The [Surprise] Driver of U.S. Legal Policy

Posted by wlansden | Filed under , , ,

By James Bowden

The United States' political system is controlled by two major political parties, one generally politically liberal and one generally politically conservative. That is the way we think of the political policy-making process: the left and the right fight for enactment of their policies and, ever so rarely, compromise. Query: what if the actual conflict implicit in the U.S. political and policy-making process wasn't the conflict between right or left, or rural versus urban, or racial, or any of the main dichotomies that we use to try to make sense of policy making. Here's the surprise: the main conflict is really generational. Presented in customary bullet-point format for your perusal:

  • The Wealth Gap. Forget the 1% versus the 99%. Even the fact that the top 1% of wage earners own more of the nation's financial wealth than the bottom 50%, or that in 2007 the top 1% of all income earners in the U.S. made 23.5% of all income, more than the entire bottom 50%. The starkest statistic is the difference between the change in wealth of the old and the new generations over the past several decades. Since 1984, older people have seen a 42% increase in their net wealth while their younger counterparts have experienced a 68% decrease. I sure hope they aren't planning to take it all with them. 
  • Debt and Taxes. For the past decade, tax increases have been the most-hated villain in Washington. Really, it goes back further than that. Since 1986, maximum marginal tax rates have been historically low, particularly compared to what the Greatest Generation paid. Over the same period, the U.S. debt has increased seven fold. The average baby boomer was between 22 and 40 in 1986; their prime income earning years have overlapped with an uninterrupted period of historically low taxation, over which period public debt exploded. Now the baby boomers are cashing out--the first of the baby boomers became eligible for Medicare and Social Security in 2011. They are retiring, and won't be paying in anymore. Guess who picks up the tab by default? 
  • The Fiscal Battle. We saw a battle over raising the debt ceiling this summer, and are facing sequestration if the “supercommittee” that resulted from the compromise fails to agree on cuts to federal spending in excess of $1 trillion. What is on the chopping block? The big losers are defense (which is a large employer of younger workers), education (which is supposed to provide the younger generation with opportunities), and spending on programs designed to reduce unemployment (which, as discussed below, effects the younger generation inordinately). What are the sacred cows? The spending items that are bringing the committee to loggerheads are entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which benefit the older generation effectively exclusively) and the possibility of raising taxes (which, as discussed above, has the effect of benefiting the older generation). 
  • The Cost of Success. The saying goes that there are two kinds of good debt--debt the incurrence of which produces a positive net change in wealth. One is a mortgage and the other is student debt. The saying is getting pretty difficult to stand behind these days. Grad PLUS loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy and guaranteed by the most credit-worthy institution in the world--the full faith and credit of the United States of America. They carry an interest rate of 8.5%. The interest rate on the last car I bought was 7.1%. That means that in 2007 a non-dischargeable, absolutely guaranteed debt carried an interest rate 140 basis points higher that a dischargeable loan secured by a depreciating asset which was likely underwater the moment it rolled off the car lot. Since then, it has gotten worse--most interest rates have dipped over the past few years, but student loan rates are fixed. A person's cost of capital for a fancy new car is lower than for an education, and the average indebtedness of a law school grad is $100,000, which buys a pretty fancy car. Or two. Or three. That is insanity. 
  • The Tyranny of High Expectations. Just like every generation [allegedly] works to pass a better world on to their children, each generation is expected to make good use of the benefits they receive from the generation that went before them. I never thought I would do this, but I am going to paraphrase Cracked.com: members of the young generation were told they needed to go to school and work hard so they didn't have to flip burgers. Now that the younger generation has gone to school and worked hard, the economy is feeble, the impact of unemployment inordinately falls on them (young adults age 20-24 have an unemployment rate of 14% compared to 9% for the population overall and 7% for people over 55), and they are being criticized as entitled for ... you guessed it: not wanting to flip burgers.
Why does the conflict of generations matter? Think of the impact on public policy, including tax policy, entitlements policy, public finance, education and fiscal policy, just to name a few, if the debate is cast in the contrast of decisions' impacts on different generations. The next decades are going to see important legal developments involving the enforcement of promises made to the public through entitlement programs, the protection of wealth, and innovations in mechanisms for the passive investment in wealth-generating assets. If attorneys can advise their clients and legislators from a perspective of the benefits and detriments to them and their constituents based on the disparate impacts on generations, long-term results are likely going to be better for clients and everyone in general. If not, someone is definitely getting hosed.

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Permalink | Comments (0) | November 17, 2011 05:40

A Note From London - Please File in the "Jeez, I Hope Not" Department

Posted by wlansden | Filed under , ,
By James Bowden

Working long hours sometimes is less than ideal – you can get to the point where all you feel like you do is work and sleep. Working long hours, though, is sort of a part of the shared experience of the law. At my firm we have all sorts of amenities on site that make working long hours easier, from an exercise room with showers to team dinners when things heat up to a service that can run errands for attorneys when we don’t have time to take care of things ourselves. But I do really like to sleep in my own bed.

Per this ABA journal article, some of the firms in the magic circle in London are so over the whole “attorneys going home to sleep” trend and accordingly are now offering accommodations – in the form of those funny little cubbyhole beds made famous by hotels in Tokyo, Japan. I have to say I am not a fan, and hope that this trend stays on the other side of the Atlantic. And, if such a thing does become common practice, I hope they find a way to make the sleeping pods look a little bit less like ovens.

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Permalink | Comments (1) | August 5, 2011 09:11

Generational Grievances - an Out-House (?) Response to In-House Counsel

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By James Bowden

Fellow blogger and occupant of the lawyerly Nirvana that is in-house counselhood Mark Herrmann recently wrote a blog post carried by Above The Law noting, in essence: (i) young attorneys don’t have great attention to detail and fail to sweat the small stuff, and (ii) more experienced attorneys obsess over details and are bothered by younger attorneys’ failure to do so, because they have all been driven insane. It is probably a fair criticism, though one that I think begs a response, in bullet-points (because I’ve been told that in-house people love bullet points):

  • The granular attention to detail that makes attorneys so valuable to companies and obnoxious to their non-lawyer friends is a learned behavior, gained from extensive training. It is not a behavior that people are born with (like washing one’s hands with five different bars of soap every time we pass a sink) even if the manifested result is similar. Risk aversion is likely the trait attorneys are born with, and attention to detail is a professional coping mechanism. In short, we’re learning.
  • There is a big difference, at least from my perspective, between initial drafting and the editorial process. I am notorious for typos in documents I draft – I think it is because I know what it is supposed to say, and am a little bit blind to minor errors in my own work. Which is why my poor assistant has to review everything for me. On the other hand, I am very good at picking up typos and inconsistencies in other people’s work. This may explain in part why one of my earlier posts misspelled “hearsay” in the title. Also, per a colleague of mine, I have the spelling skills of a baby walrus.
  • An engineer once told me that his rule for producing work was, “fast, good, and cheap: pick any two.” In law firm life, young attorneys are asked to provide things good and fast; cheap is simply a function of how much time you have to work. So, while law firms rightly obsess themselves with producing flawless work product (with the possible exception of initial complaints in class-action securities cases), sometimes the timeframe required results in work product that is “as fast as possible, and as good as it can be in the time provided.” Which is good, because it gives the other side things to comment on.
  • The Young Lawyers Blog has no comment as to the sanity or lack there of demonstrated by more experienced attorneys, except to say that if insanity is a characteristic of the attorneys we work under, insanity must be a part of what we aspire to.
  • I’ve noticed that attorneys tend to eat a large amount of sushi, which leads me to believe that the observed behavior noted by Mr. Herrmann may in fact be the result of mercury poisoning. 
Once I saw a sticker (maybe a t-shirt) that said “insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.” Based on Mr. Herrmann’s post, in the practice of law insanity is a sign of life’s lessons learned.

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Permalink | Comments (0) | July 15, 2011 09:50

The Debt Ceiling: Is it Constitutional?

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By James Bowden

I am now knowingly wading into a political subject in the most non-partisan manner I can manage, with an eye to the legal issues surrounding congressional action (or, to date, inaction) raising the debt ceiling. I am sincerely looking forward to your comments on the many ways that I have failed.

Currently, the U.S. Federal Government is subject to a limit (right now set at $14.3 trillion) on the amount of outstanding borrowings it may incur. On May 16, the debt ceiling was reached; the Treasury Department is now transferring funds across accounts (mainly raiding pension accounts, etc.) in order to keep the government in business. They can only do this for so long until the government will be shuttered for inability to pay its obligations, and worse yet – possibly default on its outstanding debt. But the limit is statutory, not market-driven; the historically low cost of borrowing that the U.S. enjoys indicates that lenders still see the U.S. T-Bill as a sound investment, even (and in spite of) recent warnings issued by credit rating agencies to the contrary. Only an act of Congress can increase the limit on the government’s credit card.

The debt ceiling was enacted in 1917, as a way of limiting aggregate debt (rather than requiring congress to individually authorize each debt issuance). This action modernized the U.S. government’s financial position by allowing the government to turn over its debt, much like large corporations. The problem is that a vote on the debt ceiling, particularly in an atmosphere where public debt is heavily scrutinized, is a deeply political issue – and currently both Democrats and Republicans are making noises that the ceiling may not be increased, or may be increased only in conjunction with drastically deep budget cuts. But what if on the day the Government ran out of funds the Treasury Department just went ahead and issued bonds – effectively exceeding its credit limit?

It ends up that some folks in the legal world believe that Congress cannot constitutionally or legally deny the executive branch the ability to incur debt in order to fund the programs already authorized by Congress. Effectively, when Congress passes a budget, be it balanced or projected to require deficit spending, it is instructing the Executive Branch to do certain things and implicitly obligating the government to the expenses related to those things. Refusing to increase the debt ceiling is in effect saying that the government must do certain things but doesn’t get the money with which to do them. It is, perhaps illegally, counteracting its own laws and attempting to undermine the validity of U.S. debt.

The constitutional argument that the debt ceiling is illegal is rooted in Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which in effect prohibits public debt authorized by law from being questioned. The genesis for this provision came out of the aftermath of the Civil War, when southern lawmakers were contesting the debts incurred by the Union fighting the Confederacy. It’s not just supporters of the current President that hold this view, either: Bruce Bartlett, an avowed political independent and fellow blogger who advised President Reagan on economic issues, has argued that the President should consider the debt limit a nullity for just this reason. The granular question is whether public debt is incurred when the Treasury issues bonds, or when Congress passes budgets requiring those bonds to be issued.

The stakes are high on this one - it is deeply unlikely that the Treasury will disregard the debt ceiling and set of the inevitable constitutional crisis that would follow. But what about default? If the U.S. were to default on its debt, the fallout could make the financial Armageddon that was the financial crisis look like a minor nuisance, and we’re still trying to dig our way out of that one. And while it would seem unlikely that Congress would pull down the temple on top of themselves, the folks in the house have made a bad policy decision for penny wise, pound foolish political reasons before. And if you want to take a look at what policies and circumstances led to the debt level we currently (*ahem*) enjoy, here’s a helpful chart.

So, is Congress’s possible punt on the debt ceiling well analogized to the story of Sampson? I’d say there are a few major differences, two of which bear mentioning: first, Sampson didn’t build the temple that he destroyed, and second, Sampson knew full well the consequences of his actions.

<<< *An earlier version of this post indicated that the U.S. debt ceiling was established in 1939, when it was in fact established in 1917 by the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917. In 1939, the debt ceiling was revised to its modern iteration of an aggregate limit, applicable to nearly all debt of the U.S. Federal Government. Thank you to Bruce Bartlett for the clarification.>>>

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Permalink | Comments (4) | June 27, 2011 07:58

It Depends on what the Definition of "Is", Is; or perhaps "Of"

Posted by wlansden | Filed under ,
By James Bowden

Forget Black’s Law Dictionary; practitioners before the U.S. Supreme Court should stack their office shelves with every dictionary they can get their hands on, starting with a few published in 1789, according to this article by Adam Liptak. For those attorneys who don’t know who Adam Liptak is, you should learn – he writes for the New York Times on the Supreme Court, and does a fine job of it (he also has a special place in my heart for decrying the trend in SCOTUS opinions of great length that succeed only in their failure to clarify what the law is, which I think probably makes all of Justice John Marshall’s descendents cry).

The take away from the article is that, despite a good bit of academic and professional criticism, the Justices are turning more and more to the OED for legal guidance. Being a corporate attorney, however, instead of planning my next oral argument (tentatively scheduled for never) to begin with “The Oxford English Dictionary defines innocence as …” I’ve decided that perhaps the highest court in the land may appreciate it if I tinkered with the boilerplate defined terms that I use daily in transactional documents. Here goes nothing:

“Agreement” means this Purchase Agreement as from time to time amended, modified or supplemented in accordance with its terms, including the Exhibits and Schedules attached hereto.an arrangement that is accepted by all parties to a transaction.

“Contract” means any agreement, lease, sublease, license, sublicense, promissory note, evidence of indebtedness, or other contract to which any party is a party or which otherwise relates primarily to the Business as of the Closing:an agreement between two or more parties for the doing or not doing of something specified.

“Knowledge” means as to a particular matter, the actual knowledge of any Person on the date hereof after reasonable inquiry by such Person of officers, directors, employees of agents of the Parties or of any Affiliate of any Party with respect to the matters at hand.acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition: e.g., knowledge of many things.

“Permits” means all licenses, permits, franchises, rights, registrations, approvals, authorizations, consents, waivers, exemptions, releases, certificates of need, variances or orders of, or filings with, or otherwise issued by, any Governmental Authority.an authoritative or official certificate of permission; license: i.e., a fishing permit.

“Returns” means all reports, estimates, declarations, disclosures, information statements, claims for refunds and returns relating to, or required to be filed in connection with, any Taxes, including any schedules or attachments thereto, and including any amendments thereto.the act or fact of returning as by going or coming back or bringing, sending, or giving back: i.e., We should appreciate your return of the book immediately.

On second thought, maybe not.

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Permalink | Comments (1) | June 14, 2011 13:48

U.S. News and World Reports Provides Tips on Improving Young Attorney's Finances, Likely as Consolation for Encouring Tuition Expenses in the First Place

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By James Bowden

I’m a big climber. Not so much a social climber or a climber of the corporate ladder; a real climber. Climbing takes a little bit of muscle and a wee smidge of balance and endurance, but the main ingredient that makes a good climber is head space – how you control your thought process while they are on a wall. So far I’ve found the practice of law to be the same: the list of skills that a lawyer needs is a mile long, and each lawyer has them [in varying degrees], but what it takes to thrive in private practice is head space – how an attorney handles stress, workload, and the balance with the rest of their lives. Keeping the idea of attorney head space in mind, check out U.S. News and World Reports’ article on Money Tips for Young Lawyers. Yes, it would appear that the publication that tells young lawyers-to-be where their oodles of tuition dollars will best be spent each year is concerned whether the folks that follow their advice will be able to afford to subscribe following graduation. This probably shows good foresight, and probably more self-awareness on the part of the U.S. News staff than many rankings critics would like to give them credit.

The article really is quite good, and quite practical. I really like the suggestion that young lawyers pick a few nice things to treat themselves with – material possessions may not be the key to happiness, but splurging a little to make sure that something you need also ends up being something that you enjoy can be a good thing. Also, catching up on retirement savings is a huge one, and retirement savings really isn’t something that attorneys are known for. I’ve heard that partners used to operate with the expectation that the partnership would continue to support them into their golden years; anyone getting in the game today with that kind of expectation should expect to get laughed at, constantly.

It would be out of character for me not to quibble with a few things, though, and I just gotta be me.  My first little nit is that the article seems to understate the amount of student debt law school graduates commonly take on. A student financing their entire legal education, including living expenses, should probably expect more than $150,000 in student debt for their law degree alone upon graduation – and that number doesn’t include interest or undergraduate debt. Also, the interests rates on those loans are set by statute, with Stafford loans at 6.8% and GradPLUS loans at 8.5% (which is sheer usury at current market rates of interest). Folks who want to lock in a better interest rate are probably going to have a tough time, too, considering how few institutions are currently offering student loan consolidation and refinancing. The technical legal term for this is “getting hosed.” Oh, and a little note on the “benefits” provided by the 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act: the program for public interest loan forgiveness is a good deal … if you stick with it for the full 10 years. If you kick the public interest habit, though, negative amortization and the power of compound interest will leave you with far more debt than they had on graduation. Finally, the idea of spending carrying a balance on a credit card for celebrating at a bar made me cringe. My rule for use of credit cards is that it’s always better to be able to talk about where the money went than when the money went. Here is another highly technical term for folks who carry giant credit balances: they are “screwed.”

Still, I think the most valuable perspective this article provides is to think of finances as a part of your life’s plan, rather than as something to be managed (or, worse, avoided). Think about your life and your goals, and make your plans to match. Getting started as an attorney with big debts is a tough spot to be in; paying attention and making well calculated financial decisions will help decrease stress, and improve your head space. It may even make you a better attorney. Check out the article – it’s got some good hints.

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Permalink | Comments (1) | February 14, 2011 06:23

What I learned in Today's CLE

Posted by wlansden | Filed under ,
By James Bowden

One of the partners in Real Estate asked me to take notes at the CLE that we attended this morning, which was actually a really enjoyable and funny review of the 2010 Supreme Court Term.  So here is what you get when a partner in Real Estate asks a corporate associate to take notes on a CLE about appellate litigation.

Sean Carter styles himself a Humorist at Law.  Here is my takeaway of his takeaway of the major decisions of the 2010 Supreme Court Term [doodles redacted]:

  1. Citizens United v. FEC: This case stands for the proposition that any PPV ordered from a hotel room regarding Hillary is protected speech, and should be free of charge.
  2. U.S. v. Stevens: Men are interested in sick things, documentaries about which are protected by the First Amendment.
  3. Salazar v. Bruno: Mootness is when someone steals the cross.
  4. Bilski v. Kappos: In order to pass the “machine-or-transformation” test and thereby be eligible for a patent, an inventor must build a better mousetrap, or alternatively figure out how to dissolve the mouse. There may be exceptions to this rule, but since Bilski’s invention stinks, SCOTUS punts.
  5. Graham v. Florida: Texas being the perennial national champion of capital punishment, this case completely fails to resolve what “some realistic opportunity for release” is where a juvenile is sentenced to life in prison. Hook ‘em Horns. [Honestly, those are my notes.]
  6. Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project: “I am not going to talk about terrorism cases. Same plot every time – SCOTUS rules against the government, the government says ‘so what.’ Almost as consistent as a Ninth Circuit opinion being overturned.”
  7. Lewis v. City of Chicago: “Pay attention to a case where Justice Thomas votes for the black guy.” Sean Carter’s exact words. Apparently he and Justice “T” are tight: he has his cell phone number.
  8. Berghuis v. Smith: “No suspense – black guy loses.” Again, his words, not mine.
  9. McDonald v. City of Chicago: “Here’s what Justice Scalia and I have in common: we both think we are very smart. But Justice Scalia has better reasons for thinking that.” In Heller v. D.C. half way through the opinion Scalia realizes that some restrictions on arms are probably a good idea, and that certain people shouldn’t have guns. People like violent felons, Democrats, people adjudicated mentally insane, and anyone that he shares a subway car with, especially if that person is Dick Cheney. McDonald says the same rules apply on the El in Chicago. And everywhere else.
  10. Christian Legal Society v. Martinez: Anyone who went to law school knows that no one will come to your event if you don’t serve Pizza. CLS went to the Supreme Court to get their pizza money back from the school after excluding homosexuals, and lost. Speculation is that the University of California Hasting School of Law chapter of CLS is now defunct.
  11. City of Ontario v. Quon: Quon: “You looked at the text messages I sent to my wife and my girlfriend from my official phone? That’s a violation of my rights. You owe me millions of dollars, so my wife has something to take from me in the divorce. You can keep the texts I sent to her, by the way.” SCOTUS: “You lose, moron. Unanimous verdict of 10-0 [Ms. Quon also entered a vote on the matter].”
  12. Summary of the Kagan nomination hearings: “I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it is relevant to Supreme Court jurisprudence, and that if I do answer you won’t like me.”

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Permalink | Comments (1) | December 7, 2010 11:24

The Economist - A Day Late and a Dollar Short on the American Legal Market

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By James Bowden

The Economist has turned its watchful eye to the plight of recent law school graduates, those poor souls saddled with mountains of debt incurred to pay tuition that is rising faster than legal salaries in an economy that has been, uh, “difficult.” I’m going to take this opportunity to point out that the Young Lawyers Blog scooped The Economist on this story, twice: on the problem presented by ever-rising law school tuition and on the Law School Transparency Project, your humble practitioner-bloggers have been there first.

Not to say that griping about job prospects and salaries in a down economy is anything new. The byline on the Economist’s article, “Graduates of American law schools are finding that their chosen career is less lucrative than they had hoped,” made me laugh out loud. Working as a white water raft guide was less lucrative than I had hoped, too, but I got to wear sandals to work every day. Being a lawyer may not be the express elevator to generational wealth, but it has its fringe benefits – and you can definitely make a living doing it. I think the nugget that I’ve taken away from my law school experience and everything that has followed is that you should go to law school if you want to be a lawyer; if you just want to make money, or you don’t know what the heck you want to do, I’d advise you go on a spiritual journey, or alternatively start tinkering with transistors in your parent’s garage.

But thank you, Economist, for shedding your wisdom upon us, and especially for the shout-out to my alma mater. One more little note, though, from the Grammar Police: punctuation is included inside of quotation marks. Please note the correct punctuation as contained in this blog post, and conform future articles accordingly. Thx.

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Permalink | Comments (1) | November 19, 2010 11:27

Flying the Unfriendly Skies - Privacy in the Terminal Edition

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By James Bowden

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your next civil libertarian crusader (and fellow blogger-raconteur), John Tyner. Tyner, it seems, is a bit weary of new TSA screening measures which require airplane passengers to submit to either a full-body x-ray machine or a pat-down. For readers who are also Star Wars fans, this is akin to being forced to choose between exposing yourself to a decidedly obnoxious robot in R2-D2 or getting a pat-down from the decidedly creepy humanoid C-3PO; either way, the TSA comes off looking as if it should drive a van with no windows and sport a wispy mustache.

It also seems that Tyner might have help from the writers from The Daily Show. Gems like, "I don't think that the government has any business seeing me naked as a condition of traveling about the country," and "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" would liven up the driest court transcript. Which might be a possibility, because the TSA’s San Diego federal security director says that refusing to complete the screening process might land Tyner a $11,000 civil penalty, and cites a 9th Circuit Court decision in support.

Hrmmm. I’m just a humble corporate lawyer, so I don’t know much about “court decisions” and “Westlaw” and  “citation” and the like, but a little Googling uncovered a law review article by someone who apparently does, and the footnote on page 397 tipped me off to an interesting, more recent bit of 9th Circuit jurisprudence which refused to reach the issue of whether a passenger may refuse more intrusive searches in certain circumstances.  Methinks there may be a little less leeway as to what constitutes a permissible administrative search under the Fourth Amendment than the TSA is willing to admit (see? I read the articles I link to).

To be fair, my response to my first encounter with a full-body x-ray at the machine went a little differently than Tyner:

Me: “Cool, is that one of those full-body scanners?”

TSA Agent: “Yes.”

Me: “Hey, can you take my picture with it so I can see what it looks like?”

TSA Agent: “No.”

Me: “Come on. Why not?”

TSA Agent: “It doesn’t work.”

Me: [disappointed]

I am clearly not the average joe when it comes to this sort of thing. My attitude is that I’m more concerned with the government keeping track of my library books than I am with a government contractor getting a glimpse of the goods every here and there. But I digress.

The law review article that I linked to above suggests that the reasonableness of the search in the administrative setting changes with the public’s attitude towards the method of the search. [WARNING: CORPORATE ATTORNEY ATTEMPTING LAW REVIEW CITATION] Sara Kornblatt, Note, Are Emerging Technologies in Airport Passenger Screening Reasonable Under the Fourth Amendment? 41 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 395 (2007). I’m thinking the TSA might have read the note, because they are certainly mounting a little bit of a publicity campaign around the incident by linking to a recent CBS News poll from their home page. Since I clearly am out of the majority on this one, I’m curious what Young Lawyers Blog readers think. Take our [sort of, OK not really] scientific poll and let us know –

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Permalink | Comments (1) | November 16, 2010 12:59

The Nashville Bar, Where Poppies Grow

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By James Bowden

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns went silent on the western front. This morning a friend of mine reminded me that veterans are people who sign a blank check to their country, payable up to and including death. I haven’t ever drafted a promissory note with such gravity, but I share the bar with a few folks who have. I thought I’d try to pay them tribute on this Veterans Day.

Douglas Henry served in the Second World War, and received an honorable discharge. He returned to Tennessee, went to law school at Vanderbilt, and was elected to the Tennessee General Assembly in 1952. He still serves the state of Tennessee as State Senator for the 6th district, and was just elected last week for another 4 year term at the age of 83. As he said in his campaign commercial, there’s more for him to do. Rumor is that he writes a check in the amount of every cent the state pays him for per diem compensation to the Treasurer's office, and returns all campaign donations to donors if he runs unopposed, with interest.

Jim Neal was in the U.S. Marine Corp. in the Korean War. After he left the military, Jim went to Vanderbilt for law school and graduated first in his class. He served as Special Prosecutor in Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice, where he prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa, twice. After being convicted, Hoffa was heard to say that if he had to do it over again, he’d hire Jim Neal to defend him. Jim went on to defend Ford in the Pinto litigation and Exxon in the Valdez cases, and investigated the Watergate scandal and the Iran-Contra affair. Jim Neal died peacefully last month at the ripe age of 81; he leaves as part of his great legal legacy the law firm of Neal & Harwell, PLC, which boasts some of the best lawyers ever to come to the bar. We’ll all miss him.

Thomas Beasley earned his undergraduate degree from West Point and served in Vietnam, the Panama Canal Zone, and Nicaragua. He went to Vanderbilt for law school with a little bit of rare jewelry: a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor. Following law school he co-founded Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s leading correctional solutions company. He established a scholarship, the Thomas W. Beasley Scholarship, which is awarded to veterans of the U.S. armed forces, including those remaining on active status during law school.

Brett Carter went to law school at the University of Memphis and earned his LL.M. in tax from Georgetown. He also knows how to drive a tank; Brett is a commissioned JAG officer in the Tennessee National Guard and deployed to Iraq with the 278th RTC in 2004 and 2005, where he earned a Bronze Star. Waller Lansden is very proud to call him one of our own.

Scott Goldman graduated from Vanderbilt Law School the same day that I did. He’s an award-winning and academically accomplished young man who had the opportunity to have his pick of the most prestigious law firms in the country, but he went to boot camp instead. He’s a first lieutenant in the JAG corps now, showing his classmates the true meaning of success and dedication.

From the Young Lawyers Blog, thank you to all of our veterans, who walk through hell so the rest of us don’t have to follow in their boot-prints.

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Permalink | Comments (3) | November 11, 2010 08:43