Greenberg Traugig must retract its opinion letter to Florida Clerks of Court

The Herald got around to asking Hilarie Bass the Greenberg Traurig chair about the firm's ridiculous opinion letter that Clerks of Court in Florida are free to enforce an unconstitutional law. 

Ms Bass, in a bit of corporate doublespeak, declared that her firm supports same sex marriage, but that its opinion, actually written by some undistinguished bankruptcy lawyers in the Tallahasse office, was "based on Florida law."

The problem of course is that the opinion letter is an open invitation to nullify in 66 counties a judgment of a federal court. Judge Hinkle held that the law law, actually a provision of the Florida Constitution, is in conflict with the Equal Protection clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Under the Supremacy Clause that means it may not be enforced. 

The Attorney General of Florida defended the Florida ban and lost. She is the one state official who is authorized to represent the interests of the state when a challenge to the constitutionality of a state law is made. 

According to the Tallahasse bankruptcy geniuses at Florida's largest law firm, 66 more clerks need to be sued before marriage licenses may be issued in every county.  

Ms Bass was given an opportunity to say that the firm was reconsidering its abysmal legal advice. Instead she obfuscated the issue and tried to portray her firm as the victim of the law itself. 

This is simply not acceptable. Most GT lawyers which include many of the best in this state know that the opinion letter is an affront to federalism and that its reasoning misstates the law. Enough is enough. 

Best op-ed paragraph in history

"One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole."

The Lost Island

The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Recipe for disappointment, August 12, 2014 This review is from: The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel (Hardcover) Pour two cups of Homer into a medium saucepan Add a dash of King Kong. Sprinkle with the Origin of the Species. Stir. Set on medium heat for an hour. Allow to cool. Next mix in a tablespoon of James Hilton. Then add five pounds of pure baloney, finely chopped. Stir again and half bake at 350 degrees for the seven hours it takes you to finish reading this convoluted mess. Serve with embarrassment.

Religion and the Supreme Court

No Catholic served on the Supreme Court until 1836 when Chief Justice Taney assumed the bench. After his death in 1864 none were appointed again until 1894. Justice Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, was confirmed in 1916.

The present composition of the Supreme Court is six Catholics and three Jews. The problem isn't their religion it is that an alignment of five male a Catholic justices on an important Constitutional issue which happens to coincide with the traditional anathema of the Roman Catholic Church to contraception in the Hobby Lobby case undermines public confidence that the federal courts are judicial and not political institutions.

HL actually presents an expansion of First Amendment rights which I might have welcome in another context. However, in thee context of religious zeal today, it will spawn litigation whose aim is to authorize discrimination against gays, women, Muslims, and even Jews. Like Citizens United, another opinion radically upending traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, HL was a mistake for which our nation will long suffer the consequence.

 

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Why I do what I do for a living

A friend of mine posted on Facebook an account of a young fellow South Floridian who is graduating from college and high school this weekend at age 16. She is African-American and has somehow become an iconic figure among conservatives. What I objected to was my friend's use of her achievement to claim that "liberals" a group which includes me apparently, think that Aferican Americans are victims who have no capacity to achieve success on their own. 

This is my response:

What I have fought for is equal opportunity. I have seen that no matter one's race, creed, color, sexual orientation, disability, or  gender we all pretty much aspire to the same things-good jobs, good educations for our children, comfortable homes, and respect from our neighbors. 

The problem is that doors open easier if you are a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male like you and I are. I usually refer to people like us as having been given the keys to the Kingdom.  

When an individual can achieve something special in spite of having to pull harder to open that door or having to kick it in, I always wonder what he or she could have achieved without such obstacles. Some, I am convinced, would achieve far less for the struggle against discrimination may have inspired them onward. For many however, our society is lesser for we have prevented our fellow Americans from reaching their true potential. 

So please do not presuppose that my commitment to justice and opportunity is because I lack faith individual achievement. Rather I mourn its suppression. That is why I have spent my professional career helping fellow human beings kick doors down.

Slogans

We often credit slogans more than thought itself. The reason for that is that they contain elements of truth. Here is a discussion with my boarding school roommate Bill about how freedom is maintained.

 

Blood and freedom

• Bill Watson Let's hope we stay that way, but that type of freedom has always been purchased and maintained with blood. I wonder if it will always continue to be.
  
• Ware Cornell That expression about purchasing and maintaining freedom and blood strikes me as a slogan which overstates the value of armed conflict and understates the value of the third branch of government. I actually work to maintain freedom. Our system of laws and our adherence and respect for those laws puts everybody on the same page. The fascists gave lots of blood for their cause. The Russians lost 20 million citizens and did not gain freedom until 1989. Very few died then.
• Bill Watson Yes, but there will always be the Adolph Hitlers who can be defeated no other way but by the shedding of blood. You cannot assume that everyone will always have adherence to and respect for law. It they did, there would be no need for a military or, indeed, a domestic police force. You can make all the laws you want, but when it comes down to brass tacks, a willingness to shed blood to protect those laws must be in place or the law is nothing but a piece of paper. That's just the way it is.
  
• Ware Cornell Bill, my point is that it's just a slogan. The Soviets had very advanced written Constitutions and their laws were scraps of paper when it came to individual liberties. But they also fought furiously against the Germans in World War II. It wasn't that blood that made their laws meaningless, and we cannot brush off the patriotism of the Russian people. The reality is that it is something far more complex than the text of laws or the patriotism of a people that will determine whether laws and liberties will be respected.
  
  In America I point to the Civil War. We in the South believed that the danger to our way of life was in Washington and we separated from the Union and as a result over 600,000 of of countrymen died. That bloodshed, futile from the Southern cause's perspective, was in fact necessary to cement the Union. Within ten years of the end of the Civil War we were truly one nation, a nation which sixty five years later, along with our Allies including Russia, would save the world.
  
  The Civil War settled in blood a Constitutional question: is this country one sovereign or is it a compact amount fifty sovereign states?. This is why I get so upset with people like Rick Perry, who try to stir up the "base" with talk about secession when he doesn't like certain laws. john C Calhoun tried this and thirty years later we paid dearly for that arrogance.
  
  The Civil War also undercuts your hypothesis somewhat. Lincoln had to fight. There was no other choice once Beauregard shelled a federal fort. But our ancestors did not have to fight. Our insistence that laws were pieces of paper had tragic consequences. What of the blood of our mistaken ancestors? Inadvertently, it advanced our freedom. Out of it we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, without compensation. We also got the Fourteenth Amendment which applied the Bill of Rights to the states.
  
  This is America and we are governed by laws which our federal and state legislatures have passed. They are not pieces of paper. They are the collective will of our fellow citizens and it is our courts, not a bunch of self-sytled "patriots", which stand to protect us from tyrannical acts of the majorities.

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The Target

A plot trick often used in the thriller writing game is to string three or four separate threads together with only the most tenuous connect. It delivers that roller coaster ride that makes thrillers thrill. In The Target featuring Will Robie and Jessica Reel, CIA fixers which is to say at times they kill for America.

The Target opens on Alabama's death row and hurls us to Paris, Pyongyang, rural Alabama, New York City and Nantucket. Robie and Reel prove almost invincible, which is to say they need help at times. We meet their counterpart, a young North Korean assassin, a Tinman-like operative only too well aware she no longer has a heart. Jessica's own awful past is revealed in pages you cannot put down. Weak and delusional leaders in the United States and North Korea make tragic blunders which create a context for all that follows.

After a poor outing with King and Maxwell (King & Maxwell), a book seemingly designed to promote a cable series, it is good to see David Baldacci at his best. Unlike some popular thriller writers, Baldacci writes his own stuff. And like the trial lawyer he was, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. The verdict on the Target is clear. It is a huge win!

A young nation

In 1815 the United States was a large and young republic. Its political life was still heavily influenced by the founding fathers, one of whom James Madison was faced with the prospect of rebuilding the seat of government following the burning of the Executive Mansion, the Congress and the Library of Congress by British forces. A coat of white paint was put on the Executive Mansion which quickly and forever became known as the White House. 

While Madison may have been the father of the Constitution, he was a very mediocre President, who led his country into a war so senseless that the decisive battle was fought at New Orleans weeks after a peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. The slowness of communications in 1815 was thus a reality that contributed to political and military events, and cost thousands of lives. By 1848, America had domestic telegraphs and railroads, and transatlantic steam ships that cut weeks if not months off the crossing. 

The United States by 1848 occupied most of what is now called the lower 48, the last piece in southern Arizona and New Mexico being acquired in 1853 by treaty instead of conquest. America was a land divided and the politics of slavery and anti-slavery dominated a nation well on its way to becoming the 19th century version of a global superpower. 

This is a comprehensive account of thirty three of the most important years in American history. It covers the social. economic, religious, intellectual, literary, political and military events of that era. It recounts with foreboding gloom the political and economic miscalculations that would lead in less than two decades to both the near-destruction and rebirth of "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Those were the days

What follows is a post on the creation of a new student newspaper in the spring of 1970 at Emory:

Rodney Derrick asked me to explain the events the led to the creation of the Emory New Times.

In the spring of 1970, two candidates for editor of the Wheel, Steve Johnson and Randy Bugg, sought election by the Publications Board.

We had all been friends but these were difficult times. Kent State occurred just about the same time as the election and there was not a lot of studying going on, particularly among the people on the Wheel staff.

Steve won, but only after Dean Don Jones, a Bugg supporter, had to leave the meeting. The election begat an actual trial before some sort of student court, and Johnson again prevailed. Randy had a lot of influence within the newly elected SGA and we were able to split the SGA funding between the Wheel and the newly established New Times. Randy was the first editor, and Calder Sinclair was the second the following year.

The Bugg faction however favored the traditional newspaper model of straight news and with opinions presented only on the editorial pages. The Johnson faction was very much in favor of a newspaper along the model of the underground papers like Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird. Despite these differences in style, politically we were all opposed to the war in Vietnam, the biggest issue of the day

The best writer on either staff was Carl Hiaasen, who was a freshman in the fall of 1970. Carl only went to Emory for two years before transferring to Florida.

The New Times merged back with the Wheel several years later. All of the people at the heart of the schism had long since graduated.

The New Times had several staffers who went on to significant journalistic careers. Gail Bronson, for instance, was a national reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

Pulling back the curtain on the Wizards of Wall Street

Suppose you are a small investor and you decide to place an order online to buy a thousand shares of a stock. You have researched the stock carefully and you are planning on holding it for the foreseeable future. You press the send button on your iPad and your order goes to your broker. The broker then becomes obligated to place your order and buy it at the lowest price being offered on as many as fifty stock exchanges and “dark pools,” essentially private exchanges operated by banks and brokerages.

Unknown to you, your broker has sold its stream of orders to a High Frequency Trader (“HFT”)who intercepts your order and buys up the 1000 shares you want at one price and sells it to you for five cents a share higher than it was available less than a second earlier. Your broker, who has sold the information stream to a HFT, has just cost you $50 and you have no idea. Repeat this process millions of times an hour, and pretty soon the real effects become clear. Investors are being cheated out of billions of dollars and don't even know it because the cheating takes place in a tenth of the time it takes to blink your eye.

How sucessful is HFT? These firms all close out their accounts at the end of each day. Some HFTs have never sustained a loss in any trading day.

Flash Boys is the story of the systematic fixing of stock exchanges world wide by HFTs, brokerages, banks and regulators. It happened largely because the urge to game a system accelerates in direct proportion to the possibility of detection. What this possibility so low is because of speed of transactions and the complicity, both claculated and inadvertent, of the governmental regulators and so-called institutional fiduciaries in the looting. If industry watchdogs are willing to help you steal, you are going to continue stealing.

This is also the story of how a few Wall Street D-Listers mainly from the Royal Bank of Canada New York trading office set out to understand why the market was acting strangely. The result was the creation of a new stock exchange transparent in its operation which is technologically and morally resistant to these kind of manipulations.

As a lawyer, I can assure you that there will be litigation. Michael Lewis has opened the curtain on the Wizards of Wall Street in this most important book. 

As always, if you liked my review, tell Amazon. The link is below. 

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZXQ545IFP33K/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

SanDisk 128GB Extreme Pro USB 3.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ88-128G-G46)

128GB is a lot. In fact it is precisely one half the solid state drive of my Apple MacBook Pro ME293LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display (NEWEST VERSION). The problem with large capacity flash drives has been time required to transfer data onto the flash drive.

This flash drive is different. Because it has a USB 3.0 connector, it has transfer speeds 60 times transfers to the conventional USB 2.0 drives. In time USB 3.0 will become the standard. Until then, it is nothing short of amazing to have the capacity to download full length movies to a flash drive in seconds.

This is a review from Amazon. If you like it, please go to my review at http://www.amazon.com/review/R1TVGQWMBECVEY/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00HR7FWUC  and click helpful. 

The product was furnished to me through the Amazon Vine program. 

Courthouses where I have tried cases

• Miami State Main
• Miami Federal Dyer Building
• Miami Federal Atkins Building
• Miami Federal King Building
• Miami Bankruptcy Pepper Building
• Miami Federal Ferguson Building
• Fort Lauderdale State
• Fort Lauderdale Federal
• West Palm Beach State Old
• West Palm Beach State New
• West Palm Beach Federal Rogers
• Sarasota State Old
• Tampa Federal Old
• Tampa Federal New
• Orlando Federal Old
• Orlando Federal New
• Taverns State Circuit
• Veto Beach State Old

Courthouses are all different. The list above reflects courthouses where I have actual tried cases. I have been in many others usually for hearings, but sometimes a deposition in a small town will be taken in a courthouse and even in a courtroom. 

The courtrooms withIn courthouses varry from the grand, like the Central courtroom in the Dyer Building in the Soutern District of Florida to the musty like the North courtoom in the same courthouse to the godaful like the elipical courtrooms in the Atkins Building next door. The worst elipical courtroom has been closed. On the third floor of the Broward County Courthouse was a place so perfectly geometrical where whispered conferences at counsel tables might be projected and dropped into the jury box. 

There are four named courthouses in The Miami Division of the Southern District, named respectively for Judges David Dyer, C. Clyde Atkins, James Lawrence King, and Wilkie Ferguson. I knew each of these judges and tried cases before the last three. judge Dyer was on the Court of Appeals by he time I was admitted to the bar, but I argued before him in both the old Fifth Circuit and our present Eleventh Circuit. 

The Wilkie Ferguson courthouse is decent and new. The best courtrooms are in the King Buiding. Full of rich mahogany, I feel like Perry Mason in those courtrooms. 

I worked in the Dyer Building in 1976 and 1977. It's full of mold and asbestos. It's still one of my favorite courthouses. We used to find slaughtered goats around the building when we came to work. Family members on the outside would leave these sacrifices to ward of evil spirits on sentencing day. 

An enhanced picture of the Dyer building. 

Cross examination, the young lawyer and the security's guard

Pearl Comments (9) Cross Examination and the Security Guard by warecornell; submitted on 15-Aug-02 in Learning category Average Rating:  4.59 (22 Votes) Send To A Friend Print This Pearl Add To Scrapbook Some judges are hell on young lawyers. This is to be expected since young lawyers make mistakes and are not as familiar as seasoned trial lawyers with the rules of procedure and rules of evidence. A great deal of the art of advocacy relates to having a reputation with judges. Lawyers can have good and bad reputations. What judges most want to know about you is whether or not your word can be trusted. Secondly, if they do whatever it is you are asking them to do, they would like to believe you can support them on appeal. Consequently, lawyers who have not been before a judge a great deal, which is to say new lawyers, usually will not find a judge willing to take a chance on them. Louis Weissing was a Circuit Judge in Fort Lauderdale. He was one of those kinds of judges who took a great deal of pride in his office, and always tried to do what the law required. He was not particularly hard on young lawyers, but he left no doubt that he expected them to prove worthy of his trust. One of my first trials as a young lawyer was on behalf of a lady who slipped and fell in an elevator. My boss, Gene Heinrich was a terrific trial lawyer. We were going against Charlie Kessler, another able and experienced guy. I asked Gene to help me pick the jury, and from that Judge Weissing apparently assumed Gene and Charlie would be doing battle in his courtroom. He praised both of them extensively in his introductory remarks to the jury panel. Nonetheless he got me instead as Gene left to do other things. I was trying my little heart out, and Judge Weissing was buying some but not all of it. In the middle of the trial he excluded a whole lot of evidence that he had previously admitted telling the jury to disregard it. This just made me work harder and harder. At some point the defense puts on a very elderly security guard who testifies about the accident scene when he found the plaintiff. After listening to him, I realized he was quite wrong about some crucial details, which I could have cleared up with the photographs which were in evidence. Instead I tried a more flamboyant approach. In Francis Wellman’s great book The Art of Cross-Examination written around the end of the nineteenth century is a cross examination of a police officer. At the police academy trainees are taught that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Using the police officer’s own recollection of the class, the cross-examiner attempts to cast doubt on harmful eye-witness testimony. Now as I said, I had photographs which would have shown him he was wrong, but basically I wanted to show off. The cross-examination of the security guard went something like this: Q Now I believe you testified you were a policeman in New York City, is that right? A Yes I was for more than twenty years. Q Now when you joined the police force did you have to attend the police academy? A Yes sir Q Do you recall taking a course in police identification techniques at the police academy? A Yes sir Q While taking the course do you recall an incident when someone broke into the classroom during the lecture and maybe fire a blank pistol and then ran out? A No sir, if he did he would be in real trouble with the sergeant. Q No sir I am talking about as an experiment in the class… A The sergeant would be really upset. Q Sir I am not asking you about the sergeant, I am… THE COURT Move on to a different area, counsel. During a break Judge Weissing was out in the hall smoking a cigarette, talking with the lawyers. I told him, “Judge, I wished you hadn’t cut me off, that was a classic cross-examination I was trying to do.” Judge Weissing looked at me. “Ah hell, Ware, I know what you were trying to do. I read the same damn book. But what you don’t know is that when that guy was at the police academy, the only thing they taught him was how to use a rubber hose.” We lost the case and but then reversed Judge Weissing because of the evidence he excluded. See Firth v. Marhoefer, 406 So.2d 521 (Fla. 4th DCA 1981). After that trial and appeal, I was a member of the club. After all, reversing a judge in a case is another good way to show that you can support him on appeal if he rules for you.

One of my first Amazon reviews

One of first books I reviewed on Amazon was Francis Wellman's The Art of Cross Examination.  My review on September 17,1998 follows:

Twenty years ago as a young lawyer I tried a case with one of my firms partners, who was in his eighties. He let me try the case, and we received a rather just decision from the court. I was quite proud of myself, only to learn from my boss that the senior partner felt that my style of cross examination was ineffective at best.
I determined to learn all I could about effective cross examination. The first book I read was also the last- Wellman's The Art of Cross Examination. Although the book was writen around the turn of the century, it contains a treasure trove of illustraions about different kinds of cross examination. How to Cross Examine the Hostile Witness, the Lying Witness , the scientific Witness, the Truthful Witness (the hardest job of all)
The book is a true today as it was 95 years ago.

There is a Kindle version of this classic for 99¢. And the classic is now 111 years old. 

Missing You

When Harlan Coben writes a stand-alone book, odds are it will feature the reunion of long lost loves. These reunions aren't all they are cracked up to be in at least one of the lovers minds as there is some deep dark and disturbing secret which coupled with character flaws puts someone's life in danger.

Kat Donovan is a Manahattan detective. The daughter of a legendary cop, killed in the line of duty, she is lonely and very much alone. Eighteen years earlier her father died and her fiancé Jeff left her. Since then her friends dispaired until someone got the bright idea of giving her an internet dating membership.

And there online Kat sees Jeff- older, grayIng and widowed. Her heart skips and she sends him an email. Can true love be rekindled?

Jeff's reaction to her however is surprisingly indifferent. Has he moved on so far as to forget what they once had? But then the mere act of reaching out to Jeff leads Kat into a major missing persons case. Along he way, she enlists the help of an odd group of irregulars-a kid missing his mom, several cross-dressers, and some members of organized crime.

It's not very realistic, but it certainly holds your attention.

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