You know, when I worked my first lawyer job, in NYC, the entering class of young attorneys, we were all assured that the Summers were slow, nothing happened. I have never had a Summer where some case or another was not going “like the hammers of hell,” to steal a phrase from the WW2 generation of attorneys who were Da Boss. So I dunno. I think he (Judge Sullivan) is saying he might move this along over the Summer too.
Of course the DOJ is going to try and appeal his ruling that he is not going to grant leave for an interlocutory appeal. My second Summer as a lawyer was spent busting my ass like Sisyphus and trying to convince a federal Circuit Court to let us appeal after a very notoriously assholic judge in the SDNY denied us leave, less temperately and articulately than Judge Sullivan did to the DOJ here. I did manage to attend my own wedding in Puerto Rico. But to steal from Mark Twain, the reports of slow Summers in Federal Court have been greatly exaggerated.
The DOJ and Barr will need to get a stay from the DC Circuit. That is a tall burden. And claiming it will be a distraction to such an easily distracted President is going to probably not pass the Giggle Test.
I’d been very happy to have anything but a slow summer. I’d spend weeks trying to get signatures on contracts to always find the need to await the next levels return from vacation. Then Labor Day would hit and the floodgates would open, contracts that languished all summer were signed in a day. The challenge was then to find the time on the calendar to do the work because of course, they all needed finished projects by the new year. The thing to also remember was that once Thanksgiving hit your chances of getting anything accomplished fell by 75% as people were thinking parties, gifts, shopping, everything but work.
Yes. I think transactional work is no less pressured than litigation. I have pretty much done exclusively litigation my entire career. The law firm I woked Summers in Puerto Rico had me set up for a transactional future. I probably would have had to relearn golf.
I took a Maritime Law class as an elective sort of in case I ever get one of these matters in PR, and then my wife could not do a PhD in her chosen field at the UPR, so we decided to stay here for a time. I took the damn Bar exam here and then,luck of the draw, or probably the transactional people’s choice at the NY firm, really, I got assigned to litigation. I have liked it and loved it sometimes. Being on trial, as one very skilled lawyer I have worked with often said, can be like a higher form of living and alertness. But, again, we were told, oh the Federal Judges all go to their Summer Homes, and it gets very slow. Maybe I have just been unlucky. Maybe because litigation also does Arbitration cases, and I had another Summer where an arbitration hearing (the arbitrators are industry people who are available nights and weekends for hearings) was first in court (procedural, to consolidate two arbitrations on the same Ship charter, sort of back to back arbitration cases) then very intense weekend hearings, Saturdays and Sundays. Just lucky maybe. The barrister for the Indian party to the arbitrations flew in from India. He was magnificent and kicked everyone’s asses.
I fail to see what winning this court case accomplishes. Trump can defy it and just continue to book foreign dignitaries and officials at his resorts and hotels. He can invite them to bring groups to his golf courses. He can keep cashing all their checks. A court is not going to enjoin the Prime Minister of Malaysia from staying at Trump’s DC hotel. If Trump is found to be violating the law in defying a ruling so what, he can’t be charged or indicted. Courts may ban some of his actions and succeed, such as the Muslim travel ban. But I fail to see how they can intercede in his personal dealings with any success. He will just tell them to piss off.
Indeed. Or stop it man you are fucking killing me test.
However, getting even minimal evolution in lawyer cliches is probably something you and I will never achieve in our lifetime.
BTW- a friend of mine during law school was a student clerk for Judge Clarence Baker Motley,who was a pioneer and great human being. He had this story about the judge and her various clerks sitting through a motion argument where one of the parties, in a civil case, was absolutely full of shit but doing the typical Wall St litigation thing, marshaling all this case law that really had nothing supportive for them and bla bla bla. The hearing ended, they all went back to chambers and as soon as the door on the elevator back to chambers closed, all began laughing hysterically.
Judge Sullivan is the only person in a position of authority or leverage in this saga who can make the case that he has been living up to the moment of this national crisis.
There’s a major flaw in the legal profession when they tend to be very comfortable taking on cases where there is a lot of precedent and shy away from cases of first impression or situations where there isn’t much case law. Sullivan isn’t afraid of any of that.
When living in Western NY I had a lawyer who hatted arbitrations and also contract negotiations. He related that before word processing there was a natural break when all copies had been scribbled on and become illegible. That usually occurred about 8/9 PM and forced a break until the next day. That meant people could have a good meal, discuss proposals among the parties on their side and get some sleep. With word processing, he stated, that there was always a fresh copy and no one wanted to stop to think a position though, that resulted in even longer cases and much more frustration.
Since I was one who helped develop word processing he and I had a friendly hate for each other. On my side, I mentioned that all lawyers were parasites living off of others problems. Needless to say, we were very good friends and still remain so even while living many years on opposite sides of the country.
In my opinion, WordPerfect 2.0 for DOS (big square floppy disk DOS, not those casette folppies that came later) was the most perfect Word Processing Program ever. I hope that does not offend you, not knowing which product you helped develope and knowing my tendency to offend people.
American Arbitration Association arbitrations I never had to do one. The Society of Maritime Arbitrators was easier procedure, SMA arbitration in NYC Clause was in all Time and Voyage Charter Parties. There was a recurring group of industry people who got appointed because they were good and surprisingly, were not partial to the party that appointed them. Relaxed rules of evidence. They were generally enjoyable, even if you pulled a both days of the weekend one so the Barrister who flew in from Bangalore could come in, kick our asses, then fly home Sunday night.
Used software called DACL (acronym was used later by MS) was the operating system for the very first word processors, actually, a desk, keyboard, monitor the whole shebang. I was asked to develop the math portion of the program. Believe it or not, not one of the original developers or designers thought that math, even simple math such as 1 + 1 would be needed. That work was done some years before the first PCs, even before the first Apple products. The equipment was developed as the next step for a secretarial pool, soon PCs came along and things never were the same.
Which coincides with the Dixiecrat attitude towards African Americans before the Civil War and After, towards Jews, Catholics, Italians, Latinos, Asians, “mongrel people.”
I do not have it at hand, but there was a precursor to Judge Roy Moore, an unabashed racist Southern Judge who, when confronted with an argument that an African American party before his Court was deserving of equal rights to Whites, proudly wrote the (for him) hilarious proposition that an orangutan would then also have to be accorded equal rights. I think he may have misspelled orangutan.
Since you are a scholar, you might also like In the Matter of Color, by A. Leon Higginbotham, a deceased Federal District and Circuit Court Judge. It goes State by State and covers the history of the laws that institutionally discriminated against African Americans. Not all of the States were in the South, either.
