives with her family oppressed by poverty in a forest. One day a white bear knocks on the door and asks if he can have the young girl. The father relents, after being promised wealth and ease if she will go with bear.
Bear and girl arrive at a castle filled with opulence. Each night, when the lights are out, a man comes to the girl's bed. He is the white bear. She longs to see him, and she is homesick. She begs to go home to see her mother and her father.
The bear relents, but upon the condition that she never speak with her mother alone about the life she shares with bear. She agrees, but, of course, once home, tells her mother of the mysterious man-bear with whom she lives. The mother counsels use of a candle to sneak a peak at the man at night.
Once back in the castle with the bear, the girl looks at the sleeping figure and discovers he is a handsome man. He awakens and some of the wax from the candle stains his shirt. He is crestfallen and explains that he has been bewitched, condemned to live for one year as a bear by day and a man by night. Because the girl had looked at him, he must now return to castle of the witch who cast a spell on him. The castle is far, far away, east of the Sun and west of the Moon. The man-bear must now marry a woman with a nose three ells long. The girl cannot go with him. He vanishes, and the girl finds herself now alone in a forest, with no family, no friends and no one on whom to rely.
The girl searches for the man-bear. She enlists help of strangers, and then trusts her fate to the winds, arriving, after a long and exhausting journey, outside the castle where the man awaits his wedding to a woman he does not love. The girl's journey spent even the power even of the North wind, the most powerful force of all.
She longs to see the man-bear, but his captors deny her access to the castle. The man-bear is enchanted with a toxin each night to keep him from hearing the girl's forlorn weeping.
Finally, moved by the sound of her weeping, strangers tell the prince about the girl's presence. The prince avoids the toxin and resolves a plan. He is to marry the hideous long-nosed woman on the morrow. He decides his only hope is a ruse. He announces he will marry only the person who can clean the bed-shirt stained with wax from the tallow the girl spilled on him long ago. Of course, only a Christian can succeed in this task, trolls cannot. His betrothed tries to wash the shirt, but soils it further. The girl cleans the shirt, however, and the two marry, and set captive those poor souls held captive at the castle.
The tale is rich in symbol and frustrating in complexity. Device upon device is piled upon one another. Belief must not merely be suspended to follow this tale from beginning to end; normal moorings must be abandoned altogether, lest the story's incredible nature leave the reader cold. And yet, belief is so easily suspended; the heartache of the girl and her hope for comfort and love sustain and nourish the reader. When she searches for what she has lost, and rides the winds in search of her love, we are comforted by the very form of the genre: in fairy tales, dreams do come true: it is only really a question of how the the girl will find her hope redeemed. And what is that hope in the end? Simply love. Or, perhaps, a little bit more: faith, hope and charity, the great gifts Paul wrote of in his letter to believers in Corinth.
I've read this tale a few times before writing about it. My normal style is scornful in tone. It as though I no longer want the seduction of hope. I am old enough now to realize that illusion is necessary, and, yet, somehow, I don't want to succumb to the illusionist's siren song. But I must, as must we all. The simple facts of the life-cycle are too difficult to be borne: from nothing we come at birth, we acquire share and form during youth, we spend our energies in our prime in search of goals and dreams most often only inchoate in form, and then, as energy wanes, we sit quietly facing and inevitable and incomprehensible end. The bare bones of existence require more than this bleached out truths; we require hope. We are, really and truly, such stuff as dreams are made of.
Thus the appeal of those simple words that summon us to suspend critical moorings and float alone to silent hopes: "Once upon a time ..." Those words have power.
East of the Sun and west of the moon is nowhere and, hence, everywhere at once. It is where we find ourselves amid the poverty that comes of simple being: sentient beasts born to die, we require more, and so we hope. Like a white bear, illusions offer solutions. We accept these solutions because we must, and test them because we survival requires it. Yet, once tested, the illusions vanish, and then, alone, we are cast to a wide, wide world buffeted by strange winds and filled with omens and portents. If we are lucky, we find our way back to our illusions, although now we do not accept them at face value: a bear is not a bear, after all. With faith and hope and charity, we seize the truth behind our illusions and remember that without the gift of love, there is nothing. So we love those whom we find willing to accept our gifts, and go on, never really forgetting the painful truths that make fairy tales necessary, but accepting with an open heart the sting the world delivers, realizing, finally, the the truths worth knowing come from within. The wise among us, and I do not claim to be such, can truly say "come sweet death."
Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
TLC: The Final Word
When I walked off the ranch ten years ago it was because I found the benefits associated with attending Trial Lawyers College events as a staff member to be outweighed by all the baggage associated with attendance: People wanted things I did not understand and I was spending far more time scratching my head trying to figure out why people were behaving as they did than I was learning to become a better lawyer. In sum, the place became oppressive: so many wannabes and so little time. I didn't want to waste the little time I have.
I feel the same about the TLC posts on this blog now. Interest in the blog grows, comments increase in number, but to no real avail. While I appreciate the fact that some folks find the comments on TLC here of interest and believe that this blog provides a forum they might not otherwise have to discuss the college, I don't feel the need to host the effort. In recent weeks, I've received dozens of anonymous comments from folks with axes to grind: Some hate Spence; some hate TLC; some hate me; some are simply incoherent. I've printed most, but not all of them.
I have a suggestion: Someone interested in an alternative forum ought simply to create another blog site. Call it what you will. I will provide a link to it if informed of its existence.
But there is no premium in my continuing to write about the college. I learned things there, and I left ten years ago because I concluded that what I gained from involvement did not come close to matching the cost of continuing on. When I returned for a visit at a reunion this past summer, I was stunned by the change in tone. I asked questions about what had happened, and poked around a bit. I shared what I learned here.
The college believes the issues I have raised lack merit and choses not to answer: That is its right, and it is the right of others to profess their fealty to the goings on at Thunderhead Ranch.
The amazement I experience watching doings at TLC is giving way to a sense of tedium: A bunch of middle age lawyers decide to play warrior: watching this is like watching Shriners parade at a circus. After you've seen a dozen or so folks walk by in the funny little hats, they all start looking the same.
I have friends who are still active in TLC, and I am not at all worried about my opinions straining the relationships. These friendships transcend club memberships. I value strength of character, not ritual efforts to become a character. A bunch of people I don't know who are involved announce enmity toward me: I greet that with the same indifference I would the howl of a disturbed rider on a municipal bus.
TLC may or may not survive. Gerry Spence may or may not be America's "Finest Trial Lawyer." Those are other people's issues. I've lingered on them too long and would rather move on to new interests. Leave 'em be, I say. Life is hard and if the college provides shelter from some, let them have it.
I spoke to a recent exile from the college this morning on the telephone and listened to real tears of sorrow. This soul had trusted and loved and was now cast aside like yesterday's outworn fashions. I reminded the person that times change, and that people change. We are sometimes divorced from familiar moorings and tears are as much a sign of pain as they are the means to nourish new growth. Letting go can be scary and exhilirating. But far better to star in one's own drama than be a prop in the drama of others. It's time to heed my own advice.
Thanks for reading and happy hunting along life's way.
I feel the same about the TLC posts on this blog now. Interest in the blog grows, comments increase in number, but to no real avail. While I appreciate the fact that some folks find the comments on TLC here of interest and believe that this blog provides a forum they might not otherwise have to discuss the college, I don't feel the need to host the effort. In recent weeks, I've received dozens of anonymous comments from folks with axes to grind: Some hate Spence; some hate TLC; some hate me; some are simply incoherent. I've printed most, but not all of them.
I have a suggestion: Someone interested in an alternative forum ought simply to create another blog site. Call it what you will. I will provide a link to it if informed of its existence.
But there is no premium in my continuing to write about the college. I learned things there, and I left ten years ago because I concluded that what I gained from involvement did not come close to matching the cost of continuing on. When I returned for a visit at a reunion this past summer, I was stunned by the change in tone. I asked questions about what had happened, and poked around a bit. I shared what I learned here.
The college believes the issues I have raised lack merit and choses not to answer: That is its right, and it is the right of others to profess their fealty to the goings on at Thunderhead Ranch.
The amazement I experience watching doings at TLC is giving way to a sense of tedium: A bunch of middle age lawyers decide to play warrior: watching this is like watching Shriners parade at a circus. After you've seen a dozen or so folks walk by in the funny little hats, they all start looking the same.
I have friends who are still active in TLC, and I am not at all worried about my opinions straining the relationships. These friendships transcend club memberships. I value strength of character, not ritual efforts to become a character. A bunch of people I don't know who are involved announce enmity toward me: I greet that with the same indifference I would the howl of a disturbed rider on a municipal bus.
TLC may or may not survive. Gerry Spence may or may not be America's "Finest Trial Lawyer." Those are other people's issues. I've lingered on them too long and would rather move on to new interests. Leave 'em be, I say. Life is hard and if the college provides shelter from some, let them have it.
I spoke to a recent exile from the college this morning on the telephone and listened to real tears of sorrow. This soul had trusted and loved and was now cast aside like yesterday's outworn fashions. I reminded the person that times change, and that people change. We are sometimes divorced from familiar moorings and tears are as much a sign of pain as they are the means to nourish new growth. Letting go can be scary and exhilirating. But far better to star in one's own drama than be a prop in the drama of others. It's time to heed my own advice.
Thanks for reading and happy hunting along life's way.
Book Banning In Cheshire?
I am glad I do not live in Cheshire, Connecticut. Townsfolk there want to control what residents can and cannot find on the shelves of the town’s library shelves. The fact that one member of the library board, Marilyn Bartoli, leads the book-banning effort calls into question why she is on a library board at all.
The hooplah involves a new book just published about the 2007 murder of members of the Petit family in Cheshire. Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky are accused of the murders. Despite a dubious gag order banning the accused and their lawyers from speaking about the case, Mr. Komisarjevsky was interviewed in prison numerous times by a reporter and sent the reporter lengthy correspondence about his life and the crime.
Brian McDonald’s "In the Middle of the Night: The Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood" just hit the streets. Ms. Bartoli and hundreds of Cheshire residents want to keep the book off of the shelves of the town library.
I have read the book, and there is not much to like about it: It is not well written. The author engages in the worst sort of reportorial fantasy, ascribing thoughts and emotions to persons now dead. Regular readers of Connecticut newspapers will get a massive case of the ho hum blues turning its pages.
But the book was not written for Connecticut residents.
The Petit murders rapidly became national news, a sort of anti-fairy tale: A doctor and his family assaulted in the dead of night: rape, murder, arson. These horrible crimes all took place in what remains of Eden, a middle and upper-middle class bedroom community of rolling lawns, splendid homes and the sort of mom and pop sensibilities that might appeal to Norman Rockwell. "In the Middle of the Night" stands to literature in the same way the horror film "Halloween" does to art cinema: take the wraps off our unconscious fears and set them loose in the waking world and see what happens. Some folks call it entertainment.
Although in this case, the Petit murders are not fiction. The book falls within the genre called "True Crime," and that, we know, sells. Television is awash with crime shows. Grand theologies may no longer be the preoccupation of our colleges and universities, but we still long for tales of good and evil. Somehow we now satisfy the need for orienting stories by turning to reality. I am not sure what to make of this flirtation with a death wish.
But I want the ability to make the effort. And I do not think that sticking my head in the sand is a solution to anything. Libraries are meant to be places where people can turn for information. Books are an important part of our culture; they are a vehicle through which is expressed the best and worst of what makes us human. Cheshire’s library board won’t make us better human beings by banning a book about a terrifying truth.
Ironically, "In the Middle of the Night" was published during Banned Book Month, recognized annually by the American Library Association. The library association maintains a vigil, watching over the nation’s libraries to combat censorship whenever it occurs. Among works deemed dangerous at one time or another in one library or another are the following: "Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary", John Steinbeck’s "Grapes of Wrath", Anthony Burgess’ "A Clockwork Orange", and Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Tarzan of the Apes".
"In the Middle of the Night" is not a work of literature worthy of occupying the same shelf as those just mentioned. But it is informative, nonetheless. I read the book on the Cheshire killings and came away a greater understanding of what makes a man come to the point of becoming almost indistinguishable from a beast. I say almost, because, brutal as the murders were, McDonald succeeded in rendering Kosimarjevsky in almost sympathetic terms. The book illustrates that the line separating us from the very worst that we can do to one another is exceedingly fine; I know it quivers in me.
I see no point in keeping Cheshire residents from being reminded that a beast is buried within every breast. "In the Middle of the Night" should not be banned in Cheshire, rather, Marilyn Bartoli should be banned from the library board: censorship and libraries simply do not mix.
Reprinted courtesy of the Connecticut Tribune Library.
The hooplah involves a new book just published about the 2007 murder of members of the Petit family in Cheshire. Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky are accused of the murders. Despite a dubious gag order banning the accused and their lawyers from speaking about the case, Mr. Komisarjevsky was interviewed in prison numerous times by a reporter and sent the reporter lengthy correspondence about his life and the crime.
Brian McDonald’s "In the Middle of the Night: The Shocking True Story of a Family Killed in Cold Blood" just hit the streets. Ms. Bartoli and hundreds of Cheshire residents want to keep the book off of the shelves of the town library.
I have read the book, and there is not much to like about it: It is not well written. The author engages in the worst sort of reportorial fantasy, ascribing thoughts and emotions to persons now dead. Regular readers of Connecticut newspapers will get a massive case of the ho hum blues turning its pages.
But the book was not written for Connecticut residents.
The Petit murders rapidly became national news, a sort of anti-fairy tale: A doctor and his family assaulted in the dead of night: rape, murder, arson. These horrible crimes all took place in what remains of Eden, a middle and upper-middle class bedroom community of rolling lawns, splendid homes and the sort of mom and pop sensibilities that might appeal to Norman Rockwell. "In the Middle of the Night" stands to literature in the same way the horror film "Halloween" does to art cinema: take the wraps off our unconscious fears and set them loose in the waking world and see what happens. Some folks call it entertainment.
Although in this case, the Petit murders are not fiction. The book falls within the genre called "True Crime," and that, we know, sells. Television is awash with crime shows. Grand theologies may no longer be the preoccupation of our colleges and universities, but we still long for tales of good and evil. Somehow we now satisfy the need for orienting stories by turning to reality. I am not sure what to make of this flirtation with a death wish.
But I want the ability to make the effort. And I do not think that sticking my head in the sand is a solution to anything. Libraries are meant to be places where people can turn for information. Books are an important part of our culture; they are a vehicle through which is expressed the best and worst of what makes us human. Cheshire’s library board won’t make us better human beings by banning a book about a terrifying truth.
Ironically, "In the Middle of the Night" was published during Banned Book Month, recognized annually by the American Library Association. The library association maintains a vigil, watching over the nation’s libraries to combat censorship whenever it occurs. Among works deemed dangerous at one time or another in one library or another are the following: "Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary", John Steinbeck’s "Grapes of Wrath", Anthony Burgess’ "A Clockwork Orange", and Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Tarzan of the Apes".
"In the Middle of the Night" is not a work of literature worthy of occupying the same shelf as those just mentioned. But it is informative, nonetheless. I read the book on the Cheshire killings and came away a greater understanding of what makes a man come to the point of becoming almost indistinguishable from a beast. I say almost, because, brutal as the murders were, McDonald succeeded in rendering Kosimarjevsky in almost sympathetic terms. The book illustrates that the line separating us from the very worst that we can do to one another is exceedingly fine; I know it quivers in me.
I see no point in keeping Cheshire residents from being reminded that a beast is buried within every breast. "In the Middle of the Night" should not be banned in Cheshire, rather, Marilyn Bartoli should be banned from the library board: censorship and libraries simply do not mix.
Reprinted courtesy of the Connecticut Tribune Library.
TLC: Refunds Possible?
R. Rex Parris wrote last night. If I do not believe I am a better lawyer as a result of TLC, I should call him and he will try to get me a refund. All else is mere noise, and I should stop my bitching.
The life the of the law is experience, not logic, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. taught. Hence, there is nothing that one can experience that won't make one a better lawyer, supposing one is capable of learning. Hell, getting sick with the flu gives me a better understanding of disability and emotional harm, and, empathically grasped, illness makes me a better lawyer.
So did TLC make me a better a lawyer? I had good outcomes before and after TLC, so I cannot say that it changed my effectiveness as a lawyer. I learned no law at the college, so I cannot say I left with a corpus of new legal knowledge.
But I did make new friends there, Rex among them. And I did try a few new techniques at the college. After leaving, I experimented with a few new things in courtrooms here and there. Sometimes I was effective; sometimes I wasn't. If I was a better lawyer after I left, it was in ways I do not see some ten years after walking away from it all.
I concede that the ranch was a powerful experience and experience teaches. I learned about charisma, group dynamics, the push and pull of conflicting desires and the lengths to which people will go to obtain and seek approval. These raw emotions animate the world. So I did learn things there, and those things, arguably, contributed to my general education. Much of what I see of TLC distresses me, some sickens me, but I have learned from it. On balance, then, I suppose it would be unfair to seek a refund.
But others may differ, and I make Rex's promise to seek refunds for those disappointed known to those of you who want to seek one.
I do not know if the offer of refund extends to those who have contributed money as gifts. Some contributors in a recent poll tendered gifts believing that the college owned the ranch. Among the noise the college chooses to ignore is information that the college merely leases the facility from another foundation, and that the lease is revocable on demand. What will happen if a contributor asks for a refund because they believe that they gave under false pretenses?
The college just wants justice and fairness for all. That's mere platitudinal pablum. Even prosecutors claim that, and they aren't invited to attend the college. When adversaries both say they want the same thing odds are they are saying nothing at all.
Those seeking a refund are encouraged to call Rex.
The life the of the law is experience, not logic, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. taught. Hence, there is nothing that one can experience that won't make one a better lawyer, supposing one is capable of learning. Hell, getting sick with the flu gives me a better understanding of disability and emotional harm, and, empathically grasped, illness makes me a better lawyer.
So did TLC make me a better a lawyer? I had good outcomes before and after TLC, so I cannot say that it changed my effectiveness as a lawyer. I learned no law at the college, so I cannot say I left with a corpus of new legal knowledge.
But I did make new friends there, Rex among them. And I did try a few new techniques at the college. After leaving, I experimented with a few new things in courtrooms here and there. Sometimes I was effective; sometimes I wasn't. If I was a better lawyer after I left, it was in ways I do not see some ten years after walking away from it all.
I concede that the ranch was a powerful experience and experience teaches. I learned about charisma, group dynamics, the push and pull of conflicting desires and the lengths to which people will go to obtain and seek approval. These raw emotions animate the world. So I did learn things there, and those things, arguably, contributed to my general education. Much of what I see of TLC distresses me, some sickens me, but I have learned from it. On balance, then, I suppose it would be unfair to seek a refund.
But others may differ, and I make Rex's promise to seek refunds for those disappointed known to those of you who want to seek one.
I do not know if the offer of refund extends to those who have contributed money as gifts. Some contributors in a recent poll tendered gifts believing that the college owned the ranch. Among the noise the college chooses to ignore is information that the college merely leases the facility from another foundation, and that the lease is revocable on demand. What will happen if a contributor asks for a refund because they believe that they gave under false pretenses?
The college just wants justice and fairness for all. That's mere platitudinal pablum. Even prosecutors claim that, and they aren't invited to attend the college. When adversaries both say they want the same thing odds are they are saying nothing at all.
Those seeking a refund are encouraged to call Rex.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
TLC: Another Source
Snarkdom has found its way into the comments section of this blog as regards the Trial Lawyers College and Gerry Spence. We have a new anonymous writer obsessed with me. It is to the point that when I pass gas the poor fellow, or gal, gets an ear ache. In TLC-speak, the writer has given up his power; urban readers might note that I have a new, er, um, well, let's bust say witch with a "b". Thank you for the gift, I suppose. But must it come in the form of a dead fish, wrapped in anonymous paper?
I am wondering about the wisdom of anonymous posts, and I am distressed that so many folks write with passion but then fail to own what they say. When I have raised questions about this, writers have responded that fear governs. They don't want to offend friends, or they are afraid they will become the target of scorn, or that they won't be invited back to serve as staff at college events. The college, it seems, breeds something less than confidence.
All this hush, hush sweet Charlotte chatter has the feel of whispering in a convent: the nuns are unchaste and enjoy their lasciviousness. But if they own their pleasures they'll be forced out on to the street. I am close to a decision to refuse acceptance of anonymous comments, but, being a good whore myself, I like the company of other unchaste souls.
Here's some miscellany about the college for those needing a fix of fresh information:
1. Multiple sources confirm that R. Rex Parris is now counsel to the college. Parris is also mayor of the Town of Lancaster in California. He is a member of the college board. He has been a go-to player for Gerry Spence in recent years. I'm told by two sources that he was asked to resign from the TLC board, but refused to do so. One wag commented today that Parris was punished by being promoted. I'd like to discuss it with Parris, who reached out a few weeks ago to talk. Our schedules have not yet permitted that. Rex: I know you're reading. Give me a call. I promise I will not tell. It is a promise I have thus far kept with regards to correspondence from another TLC powerhouse who has asked me to keep his missive a secret.
2. The TLC web site still does not reflect the recent blood bath of those removed from the board: Communication is slow at the college these days. I'm told by a person familiar with the recent history of the college that the removal of Bettinger, Sison, Bratcher and Larimer is widely unpopular among alumni. These folks are revered as stars by many. Larimer, a long-time psychodramatist is said to be on the endangered staff list, and may well be saying good bye to the college forever, or so I am told. She doesn't want to go.
3. One correspondent has speculated that one or more board members is an anonymous commenter on this blog page, and, perhaps, on the blog page of former Executive Director, Joane Garcia-Colson. When I responded by saying that this couldn't possibly be true as the comments are loopy and poorly written, I was told it almost certainly could be true as several of the current board members write English as though it were a second language. My suspicion is that a close friend or relative of Spence's is writing anonymously: the writer bosts of their senior status, is a cloying and uncreative sycophant, and is possessed of a long and ancient memory of all things Gerry. Could it be a former board member close to the master? It is a wifely sort of loyalty. You can check out Garcia-Colson's blog for more TLC stuff at: http://www.ljgc.wordpress.com/
4. Expect to see staffing of psychodramatists reduced at forthcoming events. At the creation, there were two at each of the summer sessions. There was grumbling a plenty about the costs when the number was increased to three.
5. I don't subscribe to the Warrior, so I don't know if the new administration has yet to place its imprimatur on the publication. Jude Basile, the new nominal president, is said to have a new vision for the future of the college. What is it?
6. As yet, the college has ignored the question that led me to rake the fetid muck of hypocrisy: Why does the Spence Foundation own the ranch, renting it to the college under terms of a lease that can be revoked unilaterally by the foundation? What would become of the $2 million or so in the TLC coffers if this happened? TLC would still possess the funds, unless the organization folded, in which case it would be required to transfer those funds to a like institution. Hmm? The Spence Foundation revokes the lease. TLC decided to fold its tent. TLC's money goes to the Spence Foundation? Even I am not that cynical.
But now for the best news of all: I am losing interest in the college. Those who counsel that ignoring critics will yield silence are right. I'll be attending a new trial practice seminar this spring; invitations will soon be sent I am told. Another group of 20 or so folks met recently under auspices independent of hero worship and cant.
So, keep the comments coming. But please own them. Or is that too much to ask?
I am wondering about the wisdom of anonymous posts, and I am distressed that so many folks write with passion but then fail to own what they say. When I have raised questions about this, writers have responded that fear governs. They don't want to offend friends, or they are afraid they will become the target of scorn, or that they won't be invited back to serve as staff at college events. The college, it seems, breeds something less than confidence.
All this hush, hush sweet Charlotte chatter has the feel of whispering in a convent: the nuns are unchaste and enjoy their lasciviousness. But if they own their pleasures they'll be forced out on to the street. I am close to a decision to refuse acceptance of anonymous comments, but, being a good whore myself, I like the company of other unchaste souls.
Here's some miscellany about the college for those needing a fix of fresh information:
1. Multiple sources confirm that R. Rex Parris is now counsel to the college. Parris is also mayor of the Town of Lancaster in California. He is a member of the college board. He has been a go-to player for Gerry Spence in recent years. I'm told by two sources that he was asked to resign from the TLC board, but refused to do so. One wag commented today that Parris was punished by being promoted. I'd like to discuss it with Parris, who reached out a few weeks ago to talk. Our schedules have not yet permitted that. Rex: I know you're reading. Give me a call. I promise I will not tell. It is a promise I have thus far kept with regards to correspondence from another TLC powerhouse who has asked me to keep his missive a secret.
2. The TLC web site still does not reflect the recent blood bath of those removed from the board: Communication is slow at the college these days. I'm told by a person familiar with the recent history of the college that the removal of Bettinger, Sison, Bratcher and Larimer is widely unpopular among alumni. These folks are revered as stars by many. Larimer, a long-time psychodramatist is said to be on the endangered staff list, and may well be saying good bye to the college forever, or so I am told. She doesn't want to go.
3. One correspondent has speculated that one or more board members is an anonymous commenter on this blog page, and, perhaps, on the blog page of former Executive Director, Joane Garcia-Colson. When I responded by saying that this couldn't possibly be true as the comments are loopy and poorly written, I was told it almost certainly could be true as several of the current board members write English as though it were a second language. My suspicion is that a close friend or relative of Spence's is writing anonymously: the writer bosts of their senior status, is a cloying and uncreative sycophant, and is possessed of a long and ancient memory of all things Gerry. Could it be a former board member close to the master? It is a wifely sort of loyalty. You can check out Garcia-Colson's blog for more TLC stuff at: http://www.ljgc.wordpress.com/
4. Expect to see staffing of psychodramatists reduced at forthcoming events. At the creation, there were two at each of the summer sessions. There was grumbling a plenty about the costs when the number was increased to three.
5. I don't subscribe to the Warrior, so I don't know if the new administration has yet to place its imprimatur on the publication. Jude Basile, the new nominal president, is said to have a new vision for the future of the college. What is it?
6. As yet, the college has ignored the question that led me to rake the fetid muck of hypocrisy: Why does the Spence Foundation own the ranch, renting it to the college under terms of a lease that can be revoked unilaterally by the foundation? What would become of the $2 million or so in the TLC coffers if this happened? TLC would still possess the funds, unless the organization folded, in which case it would be required to transfer those funds to a like institution. Hmm? The Spence Foundation revokes the lease. TLC decided to fold its tent. TLC's money goes to the Spence Foundation? Even I am not that cynical.
But now for the best news of all: I am losing interest in the college. Those who counsel that ignoring critics will yield silence are right. I'll be attending a new trial practice seminar this spring; invitations will soon be sent I am told. Another group of 20 or so folks met recently under auspices independent of hero worship and cant.
So, keep the comments coming. But please own them. Or is that too much to ask?
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Imageless Mirror
"In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others."
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Appeal of Ted Bundy
Who really thinks these days about Ted Bundy? I hadn't done so for many years. Sure, I knew he was a serial killer. But I cannot say I view him as a rock star. From 1973 to 1978, he killed as many as 100 women, confessing, before his execution by the State of Florida, to 30 murders. He was a bad, bad man, but, frankly, no more than that.
So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon him not once, but twice, on a recent trip to Europe. Bundy's reputation is, at the very least, transatlantic. He may even have made a name for himself in Africa.
Florence is one of my favorite places. I've been there three times, and I will go back the very next chance I get. My wife and I begin each day with a walk that takes us from the city's center, through the hills South of the Arno, and then back into the city itself approaching Sante Croce from the East, through comparatively quiet neighbors unfrequented by tourists. Sometimes we stop at Sante Croce, our favorite church; I remain stunned each time I see Galileo's, Michelangelo's and Machiavelli's tomb. Three men of genius, each reposed in a church that is almost enough to make two pagans believe that there is utility in faith's effort to make intelligible what cannot be spoken.
When we go to Florence, we seek calm. I get my fill of murder and violence at home. I am a criminal defense lawyer by vocation.
This past trip, however, I was drawn to a different sight: The Museo Criminale on Via Cavour. There was an exhibit on serial killers. I resisted entering it for days, but, near the trip's end, my wife and I struck a deal: She would wait on line outside the Accademia to purchase admission tickets. We both wanted to see not just David, but the more impressive row of Slaves, unfinished statues, seeking to release themselves from their prisons of stone. These figures make tangible the spirit's struggle to free itself of the prison in which it finds itself. While my wife waited on line, I could tour the Museo Criminale.
I snuck into the darkly lit building, feeling like a fundamentalist minister sneaking into a peep show during a Bible convention. The price was steep, 12 Euros, or about 17 dollars. But the price of admission also bought an audio tour. I stepped into a world that began with accounts of early modern mayhem and landed me, an hour or so later, sitting at the feet of a wax replica of Ted Bundy.
The lights were dim, and Bundy's eyes were veiled in darkness. But as I listened to the narrator discuss the troubled facts of his life -- his father is unknown, he thought for many years that his mother was, in fact, his sister -- I felt a kinship with this killer. No, I've never killed to achieve a sense of efficacy, but I know about broken lives and looking for hope in all the wrong places. I sat looking at Bundy, hoping for a miracle. What could be tell me about evil, and my own nefarious quirks, if he were permitted to speak? I waited in vain for the moment to come.
Something about this encounter with an effigy of Bundy stuck with me over the days that followed. We went from Florence to Rome, visiting the Coliseum. I looked at the arena and tried to imagine a world entertained by violence. "The others ask me to kill and I kill. That's all," one gladiator once said. I wonder now why we are still so entertained by violence.
From Rome we headed north, to Edinburgh, for the wedding of a family friend. Two days of festivities were followed by long walks through the countryside and city proper. My wife and I are readers, so we spent a day looking through bookshops in Edinburgh, scouting new writers whose voice had not yet reached across the ocean. For new books, Waterstone's on Princes Street is a good bet: buy two books and get one free, from a selected group of new books. We got several free books.
"True Murder" caught my eye. Young girls on holiday from a British boarding school discover suspicious bones in a trunk long since forgotten in the attic of an old home. The bones have a story to tell, and so do the girls' family histories. Ajuba, the protagonist, struggles: She is from Ghana and her mother's heart has been broken into pieces by a faithless husband. Ajuba seeks the love she has lost from a new family in England, that of her classmate Polly Venus.
Polly's father is an international journalist and hence Polly has lived in America. While there, or here, as the case may be, she acquired a taste for a magazine called True Murder. The girls read through the magazine when the lights are out in their boarding school. And, lo and behold, there is Ted Bundy again. Anyone can kill, Polly explains; all it takes is hatred.
The book is written by Yaba Badoe, a graduate of Cambridge who has worked as a civil servant in Ghana and taught in Spain, Jamaica and Ghana. This is apparently her first novel. Keep an eye out for her name; this work easily migrates to the states. The setting is not so unfamiliar as to distract, and Polly, even if she does come off at times like Damon Runyan in drag, sheds light on what it must look like to be quintessentially American: Slang is our native tongue and violence our national pastime.
So what does that make Ted Bundy? In Florence, he stands not two block's from Michaelangelo's David. He haunts the imagination of a young writer from Ghana. Young girls in an English boarding school add spice to their lives by reading about Bundy's murders. And then there is me, a tourist seeking relief from violence overseas, but unable to tear myself away from it even as I was surrounded by beauty.
TLC: Even The Melodrama Feels The Same
One of the benefits of foreign travel and time away is a much-needed sense of perspective. Struggling with a foreign tongue, struggling to see from a different perspective, being steeped in different mores: These are all good things. Even moreso, if, as my wife and I did on our recent trip, you happen to struggle through a week or so bout with the flu. We return to a world in all respects identical to the one we left, save only for the slight changes wrought in ourselves.
My Internet connection was intermittent. For the later portion of our trip, I was out of touch, and blissfully so. Logging back into the stream of consciousness we had fled was jarring. There were some 60 comments backed up on this blog page alone, together with an email account overloaded with messages. Many of the comments here referred to pieces I had recently written on the Trial Lawyers College: Some thanked me for writing, some scorned me for sniping from afar and others, well, to be honest, others I could not really decipher. I would read for but a sentence or two, and then simply publish them. I am grateful to be read at all.
The most abiding impression from all the comments about TLC? Virtually all of the comments are anonymous.
Mark Bennett, himself a TLC grad and blogger, foreswears publication of anonymous posts on his page. He requires a person to own what they speak. That struck me as unnecessarily fussy when I first learned about it. Why such a requirement?
I suppose it screens hypocrites. Several writers on this page call me out as a coward. If I have something to say, I should not say it here, they imply. I am weak, deluded, vainglorious, diseased, and other such things because I speak my mind on a page bearing my name. The folks troubled by that and calling scorn down upon me? Mostly anonymous. Go figure. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall; what has become of my two balls?"
Apparently, things are rocking and rolling at Thunderhead Ranch. There is a new board, and with it, new wounds. Old favorites have been discarded like lover's whose kiss ensnares rather than enthralls. New board members now sit and give counsel to new dreams wrapped in the same old wine skin. At the September class, students protested the fare; enrollments were so low for an October workshop that alumni were apparently invited back free of charge. If Gerry Spence be truly gone, what will attract students?
One writer contends that the college's new counsel, Rex Parris, recently told the board he has no respect for me, that if ignored, I will simply go away. So while questions have been raised about the college's financial footing, those questions shall go unanswered. Is this the same Rex Parris who wrote me but three weeks ago saying that he missed talking, and that we should remedy that soon? What credit shall I give to this anonymous gossip? Should I view an old friend's words as suspect? Was Rex merely dropping a line to tether me? Such cynicism, unless, of course, Machiavelli was right and keeping enemies close is wise policy for a courtier?
And then notes about the silencing of dissent. The college will no longer post links to web pages, having ceased doing so shortly after questions it does not want to address began to appear in print. Joane Garcia-Colson raised questions on her blog page about loyalty. Better to erase her page and others like it. Put enough wax in our ears, the new leaders seem to say, and we'll all hear the melodious hum of contentment.
Another writer tells me that I am a captive to the ranch. I cannot shake myself free, and, hence, I write, obsessively. Another near miss. For many years I kept silent about the place. But then I visited the ranch again, and what I saw and heard shocked me. Proud warriors once gathered there. Today the same place has the look and feel of of a rehab center. One newbie boasts that although he practiced law for some twenty year before becoming a student, he only became a human being after a few weeks beneath the Wyoming stars. Oh, my.
But I digress. It is my style. I am losing interest in the ranch and its doings. It's been nice to be away. And returning is always tough. Being a steward for other people's troubles takes its toll. There are only so many hours in a day, and not nearly enough days.
I will try to be kinder, I promise. But something about the rancid odor of hypocrisy stirs me. I would respect the college more if it were less evangelical in its goals: It is not I who sought the college; the college rather seeks out all of us. It wants to educate a new type of lawyer. It claims to have discovered new things, things of value. Having made such claims, it invites scrutiny.
Ad hominem attacks by anonymous writers are merely more proof that for all the college's claims to have discovered something new, it is merely another ant heap filled with struggling creatures.
Jung: A Gift Will Soon Arrive
I am offering a gift today. Accept it if you will: There is just enough time to prepare for the publication of a long awaited book that may be as significant as any to be published in this dawning century. But to be prepared to hear what this author has to say, you must first read something else.
The new book is C.J. Jung’s Red Book. It will be published in early December. The work is part journal, part critical account of one of the most amazing intellectual journeys and experiments of the twentieth century.
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and contemporary of Freud’s; he was a protean genius, who, like Freud, was present at the creation of a new science: one devoted to trying to understand the role and power of the unconscious in individual and group life. So much of the past century fell under the sway of this radical new teaching we now toss terms around as though their meanings were self-evident: we repress things, engage in meaningful slips of tongue and refer to experience as archetypical.
Jung and Freud broke ranks over what to make of the unconscious. Freud saw sexuality as the paramount force impelling human action and conduct. He scandalized Europe with his essays on infantile sexuality. And he insisted that those with whom he worked regard his views on sexuality as something akin to dogma: his new science had certain fundaments that must be accepted. There could be no new physics of the psyche without the gravitational pull of desire.
This made Jung uneasy. Surely there was more to the world than this. Jung was suspicious of Freud’s insistence that there was and could be something akin to a rational explanation or approach to the forces giving shape to our lives. Jung sought something we all seek: meaning. He did so by trying to observe the unconscious at work and without preconception.
When he broke from Freud, Jung turned inward, recounting his dreams, reveries and fantasies in a series of notebooks he later transformed into an incomplete volume known as the Red Book. This volume sat for many years in a bank vault, under lock and key and the foreboding rectitude of an executor’s watchful eye. The family has now consented to publication.
What to make of this new book?
Jung’s heirs are deeply ambivalent about the work. Would it not show the author to be a man dangerously close to mental illness, perhaps swept within the vortex of psychosis, for several years? Would publication tarnish the reputation of a man already suspect given the unconventional character of so many of his ideas?
Well before I became a lawyer I tried my hand at teaching. I sat at the head of a conference table at Columbia and walked students through great books I had read and tried to comprehend. In one year-long course, we would start with Plato’s Republic and sprint through several dozen impossibly difficult works, often ending somewhere around the time of Freud. As each class ended, I would collapse in despair. Had civilization run its course? Had we marched from hope, through illusion and then settled into elegant and fashionable despair? I wanted nothing of the parlor game of intellectuals; I fled academe.
We did not read Jung. And now I wish we had.
I’ve just finished Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The book is liquid fire. It gives an account of what led to the writing of the Red Book, and what followed from it. If you have time to read only one book between now and December, this is the book you must read. Period. If it does not speak to a deeper sense of self alive to a world of meaning, I will be surprised. This book is a homecoming, and a premonition of something amazing that will soon take shape when the Red Book is published.
Now cometh the Red Book. That is a gift I shall soon receive, and I am counting the days until my copy arrives.
Monday, October 12, 2009
H1N1?
Much though I love to travel, I still leave home reluctantly. Something about leaving familiar landmarks behind me heightens a sense of being lost asea in a world far too wide and vast to comprehend. So sitting in Europe wondering whether I've contracted H1N1 scares me.
We are in Edinburgh now, having arrived here by way of a week's stay in Florence and a brief stop in Rome. We are attending the wedding of a good friend's daughter in a castle not far from the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment. My wife and I walk each day for hours, recently through Tuscan hills or busy Roman thoroughfares, and now through rolling East Lothian pastures. I love to walk and talk with m wife; these are some of the best times we spend together.
Four or five days ago, I developed a slight sore throat. This was followed by sneezing, a runny nose and a general sense of malaise. The other night, I had night sweats. My throat bothers me still.
The symptoms are really more nuisance than anything else, but the press has been filled with accounts of a flu pandemic. Why, the world is to be swept and thousands, perhaps millions, will die, right? So I am suddenly homesick and wishing I could give our family doctor a call, although I know what he will say: Rest, drink plenty of fluids, take some cough medicine and perhaps some aspirin.
Easy enough things to do while on vacation.
But I am almost never ill. I have booked off sick perhaps once in the past 20 years when work beckons. I suppose I've become complacent about good health. I should know better.
My wife has battled bad luck in terms of health for a decade: she's twice pushed through cancer, endured a freak eye injury, been hobbled by diabetes, and, when all this and various medications she took to cope with one insult after another overwhelmed her, she nearly died: I once rushed her to an emergency room three times in a ten-day period. I know the ties that bind body and soul to the known world are slender, and it takes but little to snap them.
So I suppose that is what scares me about the possibility of fighting through my own trifling case of H1N1, if that is, in fact, what I am doing. Otherwise healthy folk push through an exposure with a week's discomfort, I have read. But those not otherwise healthy, these folks can be felled by a bout of this new flu.
I am far from home tonight and cherishing the sound of my wife's deep breaths as she sleeps. So far, she's fine. I hope she remains so.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
A New Board; Same Old Stuff
The secret tap came the other day: Caitlin Larimer, Lynne Brachter, Carl Bettinger, Fredilyn Sisson have all been asked to resign. Rex Parris will soon be asked to yield his head to the block. Jude Basile's been making the rounds, trying to trim the body and fill it with folks to his liking.
This is the way it always is when power changes hands. A new leader is entitled to a board he likes. At least that it is the way it is an autocratic institution, one which does not vote, one which does not seek the input of those on whom it depends for economic support, one which is secure enough to care but little for anything other than the image it sees in the mirror.
Anne Valentine is said to be a favorite of the new regime, but she is said to be reluctant. Anne would be wise to decline. Only sycophants jump on a sinking ship and call it a pleasure cruise. J.R. Clary is said to be anxious to assume a seat; and Vicki Slater is a near second to fill a slot not yet embodied.
All this done secretly. No votes. No poll of students. No poll of staff. Just quiet meetings in the big house and phone lines abuzzing. Dissent silenced. All the while money raised and put to uses for which there seems but little in terms of accountability. No one yet answers who actually owns the ranch. It's all business as usual.
Except ... except Imaging is reported to offer her resignation. My prediction? It will not be accepted. Even Potemkin sees through this one.
A note to expatriates: Don't despair. TLC was a beautiful flash in the pan. Like an alchemist's vision, new flashes will brigthen the night sky. I am aware of two groups of lawyers forming workshops for those reluctant to worship and pay top dollar to built a shrine to another. One group has already begun to meet, another will be sending out invitations soon. I will forward details as they become available.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Doings At Dunderhead Ranch
My wife and I are lolling about in Europe, but my spies are ever at work. Comes this morning a report from the inner sanctum of the Trial Lawyers College. Blood is soon to be spilled, and, cognoscenti, all is not what it appears. It feels as though I never left the United States.
First the blood: The board is about to be reconfigured. A list of those naughty and those nice has been compiled. The board is too unwieldy. Too much information leaks to the likes of me. It is hard to know who to trust. It feels almost Florentine, this whispering and shoving in the piazza. (Okay, okay -- we are in Florence, our favorite city in the world.)
Jude Basile is the new president, and he is aided by his consigliere, Jim Nugent. Both report to Spence, loyal lieutenants to the end, bearing the Thunderhead crest on their souls. Any day now, the board will somehow transfigure itself. There will be no real vote. Instead their will be silent taps on the shoulder and invitations to resign. Nothing public will take place. But in the end one man's will will have reshaped the body: Gerry Spence, who fawns over himself say "But me, me, I am not even on the board." Right. And Lorenzo was not the ruler of Florence.
Another subtle sign of deceit?
Recall the fanfare when the new executive director was found? She was not a TLC alum. She simply appeared one fine summer day and her qualifications were such that it became obvious that she and she alone possessed the heart and soul to hold the college together. Funny how she just stumbled along, this stranger to the scene. Within an hour, she had Jude persuaded that she was the right woman for the job. Such charisma.
It turns out she is a former denizen of the law offices of none other than Gerry Spence. Not just she, mind you, but her rabbit, too. The new ED was in Jackson Hole not long ago sizing up a new office for herself. Where else would this office be but in Spence's firm. When she appeared, old hands at the firm who actually practice law, rather than merely preach it, were not happy to see she and the rabbit return. It turns out the rabbit is a destructive little critter. No one wants an office next to rabbit and mom.
I was at the 80/15 celebration when the new ED was presented. It was all smiles and aw shucks, aren't we lucky we stumbled upon just the right person. The fact is an old crony was drafted and sold to the college as a fresh find. And it should surprise no one that this crony is old Spence hand. The alter ego not only owns the ranch, he staffs it with loyalists. There is nothing wrong with that, mind you. But let's not pretend that God works in mysterious ways.
It hurts me to see good friends neck deep in this nonsense.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Divided As One
"I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of the day, at the furtherance or knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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