Hearsay

By Stephen Anderson
Editor 

Cites for sore eyes

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”)
Of course, Emerson made that erudite observation in his youth, 172 years ago – well before the proliferation of news media and their annual scrambles to best each other in epochal glorification of events of the most recent year.
For us optimists, who are nostalgic about the future, these forays into the past are of little use other than as snippets of history that, if ignored, we might be condemned to repeat.
As the chronometer clicked over from 2007 to 2008, newspapers bursted with lists of the least forgettable public occurrences of the past 12 months, and surveys of the top 10 or 25 most egregious peccadilloes of spoiled millionaires.
Then what to our wondering eyes should appear but one annual listing that focused a softer light, if not faint praise, on the bench and bar of Illinois.
Madison County has continued its decline in notoriety as a “judicial hellhole” that began in 2005 and, in fact, has been upgraded from the American Tort Reform Foundation hit list to merely the watch list.
Having been number one on the ATRF hellhole hit list from 2002 to 2004, the 3rd Circuit dropped to number four two years ago and, through no fault of its own, to number six in 2006.
“Continued progress in restoring judicial fairness led by Chief Judge Ann Callis and Judge Daniel Stack, combined with substantial drops in the filing of class action, asbestos and large claims,” was cited as ample cause for moving Madison County to merely a watch list, along with St. Clair County.
A Wall Street Journal online blog jumped in with commentary that began, “Talk about a backhanded compliment!” It went on to credit Judge Callis, deservedly, for establishing rules that prohibit plaintiff lawyers from judicial forum shopping, require mediation of medical malpractice lawsuits, and refer smaller cases for ADR.
(It also appended the chief judge’s photo, to which one blogger responded facetiously, “Judge Callis is hot!” Another asked, “Are you single?”)
In contrast, unfortunately, the ATRF ranks Cook County at number three on the hit list and “the last standing judicial hellhole in Illinois,” due in part for being host to “a disproportionate number of the state’s large civil cases.”
Disproportionate? Might that have something to do with Cook County being the largest unified court system in the nation, with as many lawyers, litigants, judges and courtrooms as the rest of the state combined? Just asking.

One in a million lawyers?

So, Time magazine has named Vladimir Putin its “2007 Person of the Year.” One might wonder about the selection criteria, beyond Time’s citation of Putin’s leadership in stabilizing Russia’s chaotic economy.
Whatever good has befallen the struggling, post-communist nation, however, has come at the expense of free speech and news media, an independent judicial system and the civil liberties of 141 million people.
For Putin to get that caliber of honorific seems as untenable as naming Alberto Gonzales, our erstwhile attorney general who fired eight district attorneys for political differences, as the “2007 Lawyer of the Year.”
But wait. Didn’t the American Bar Association just do that? Well, yes and no. The ABA Journal, having almost a million lawyers to pick from, announced on Dec. 12 that it was, indeed, giving Gonzales that coveted title.
Before the ink had dried, however, a wave of incredulity among ABA members and news media caused the Journal to change the nomenclature two days later to “Newsmaker of the Year.”
In a negative sense, that might seem appropriate for Gonzales. But a quick perusal of ABA’s list of also-rans reveals more positive candidates: among them U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the fictional “Michael Clayton,” as portrayed by George Clooney.
The incongruity of giving legal acclaim to a person being probed by Congress for perjury and obstruction is manifested by the ABA Journal’s perhaps premature designation of a “2008 Legal Newsmaker of the Year” yet to come.
It is none other than new Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The magazine predicts that Mukasey will generate notable news “as he deals with the problems he inherited from Gonzales in the politically charged climate of a presidential election year.”
Give the Journal staff credit for editorial independence and, we hope, prescience. In his clarifying mea culpa, the editor noted that published articles are not reviewed by any ABA authority higher than himself.

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