Lawyering – Page 4 – dwkcommentaries

Practitioner in Residence

UILaw — University of Iowa College of Law

For three days in February 1986 I was the practitioner in residence at the University of Iowa College of Law. I helped teach a class, made a presentation to a faculty seminar, gave a speech to an assembly of students and faculty and talked to a student group and a legal clinic seminar.[1]

Professor Patrick Bauer, a friend and former colleague at the Faegre & Benson law firm in Minneapolis, taught a first-year civil procedure class that I joined. The topic was Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that requires an attorney who submits a pleading, written motion or other paper to a federal district court to make an implicit representation that it was not presented for an “improper purpose,” that is was “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument” for changing the law and that its factual contentions had or were likely to have “evidentiary support.” [2]

The problem for the class that day was posed by a recent case in which the court had denied a defense motion to dismiss a complaint and had directed defense counsel to submit a brief as to why they should not be subject to Rule 11 sanctions for their dismissal motion. The court thereafter decided that such sanctions were appropriate and imposed a fine on the defense counsel (in an amount to be determined). The violation of Rule 11, according to the court, occurred because the dismissal motion was not warranted by existing law and because the lawyers had not made a reasonable inquiry to determine if the motion was warranted by existing law.[3]

In the civil procedure class, I played the role of a law firm partner soliciting input and advice from his associate lawyers (played by the students) on preparing a complaint for a new civil lawsuit. Professor Bauer at the blackboard wrote down Rule 11 issues that were created by the ideas put forward by the associates.

“Sue the Bastard! Ruminations on American Litigiousness” was the title of my presentation to a faculty seminar. I had prepared this paper while on my sabbatical leave at Grinnell College. I discussed what I saw as the causes and effects of such litigiousness and suggested changes in our legal system and national psyche.[4]

An assembly of faculty and students was the forum for my speech, “The Pilgrimage of a Hired Gun–The First Twenty Years.” Accepting the challenge of Judge Frank M. Coffin for lawyers and judges to make “interiorly revealing” comments about their professional lives,[5] I discussed my first 20 years of practicing law and my search for meaning and spiritual values in a litigator’s life.

The first five years were my apprenticeship period when I was learning how to be a litigator and how to function in two large law firms in two new cities while also becoming a father to two sons. The self-sufficient, inner-directed person I thought I was had found a home in the well-paid, high-powered, eminently secular law firm.

The next five years I saw as my yuppie period. I was becoming more proficient as a lawyer. I advanced to partner at Faegre & Benson. We bought an upper-middle-class home. Still no room for a spiritual, religious life.

The next four or five years or so, in retrospect, was a time of mid-life crisis. I was increasingly skeptical of the significance of what I was doing for a living while facing personal challenges.

I started to sort out these problems over the next five years and started to integrate the various aspects of my life. In 1981 I joined Minneapolis’ Westminster Presbyterian Church and started to re-discover a spiritual life.[6] In 1982 I took a sabbatical leave from my law firm to teach at Grinnell College.[7] In 1984, I organized a liberal arts seminar for lawyers at the College.[8] I started to do research about two lawyers whom I admired: Joseph Welch and Edward Burling.[9] Being a practitioner in residence also gave me the opportunity to reflect on these issues and to share these thoughts with others.

I concluded my “Pilgrimage” speech by saying, “I embrace the tools of the trade [and] the craftsman’s pride in a job well done and let go of the omni-competent, omnipotent attitude of the successful lawyer.”

Little did I know at the time of this speech that my then just-starting involvement in the Sanctuary Movement case[10] would be an integrative experience that would lead to my becoming a pro bono asylum attorney,[11] my making a life-changing pilgrimage to El Salvador[12] and my becoming an adjunct professor of international human rights law at the University of Minnesota Law School.[13]

While a practitioner in residence at the Iowa College of Law in February 1986, I also spoke to a meeting of the Christian Legal Society on “Legal Issues Arising Out of the Sanctuary Movement and Government Infiltration of the Churches.” This was an account of the federal criminal case against leaders of the Sanctuary Movement and the Government’s disclosure that it had sent under-cover agents into worship services and Bible-study meetings at Arizona churches involved in the Movement. I also discussed the just-filed civil case against the U.S. Government over “the spies in the churches” by the American Lutheran Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).[14]

Another activity at the Iowa College of Law was attending a legal clinic seminar. I talked about the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers and legal malpractice.[15] I shared my opinion that legislatures and courts were in the process of altering the balance between a lawyer’s role as advocate and the role as officer of the court to give greater importance to the latter. One example was the previously mentioned court’s imposing sanctions on lawyers for arguments that were not deemed in accordance with established law. I attributed this shift to increasing legal fees and the costs of litigation, the public perception that litigation processes had been abused and the knowledge that some lawyers are dishonest. This rebalancing carried with it a risk of diminishing a lawyer’s responsibilities to a client and hence an increased risk of malpractice. I concluded with this quotation: “Clients are entitled to much. They are entitled to dedication, diligent preparation, undivided loyalty, superb research, the most zealous advocacy and even sleepless nights; but they are not entitled to the corruption of our souls . . . . We do not lie, we do not cheat, we do not suborn, and we do not fabricate. We do not lie to clients. We do not lie for clients.”[16]

[1] Duane Krohnke Is First Daum Practitioner in Residence, Iowa Advocate, Fall/Winter 1985-86, at 15. The widow of F. Arnold Daum, a 1934 graduate of the Iowa College of Law and a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm, established the F. Arnold Daum Visiting Practitioner’s Program in the Law College to support bringing leading practitioners to the law school to appear in classes and exchange ideas with faculty and students. I was the first such practitioner to participate in this program.

[2] Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 11.

[3] Golden Eagle Distributing Corp. v. Burroughs Corp., 103 F.R.D. 124 (N.D. Cal. 1984).

[4] Post: A Sabbatical Leave from Lawyering (May 26, 2011).

[5] Post: A Liberal Arts Seminar for Lawyers (May 28, 2011).

[6] Post: Minneapolis’ Westminster Presbyterian Church (April 6, 2011).

[7] Post: A Sabbatical Leave from Lawyering (May 326, 2011).

[8] Post: A Liberal Arts Seminar for Lawyers (May 28, 2011).

[9] Post: Adventures of a History Detective (April 5, 2011).

[10] Post: The Sanctuary Movement Case (May 22, 2011).

[11] Post: Becoming a Pro Bono Asylum Lawyer (May 24, 2011).

[12] Post: My Pilgrimage to El Salvador, April 1989 (May 25, 2011).

[13] Post: My First Ten Years of Retirement (April 23, 2011).

[14] Post: The Sanctuary Movement Case (May 22, 2011)(account of the churches’ completed case against the Government).

[15] Krohnke, A Litigator’s Comments on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and Attorney Malpractice (Feb. 1986).

[16] Miller, A Report on the Morals and Manners of Advocates, 29 Cath. Law. 103, 108 (1984).

Minnesota’s Federal Court

Fedctmpls — Federal Courthouse, Minneapolis

mpls-typical-courtroom — Courtroom, Federal Courthouse, Minneapolis

The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota is the federal court in the State. It and the 93 other U.S. district courts are the trial courts of the federal court system. Within limits set by Congress and the Constitution, the district courts have jurisdiction to hear nearly all categories of federal cases, including both civil and criminal matters.[1]

The Minnesota federal court has four federal courthouses in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth and Fergus Falls although the last one does not have any regularly assigned federal judges.[2]

The Minnesota court has seven judgeships authorized by federal statutes. There are 670 other such federal district court judgeships in the U.S. All of the people who hold these judgeships are appointed for life by the President of the U.S. after advice and consent of the U.S. Senate.[3] They exercise the full powers of the district courts.

Five of the seven U.S. District Judges for the Minnesota court have their chambers at the Minneapolis federal courthouse; they are Joan N. Ericksen, Michael J. Davis, John R. Tunheim, Patrick J. Schiltz and Ann D. Montgomery. In the St. Paul federal courthouse they are Donovan W. Frank and Susan Richard Nelson. They are joined by four Senior U.S. District Judges, who also continue to take cases: Donald D. Alsop, Paul A. Magnuson and Richard H. Kyle in St. Paul and David S. Doty in Minneapolis.[4]

The Court also has nine United States Magistrate Judges, who are appointed by the Judges of the U.S. District Court for a term of eight years and who are eligible for reappointment to successive terms. The Magistrate Judges at the U. S. District Court in St. Paul are Janie S. Mayerson, Jeanne J. Graham, Jeffrey J. Keyes and Tony N. Leung; at the Minneapolis federal courthouse they are Arthur J. Boylan (Senior Magistrate Judge), Franklin L. Noel and Steven F. Rau. Leo J. Brisbois serves in the Duluth federal courthouse; and Mary Kay Klein is part-time in Bemidji.[5] The magistrate judges have more limited roles then the judges and may try cases only with the consent of the parties.[6]

In 1986 the District Court appointed District Judge Diana E. Murphy and me as co-chairs of the Bicentennial of the Constitution Committee for the District of Minnesota. We produced a history of the Court and sponsored and organized a seminar on constitutional law, a lecture and discussion on “Religion and the Constitution” and videotaped interviews of the sitting judges.[7]

[1] United States Courts, District courts, http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/; 28 U.S.C. ch. 85 (jurisdiction). The more populous states have more than one federal district court. For example, the State of New York has four: Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western Districts. (28 U.S.C. § 112.)

[2] U.S. Dist. Ct., D. Minn., Courthouses, http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/Courthouses.shtml.

[3] U.S. Dist. Ct., D. Minn., Judges, http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/judges.shtml; United States Courts, Federal Judgeships, http://www.uscourts.gov/JudgesAndJudgeships/.

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] 28 U.S.C. ch.43.

[7] Murphy & Krohnke, The Minnesota Federal Court Embarks on Bicentennial Projects, Hennepin Lawyer, May-June 1987 at 10; History of the U.S. Court for the District of Minnesota (1989), http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/History. Since October 1994, Judge Murphy has been a U.S. Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which handles appeals from the Minnesota federal court as well as the federal district courts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas. (Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judges, http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/newcoa/judge.htm; 28 U.S.C. § 41; 28 U.S.C. ch. 83.) Appeals from the Eighth Circuit go to the U.S. Supreme Court when the latter agrees to take the case. (28 U.S.C. § 1254.)

The Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Litigation

On March 1, 1967, the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 307 to 116 refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the re-elected African-American Congressman from Harlem, censured him, fined him $25,000, took away his seniority and declared his seat vacant. The grounds were that he had engaged in conduct unbecoming a Congressman: he had refused to pay a libel judgment ordered by a New York state court, had refused to return to his district except on Sunday in order to avoid service of legal process in that case, had misappropriated congressional travel funds and illegally had paid his wife a congressional staff salary for work she had not done.[1]

Soon thereafter Powell along with 13 of his constituents commenced a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to invalidate his exclusion. The defendants were John McCormack, who was the Speaker of the House, five other House members and three of its staff. The complaint alleged that the exclusion violated Powell’s constitutional rights: Powell satisfied the constitutional qualifications for membership (age, citizenship and residency) and the exclusion allegedly was based upon his race and color and thereby violated his rights under the Fifth, Thirteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.[2]

Powell’s lawyers were William Kunstler, a famous civil rights lawyer;[3] Arthur Kinoy, another prominent civil rights lawyer and Rutgers Law School Professor;[4] Herbert Reid, another civil rights lawyer and Howard Law School Professor;[5] and others.

The House decided that it did not want the Lyndon Johnson Administration’s Justice Department to defend the House’s leadership because of concern that political considerations would prevent the Department from vigorously asserting what the House believed to be its full constitutional prerogatives. Instead, the House took the recommendation of Emmanuel Celler, the Brooklyn Congressman and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to hire as its attorney, Bruce Bromley, a partner in the New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore.[6]

Bromley was a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Harvard Law School. He was a lawyer with the Cravath firm for over 50 years with one interruption. In January 1949, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had been the unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate the prior year, appointed Bromley to New York’s highest court (the Court of Appeals), but in November 1949, Bromley lost the election for a full term. Although he served on the bench for less than a year, thereafter he was always referred to as “Judge Bromley.” While at Cravath, he was the lead lawyer in successful representation of IBM, General Motors and other major corporations.[7]

For the Powell case, Bromley assembled a team of Cravath lawyers to work on the case, including yours truly. I do not recall what issues I worked on and now wish I had kept a journal about my involvement in this case to refresh my recollection. I do remember that another Cravath associate attorney and member of the team, Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr., was an amateur legal historian and was the primary draftsman of an appendix to the eventual Supreme Court brief that discussed the legislative common law of the British House of Commons and the early state legislatures regarding exclusion and expulsion of members of legislatures.[8] Another Cravath associate on the team, Jay Gerber, recently told me that he remembers the issues on which he worked.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.[9] The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the dismissal, but on different grounds. It held that the federal courts had subject-matter jurisdiction, but that case was not justiciable, i.e, it was not appropriate for judicial relief because of the separation of powers.[10] The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before the Supreme Court argument, the other members of the Cravath team and I went to Washington several days ahead of time to prepare for the argument and to consult with Cravath’s Washington allies and former partners: Lloyd Cutler, who subsequently was White House Counsel for Presidents Carter and Clinton,[11] and John Pickering.[12] Cravath also brought the lawyers’ spouses to Washington on the Sunday before the oral argument in the Supreme Court so that they could watch the proceedings the next day. My wife was on a plane from New York City that Sunday with none other than Congressman Powell.

Although the House’s side had won in the lower federal courts, there were no guarantees that it would prevail in the U.S. Supreme Court. The House was asserting that its power under Article I, Section 5(1) of the Constitution to “be the Judge of the . . . Qualifications of its own members” was an implicit exception from the Article III “judicial Power of the United States [that was] vested in [the Supreme Court]” and the lower federal courts. Thus, the House argued, no federal court had the power to do anything in this case. As a result, it was anticipated that Chief Justice Earl Warren might well ask Judge Bromley in oral argument whether he was claiming that if the House or the Senate hypothetically were to exclude or expel five or six black members-elect in succession that the Supreme Court could do nothing. The answer to this hypothetical question was clearly “yes.”

At the oral argument, as I recall, the Chief Justice in fact asked that question. Bromley’s responded in essence that yes, the Court could do nothing, but that there was no reason to suspect that the House or the Senate might do such a thing and that there was a political remedy by the voters’ re-electing the same people. The Chief Justice and Bromley then got into a colloquy as to which branch of the federal government had the “final” say regarding the Constitution. Bromley said in very limited areas, each house of the Congress had the “final say:” impeachment and removal of federal officials and judging the qualifications of its members. Jay Gerber recalls that the Chief Justice almost fell out of his chair at that answer.

In June 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court, 7 to 1, reversed the dismissal of the lawsuit. The majority opinion by the Chief Justice held that the federal courts had jurisdiction over the subject matter of the case and that it was justiciable; that it did not constitute a political question that pitted one branch of government against another. Rather, it required “no more than an interpretation of the Constitution” by the Supreme Court.[13]

The majority opinion stated that while the House of Representatives was the sole judge of its members’ qualifications (U.S. Const., Art. I, § 5, cl. 1), the House did not have the power to develop qualifications other than those specified in the Constitution: election certificate, at least 25 years of age, U.S. citizen for at least seven years and an inhabitant of the state in which he or she was elected at the time of election (Art. I, § 2. Cls, 1, 2).

In addition, the Court’s majority opinion noted that while the Constitution states (Art. I, § 5, Cl. 2),”Each House [of Congress] shall be the Judge of the . . . Qualifications of its own Members,” the Constitution immediately states that each “House may . . . with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.” The Court, therefore, held that the process leading to the expulsion of a Member, duly sworn and enrolled upon the body’s rolls, was the only constitutional method for a House to give effect to its power to determine the qualifications of its members. The House did not follow this procedure with respect to Congressman Powell. Therefore, he was entitled to a declaratory judgment that he had been unlawfully excluded from the Congress.

In the meantime, Powell had won the May 1967 special election to fill his congressional seat, but did not attempt to be seated. He then won the next regular election in November 1968 and was seated in the House in January 1969 (approximately five months before the Supreme Court decision) subject to the $25,000 fine and loss of seniority. The next year, however, Powell lost the 1970 Democratic primary election to Charles Rangel and failed to qualify to be on the general election ballot.[14]

Powell was a member of a notable Harlem family. His father, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem (1908-36) before being succeeded by Powell, Jr., his only son (1937-71).[15] Powell. Jr.’s older son, Adam Clayton Powell, III, was a journalist and media executive,[16] and Powell, Jr.’s younger son, Adam Clayton Powell IV, is a New York State legislator who lost the 2010 Democratic primary election for Congress to the incumbent, Charles Rangel.[17]

Powell, Jr. died in 1972 at age 62.

[1] Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486, 489-93 (1969); Wikipedia, Powell v. McCormack, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack.

[2] Powell v. McCormack, 266 F. Supp. 354 (D.C. DC. 1967).

[3] Wikipedia, William Kunstler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kunstler.

[4] Wikipedia, Arthur Kinoy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Kinoy.

[5] Ravo, Herbert O. Reid, Sr., 75, Lawyer Who Taught Many Black Leaders, N.Y. Times (June 19, 1991).

[6] Wikipedia, Bruce Bromley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bromley.

[7] Wikipedia, Bruce Bromley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bromley.

[8] After Cravath, “Dan” Ellis became a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa School of Law and then Professor, Dean and eventually Dean Emeritus and William R. Orthwein Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Washington in St. Louis School of Law. (Washington University in St. Louis, Dorsey Ellis, http://news.wustl.edu/people/Pages/DorseyEllis.aspx.

[9] Powell v. McCormack, 266 F. Supp. 354 (D.C. D.C. 1967).

[10] Powell v. McCormack, 395 F.2d 577 (D.C. Cir. 1968).

[11] Wikipedia, Lloyd Cutler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Cutler.

[12] Wikipedia, John H. Pickering, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Pickering.

[13] Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).

[14] Wikipedia, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Clayton_Powell,_Jr.; Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, “Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.,” http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=p000477

[15] Wikipedia, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Clayton_Powell,_Sr.; Abyssinian Baptist Church, History, http://www.abyssinian.org/about-us/history/.

[16] Wikipedia, Adam Clayton Powell III, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Clayton_Powell_III.

[17] Wikipedia, Adam Clayton Powell IV (Politician), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Clayton_Powell_IV_(politician).

A Liberal Arts Seminar for Lawyers

My sabbatical leave at Grinnell College in 1982 prompted me to think about ways to provide intellectual stimulation and enrichment for practicing lawyers. This reflection resulted in my organizing “Renewing Fealty to the Law: A Liberal Arts Seminar for Lawyers” at the College in June 1984.[1]

My invitation to the Seminar stated, “Have you ever been bored while sitting in a large hotel banquet room listening to a continuing legal education lecturer? Have you ever regretted your inability to find or make time to read some general books about the law? Have you ever wondered about the significance of what we do for a living? Have you ever longed for the opportunity to take time out of the hurly-burly of practice to meet with other lawyers and discuss some of the broader issues of law and the practice?”

If the recipient had ever said “yes” to any of these questions, I urged them to come to the seminar. Twenty-six lawyers did and joined the five seminar leaders for a weekend at the College.

The keynote speaker was the Honorable Frank M. Coffin, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in New England.[2] I had met him in the Fall of 1982 when we were both on the Visiting Committee for the University of Chicago Law School. I had mentioned to him that I had used his book, The Ways of a Judge, in the undergraduate course I had taught at Grinnell earlier that year. The ensuing conversation revealed that we both firmly believed that there was a profound need for lawyers and judges to read, think, and talk about broader issues involving law and the profession.

For the seminar I prepared a collection of Judge Coffin’s unpublished speeches that I entitled “Lawyers and Judges–The Essential Humanists in a Technological Society.” My Introduction to this booklet said that his speeches “recount the observations of a sensitive, profound individual caught in the demands of an increasingly technical, more business-like profession.” The speeches were organized into sections about constitutional law, lawyering and judging. The booklet also contained bibliographies of his judicial opinions, books and articles and reviews of his book, The Ways of a Judge.

Judge Coffin’s speech at the Grinnell seminar, Finding Serenity in the Practice of Law, defined “serenity” as “an inner calm built of three components: (1) regaining a sense of control of work and life style; (2) repositioning the individual at the center of the stage, whether we focus on the lawyer or the client; and (3) restoring a sense of framework, of perspective, of being aware of where we have come from, who we are, how to carry on a noble tradition.”

Such serenity, Coffin said, should give us “a better chance of remaining sane, of avoiding burnout, and of retaining our motivation and momentum.” It also should make us better counselors and advisors or better lawyers in the grand tradition.

To this end, Judge Coffin proposed humanizing the law office. Lawyers share their experiences and insights with others in the firm. Retired lawyers talk about their recollections. Develop “story-telling” about the law for lay people. Organize social activities. Collect oral histories. Provide sabbatical leaves. Conduct retreats and seminars on broader topics. Provide lawyers in residence for law schools. Host academics and judges in residence at law firms.

He also suggested developing other models for delivery of legal services by smaller groups. Finally Judge Coffin reminded us of the importance of being familiar with the great works of civilization that shed light on the human predicament.

This pursuit of serenity, he concluded, should help us “keep the law a humanistic profession worthy of our fealty.”

Grinnell seminar — Judge Coffin, Duane Krohnke, Jim Laue

Other discussion leaders at the seminar were Grinnell’s Parker Professor of History Al Jones on “American Legal History;” James H. Laue, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the University of Missouri (St. Louis),[3] on “Lawyers and Dispute Resolution;” Victor G. Rosenblum, Professor of Law and Political Science at Northwestern University, on “Jurisprudence; ” and Gene E. Wilkins, an Indianapolis attorney and Adjunct Professor at Indiana University, on “The Humane Practice of Law.”

One of the participants in the seminar afterwards said the College “has a quite palpable aura” and was “the place where [many of our enduring values] . . . were refined, buttressed or altered in an atmosphere which required the free exchange and testing of ideas.”

[1] Post: A Sabbatical Leave from Lawyering (May 26, 2011).

[2] Wikipedia, Frank Morey Coffin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Morey_Coffin; Lewis, Frank Coffin, Chief Judge of a Federal Appeals Court, Dies at 90, N.Y. Times (Dec. 17, 2009). See also Post: Adventures of a History Detective (April 5, 2011) (oral history interview of Judge Coffin in John F. Kennedy Presidential Library).

[3] Jim Laue was a personal friend and the husband of a high school and Grinnell College classmate. In the Johnson Administration he was working on resolving racial conflicts for the federal government’s Community Relations Service and was with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. President Carter in 1979 appointed Laue as co-chair of a commission that recommended the establishment of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which happened in 1984. He was a Vice Chancellor of the Washington University in St. Louis, 1971-74; the Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1974-87; and the Lynch Professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, 1987 until his death in 1993. (George Mason University Libraries, Guide to the Papers of James H. Laue, 1947-1993, http://sca.gmu.edu/finding_aids/laue.html.)

A Sabbatical Leave from Lawyering

In February 1982 I took a three-month sabbatical leave from my law firm, Faegre & Benson, and became a Visiting Instructor in Political Science at my alma mater, Grinnell College.[1]

I taught one course that I created, The American Civil Law System. It had units on the structure of the legal system, legal reasoning, adjective law (civil procedure, conflicts of law and evidence) and substantive law (torts, corporations and contracts).

In addition to readings, lectures and class discussion, I employed some unusual pedagogical devices. I put on the “witness stand” a sociology professor and questioned her about her personal experience as a juror. We saw part of a civil jury trial. We visited the Iowa Supreme Court and observed oral arguments. Afterwards we talked about the work of the court with two Grinnell alums who were justices on the court and another Grinnellian who was a law clerk for another justice. We obtained the briefs in one of the cases we heard, and with some explanatory memos from me the students were asked to write an opinion deciding the case in lieu of a final exam.

Another unusual technique was a moot court in the hypothetical case of Smith v. Oxbridge College. Denied tenure, Smith sued for breach of contract. The dispute concerned whether the plaintiff could obtain copies of the college’s tenure committee records. Two students acted as opposing lawyers and argued the motion to compel discovery relying upon two recent federal cases on point. I played the part of the judge. (I should note that the facts of the hypothetical case were very close to a then current case of a Grinnell faculty member who had been denied tenure.)

During my semester at the College I gave two public lectures. One with an economics professor concerned antitrust policy. The other, American litigiousness.

In the latter talk, I discussed what I saw as the causes and effects of Americans’ inclination to sue one another. While concluding that one could not applaud or deplore litigation and litigiousness in the abstract, I suggested changes in our legal system and national psyche.

I also discovered that the mid-19th century founder of the town of Grinnell (J. B. Grinnell) had similar thoughts. In his memoirs he said, “To the honor of the first settlers [of the town], I can recall no suit where they were personally litigants. How much time and money was saved! What an exemption from bitterness, cold-blooded social strategies, and flippant perjuries in mockery of oaths! This did not come by chance, for there was a verbal compact that we would not promote a lawsuit.”

J. B. Grinnell had even harsher words for lawyers who encouraged litigation. “There may be honor, which I doubt, among thieves, but little when robust clients are to be plucked . . . . [A] class of idle pettifoggers in legal business stir up litigation more degrading than any brute warfare, and then laugh at their dupes, traducing the judge as the author of defeat, or a jury which they irreverently send to another and warmer realm . . . . Filth to them is like nutritious food; they are crazy on constitutions, and in spasms of assumed virtue on a human suggestion not written in law. They have no God, nor one fit to be written with a small g. Human gad-flies.”

While on sabbatical leave, I had to return to Minneapolis to appear at a hearing in federal court. This made me realize how much I enjoyed the challenge of the adversary system–preparing for, and doing, battle on relatively short notice puts an attorney’s abilities to a difficult test. But I did not miss the annoying difficulties of scheduling and re-scheduling appointments and having one’s personal life whipsawed by others’ demands plus the increasing incivility of lawyers to one another, even in a city like Minneapolis.

Nor did I miss the nagging doubts about the significance of a lawyer’s life. As Learned Hand, one of our greatest judges, said in a 1931 commencement address at the Yale Law School, “Most of a lawyer’s time . . . consists of activity which seems to have small value and small bearing on the greater issues of the community in which he lives. True, it concerns the individuals whom he touches oftentimes in their deepest interests, but it is hard to believe that the results are important more largely.” [2]

Despair, however, was not Hand’s conclusion. “When our lights burn low, when we [lawyers] seem to stand futile and without meaning, used up in the senseless strife of interest and passion, concerned with nothing better than to get for others what perhaps they should not have, let us look up to the great edifice which our forebears have built, of which we are now the guardians and the craftsmen. Though severally we may perhaps be paltry and inconsequent, for the present it is we who are charged with its maintenance and its growth. Descended to us, in some sort moulded by our hands, passed on to the future with reverence and with pride, we at once its servants and its masters, renew our fealty to the Law.”[3]

Despair at the lawyer’s life was not my conclusion either. My sabbatical leave enabled me to step back and look more broadly at the edifice of the law and our legal institutions and to draw sustenance to return to practicing law.

In June of 1982 the College granted me an Alumni Award in recognition of this teaching and other service to Grinnell.

[1] An earlier version of this essay appeared as An attorney finds an “accommodating bench,” Grinnell Magazine, June-July-August 1982, at 17.

[2] Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty at 84-89 (3d ed. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press 1960). Several years after my sabbatical leave, I discovered that Learned Hand was a Harvard Law School contemporary and then life-long friend of Edward B. Burling, a famous Washington, D.C. lawyer who came from a small Iowa town and Grinnell College. (See Post: Adventures of a History Detective (April 5, 2011).

[3] Id.

My Pilgrimage to El Salvador, April 1989

For my second Salvadoran asylum case, I decided that I needed to go to El Salvador to do investigations for the case and to learn more about the country. In April 1989 I made my first of six trips to the country. I went with a group led by Minneapolis’ Center for Global Education at Augsburg College.[1]

The Salvadoran Civil War was still going on, and on the day we arrived her Attorney General was assassinated with a car bomb. In response, the Salvadoran military forces were in the streets with their automatic rifles at the ready, stopping everyone to provide identification. People in the “popular organizations” were being arrested. It was a very dangerous and tense 10 days in the country.

These days turned out to be the most intense religious and spiritual experience of my life. It was and still is a major reason why I now say that El Salvador liberated this American lawyer in many ways and helped him integrate his religious faith with his professional life.

We went to a service of solidarity for a Catholic priest who that week had received death threats. The service was in a screened recreational building next to a very dusty soccer field. As we entered, we were handed mimeographed sheets with words for hymns of the people about Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had been murdered nine years earlier. Thus began my learning about Romero.[2]

Our group visited the office of COMADRES in a small house in the city. (It is the committee of the mothers of the disappeared and assassinated). A young woman talked about her jailing and torture earlier that week. Right behind her I saw a bust of Robert Kennedy representing the very first Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. It was granted to COMADRES for its struggle for amnesty for political prisoners, information regarding the “disappeared” and punishment for those responsible for human rights violations.[3] (During the Reagan Administration, the U.S. would not grant a U.S. visa to a COMADRES representative to come to the U.S. to receive the award.)

At the COMADRES’ office I also saw a framed copy en espanol of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,[4] which I had never regarded as important and about which I knew nothing. Even though I could not read the Spanish text, I could see that it was an inspirational document for these people. This experience came rushing back to me when later I learned about the Universal Declaration.

Our group met with Phil Anderson, a Lutheran pastor from Minnesota who was working in El Salvador for Lutheran World Federation. Earlier that week he had sent faxes to the Federation’s headquarters in Switzerland with information about the arrests of many people from the popular organizations so that the next day the headquarters could send faxes of complaints to the Government of El Salvador. I gained a new appreciation for the work of international organizations around the world and about the sinister messages that are sent when they are kicked out of a country.

My fellow travelers on this trip were from the Washington, D.C. Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (the successor of the Lutheran Church in America, my client in the Sanctuary Movement case). Through their connections I was introduced to the significant work in El Salvador of its small Lutheran Church and its Bishop Medardo Gomez, who is frequently regarded as the spiritual heir to Archbishop Romero.[5]

We also met Salvador Ibarra, a lawyer for the human rights office of the Lutheran Church of El Salvador. He told us that in late 1980 a judge had appointed him to represent one of the Salvadoran national guardsmen accused of raping and murdering the four American church women.[6] Someone from the U.S. Embassy then asked Ibarra to call a press conference and announce that he had investigated and had found no involvement of higher officials in this horrible crime. This, however, was not true, and he refused to hold a press conference. In response he received death threats that prompted him and his family to flee the country. His wife told him that he was stupid to put her and their children’s lives at risk, and she took the children and divorced him. Yet Ibarra subsequently returned to his country to be a human rights lawyer and thereby continued to put his life on the line. He spoke about the joy he had in his work as a lawyer for people whose human rights were at greater risk.

In my subsequent work as a pro bono asylum lawyer and human rights advocate, I continued to be inspired by Salvador Ibarra. How easy it was for me as a large law-firm lawyer in Minneapolis to do this work. I did not have to risk my life as he did.

Our group visited the “22nd of April” community in San Salvador. This community was a three-block area of land on a steep hill between railroad tracks above and a road below. It had been used as a garbage dump, but on April 22nd in the early 1980’s displaced Salvadorans (“desplazados”) started to occupy it. In April of 1989 there were at least 10,000 people living there. They were mainly women and small children because teenage and adult males were fighting in the civil war or had been killed or disappeared. The people lived in “houses”– some of concrete blocks and tin roof; others of cheap tin or aluminum sheets or scrap lumber; yet others made with cardboard.

We walked around “22nd of April” with its pastor–Father Jim Barnett, a Dominican priest from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He talked about his ministry of accompaniment and solidarity. He was inspired by the example of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had entered the total experience of the poor–physical, spiritual, social, economic and political–and who had spoken about the church’s need to be incarnated in the life of the people and the institutional injustice and violence in El Salvador.

Another stop on our trip was UCA, the Universidad de Centro America, a Jesuit institution with a beautiful, serene campus on a hill in the capital city.[7] We spent an hour with Father Jon Sobrino, a noted liberation theologian.[8] Only seven months later six of his fellow Jesuit priests were brutally murdered at that very place by the Salvadoran Armed Forces. (Sobrino escaped this fate because he was in Thailand giving lectures.)[9]

We went to the small, modern, beautiful, serene Chapel of Divine Providence on the quiet grounds of a cancer hospital. This is where Oscar Romero was assassinated while celebrating mass on March 24, 1980. (Across the street was the three-room apartment where Romero lived. No luxurious Archbishop’s palace for him.) Along the way to the chapel I saw graffiti messages: “Romero vive!” (“Romero lives!”)

The Cathedral of San Salvador, on the other hand, is in el centro with all the noise and hurly-burly of buses and other traffic. In April 1989 the building was not finished. (Romero had halted all construction because he did not think it was right for the church to be spending money on its building when the people were suffering from poverty and human rights abuses.) On the steps were women from COMADRES with their bullhorns protesting against the latest wave of repression. Inside, scraps of linoleum were on the floor along with scattered plain wooden benches. In the right transept was Romero’s tomb–plain concrete and covered with flowers and prayers of the people. As I stood there, the words “My body broken for you” from the Christian sacrament of communion echoed in my mind.

[1] Center for Global Education, http://www.augsburg.edu/global/.

[2] Later posts will discuss the life and witness of Archbishop Romero and why he is my personal saint.

[3] Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, http://www.rfkcenter.org/ourwork/humanrightsaward.

[4] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/b1udhr.htm.

[5] Medardo Gomez, Fire Against Fire (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress 1990); Medardo Gomez, And the Word Became History (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress 1992).

[6] E.g., Ford v. Garcia, 289 F.3d 1283 (11th Cir. 2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1147 (2003); Gonzalez, 2 Salvadoran Generals Cleared by U.S. Jury in Nuns’ Deaths, N.Y. Times, Nov. 4, 2000, at A3.

[7] Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas,” http://www.uca.edu.sv/.

[8] Wikipedia, Jon Sobrino, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Sobrino.

[9] Sobrino, et al., Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 1990); Center for Justice & Accountability, Jesuits Massacre Case, http://www.cja.org/article.php?list=type&type=84.

Becoming a Pro Bono Asylum Lawyer

Because U.S. immigration law was in the background of the Sanctuary Movement case in which I was involved in the mid-1980’s,[1] I sought to obtain some knowledge of this area of law by taking a training course in asylum law from a Minneapolis NGO–Advocates for Human Rights.[2]

I learned that there is a legitimate claim for asylum under U.S. and international law if an alien establishes that he or she is a “refugee,” i.e., he or she has been persecuted or has a “well-founded fear of [future] persecution [in his or her home country] on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”[3]

I then volunteered to be a pro bono (no legal fees) lawyer for Jorge, a young Salvadoran asylum seeker, and started to learn about his country. He had participated in demonstrations against his government at the national university in San Salvador and feared he would be persecuted for his political opinions by the government if he returned to his country. With the aid of an experienced immigration lawyer, I tried his case before an immigration judge who denied his application, which was typical for the time. We immediately filed an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and under the law at that time he had legal permission to remain and work in the U.S. while the appeal was pending.

In 1988 I volunteered to take another pro bono Salvadoran asylum case. My client had a middle class background. He had held a position in the Salvadoran government and had publicly protested about corruption in her military forces. As a consequence, he was imprisoned and severely tortured in El Salvador, and one of the reasons he came to Minnesota was to receive treatment at our Center for the Treatment of Victims of Torture.[4] He had been persecuted, and he and members of his family feared future persecution by the Salvadoran military for their political opinions. He and his family members subsequently were granted asylum.

I was now on my way to becoming a pro bono asylum lawyer.

Thereafter I was a lawyer for successful asylum applicants from Somalia, Afghanistan, Burma and Colombia. (Later, in 2002, I became an Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where I taught refugee and asylum law as part of an international human rights course.)

The asylum work enabled me to get to know, and to help, interesting, brave people. I also learned a lot about conditions in these countries. In the process, I was weaned away from accepting what our government said about conditions in other countries at face value and from avoiding making my own judgments about those questions because there was no way that I could know as much as our government knew. As an asylum lawyer I had to investigate conditions in these other countries and come to my own conclusions on such issues and then advocate for individuals as to why they had well-founded fears of persecution (death, physical harm, imprisonment) due to their political opinions or other grounds protected by refugee law.

Moreover, the Sanctuary Movement case and my pro bono asylum work liberated me from the narrow vision and focus of a practicing lawyer concentrating on the laborious development of detailed factual records and legal analysis and arguments in the succession of individual cases. In this prior life I had little time and inclination to be concerned about, or interested in, broader concepts of law or the plight of people around the world who lack a trustworthy legal system to protect them from assassinations, “disappearances,” torture or even mere injustice. To the extent I thought about such things at all, I regarded international human rights as touchy-feely mush that did not qualify for the important “real world” things that corporate lawyers like myself were concerned about.

I also was liberated from the notion that was fostered by the life of a corporate litigator in our secular society that churches and religious people rarely had major impact on our lives in the U.S.

As a result, I often refer to this experience as El Salvador’s liberation of an American lawyer.[5]

[1] See Post: The Sanctuary Movement Case (May 22, 2011).

[2] Advocates for Human Rights, http://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/. See Post: Two Women “Shakers” Rock Minneapolis Dinner (May 20, 2011).

[3] E.g., David Weissbrodt, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Joan Fitzpatrick, and Frank Newman, International Human Rights: Law, Policy and Process, ch. 15 (4^th ed. 2009); Convention [Treaty] Relating to the Status of Refugees, 189 U.N.T.S. 137; Protocol of 1967 Relating to the Status of Refugees, 606 U.N.T.S. 267; U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home; Refugee Act of 1980, 8 U.S.C. § 1101 (a)(42).

[4] Center for Victims of Torture, http://www.cvt.org/index.php.

[5] Krohnke, And Then There Was Light, Minnesota’s Journal of Law & Politics, at 10 (Jan. 1992); Krohnke, The Liberation of a Corporate Lawyer, LXXXI Am. Oxonian 146 (1994).

The Sanctuary Movement Case

After 19 years of practicing corporate litigation with prominent law firms in New York City and Minneapolis, I was a tabula rasa in what turned out to be important topics for me. I had no knowledge of, or interest in, international human rights law in general or refugee and asylum law in particular. Nor did I have any knowledge of, or interest in, Latin America in general or El Salvador in particular. At the same time I was struggling with the question of how to integrate my newly re-acquired Christian faith with my professional life.

In 1985 all of this started to change.

My senior partner at Faegre & Benson asked me to provide legal counsel to the firm’s client, the American Lutheran Church. The problem: how should the ALC respond to the news that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had sent undercover agents into worship services and Bible study meetings at Lutheran and Presbyterian churches in Arizona that were involved in the Sanctuary Movement?

As I soon discovered, that Movement was a loose association of Christian congregations that declared themselves sanctuaries or safe spaces for Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing their civil wars in the 1980s. The news about the “spies in the churches” was revealed by the U.S. Government in its prosecution of some of the Movement’s leaders for harboring and transporting illegal aliens, some of whom were later convicted of these charges.[1]

In the meantime, the ALC and my own church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), decided to join together to sue the U.S. Government over the “spies in the churches.” Eventually the U.S. District Court in Phoenix agreed with the churches that the First Amendment’s “freedom of religion” clause[2] provided protection against certain government investigations.

The court said that the churches “in the free exercise of their constitutionally protected religious activities, are protected against governmental intrusion in the absence of a good faith purpose for the subject investigation. The government is constitutionally precluded from unbridled and inappropriate covert activity which has as its purpose or objective the abridgment of the first amendment freedoms of those involved. Additionally, the participants involved in such investigations must adhere scrupulously to the scope and extent of the invitation to participate that may have been extended or offered to them.”[3]

I should add that the courtroom work in this case was done by two lawyers at the Phoenix firm of Lewis and Roca–Peter Baird[4] and Janet Napolitano.[5]

This case marked a turning point in my legal career as will be evident in subsequent posts.

[1] One of the founders of the Sanctuary Movement was Rev. John Fife of Tucson’s Southside Presbyterian Church. He was one of those convicted in 1986 in the criminal case. Six years later he was elected the national leader (Moderator) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)..(Wikipedia, John Fife, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fife.)

[2] “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].” (U.S. Const., Amend. I.)

[3] Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) v. U.S., 752 F. Supp. 1505, 1516 (D. Ariz. 1990), on remand from, 870 F.2d 518 (9th Cir. 1989).

[4] Peter Baird, http://www.lrlaw.com/files/Uploads/Documents/Baird%20Bio.pdf; Phoenix veteran attorney Peter Baird dies, Phoenix Bus. J.(Aug. 31, 2009), http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2009/08/31/daily19.html.

[5] Napolitano now, of course, is the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (Wikipedia, Janet Napolitano, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano.)

Dr. Rev. Anna Carter Florence’s “Changing Your Mind”

At the Homiletics Festival on May 17th,[1] Dr. Rev. Anna Carter Florence presented a lecture on why people of faith change their mind.

She said she has been doing a lot of thinking on this topic. Here are some of the emerging answers to that question. An individual feels the call of the spirit. An individual recognizes himself or herself in a story of the Bible. An individual commits his or her life to a life in the sacred text. An individual decides that he or she has a script from the sacred text.

When someone is called by God to do a difficult thing, he or she usually balks. But then a sacred script comes to mind, and the individual changes his or her mind.

An individual of faith has to become a witness and give testimony. Being a witness is not easy. You have to give your account of what happened and your belief as to what it means. There are often conflicting stories or testimonies. Some witnesses are discredited. An individual has to come to a verdict on which version to believe. The person has to stand and say what he or she believes about God.

Such testimony is contrary to the world’s “mean” script. Power. Might makes right. Do not share what you have. Be successful, beautiful, strong.[2]

The emphasis on witnessing and testimony prompt me to make comments drawn from my lawyering days. Being a witness in a U.S. judicial proceeding is not easy. A witness first has to be sworn: “I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help me God.” [3] This oath, in my opinion, should also be kept in mind when a person witnesses to matters of faith. Our law has a well established principle to ensure that a witness is competent to provide testimony on a particular subject. Our law provides for cross-examination to test the validity of a witness’ testimony. Our law also has principles to help a jury or a judge evaluate often conflicting testimony. In a religious context, testimony should be subject to similar procedures. One such procedure is the tradition of discernment in honest discussion with fellow Christians.

[1] The Festival seeks to bring together a wide variety of outstanding preachers and professors of homiletics; to inspire a discourse about preaching, worship, and culture; to engage issues related to church in the 21st century; to engage theologically the practices of preaching and worship; to invite individual preachers to consider various styles and methodologies of preaching; and to inspire preachers in their roles of proclaiming the gospel. Festival of Homiletics (May 16-20, 2011), http://www.goodpreacher.com/festival/index.php. See Post: Dr. Rev. Anna Carter Florence’s “Skinny-Dip Sermon” (May 19, 2011).

[2] The discussion of testimony and witnessing is drawn from Florence’s book Preaching as Testimony. See Post: Dr. Rev. Anna Carter Florence’s “Preaching as Testimony” (April 6, 2011).

[3] Alternatively a witness may affirm to tell the truth without reference to God.

The Roads Not Taken

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”[1]

In earlier posts, I described two roads not taken–becoming a Protestant minister or a professional historian.[2] Another was not going to graduate school in economics after reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford. That was primarily because I had had hardly any of the necessary mathematics in college and did not want to embark on a lengthy pursuit of a Ph.D.

After four years of being a Wall Street lawyer, I already have talked about my choosing not to remain at Cravath, Swaine & Moore to compete for one of its partnerships.[3] At the same time I declined an offer to teach at the University of Iowa College of Law. That was because I had enjoyed practicing law, because practice was more lucrative than teaching, and because I did not have some brilliant legal scholarship waiting to be unleashed.

Instead I chose to continue practicing law. But instead of fully exploring various cities, including San Diego, that were on my list of possibilities for such practice, I chose Minneapolis without an exhaustive analysis of the pros and cons of one city versus another. I did so because I already had developed good working relationships with Minneapolis attorneys at Faegre & Benson on the IBM antitrust cases, because Minneapolis was closer to my wife and my original homes in Nebraska and Iowa and because Minneapolis sounded like an interesting place to live. (This last February after spending four pleasant weeks in Carlsbad, California just north of San Diego and avoiding a very cold and snowy Minneapolis, I wondered: Did I make a mistake in not going to San Diego?)

Other paths not taken were because I was not chosen. I already mentioned not winning a White House Fellowship in the last semester of law school.[4] At the same time my applications for U.S. Supreme Court clerkships with Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White were rejected. Such clerkships, of course, are pursued by many top law graduates because they are fascinating, challenging and prestigious jobs that open many doors for subsequent legal careers.

After registering for the military draft at age 18, I had college student deferments (Class 2-S) that covered my nine years at Grinnell, Oxford and Chicago. But in my last semester of law school, I received a notice from my draft board to report for an Armed Services physical examination and thus potential military service. As it turned out, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and I thus was entitled to a new deferment (Class 3-A) because of dependant’s hardship. As a result, I never had to serve in the military, and I did not volunteer to do so. I missed the Vietnam War, much to my relief then and now.

While I was at the Faegre & Benson law firm, I was unsuccessful in my efforts to be appointed to vacancies on the Minneapolis School Board and the U.S. District Court in Minnesota as a judge and then later as a magistrate judge. I also was unsuccessful in seeking the Deanship of the Hamline University School of Law. These jobs all sounded interesting, challenging and rewarding. The last three also would have allowed me to escape the pressures of practicing law.

I also have mentioned my not being offered a teaching position in Ecuador after I retired.[5]

I have no regrets about these roads not taken although I will never know what would have happened had I chosen or been chosen for one of them. But clearly the road I did take “has made all the difference” in my life. Indeed, the road you take and the many decisions you made at various forks in the road along the way constitute your life.

[1] Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken in Mountain Interval (1915).

[2] Post: Adventures of a History Detective (4/5/11); Post: Minneapolis’ Westminster Presbyterian Church (4/6/11).

[3] Post: Lawyering on Wall Street (4/14/11).

[4] Post: Questioning President Lyndon Johnson (4/17/11).

[5] Post: My First 10 Years of Retirement (4/23/11).