Law School
I got back to the US in time to start studying at Columbia Law School. The timing was very close. There were only ten days between my return and the day I began school. I was living in Larchmont at the time and commuted by train to Columbia at 108th Street and Broadway. I remember the Dean welcoming the class and saying that because of the tremendous over supply of lawyers beginning school, that unless we had a family law firm to go into, or the FBI, we should think twice. It certainly made no difference to most of the people there, because with all of the work it took to get into a law school of that quality, nobody was about to give it up. The courses I remember most distinctly were on the development of legal institutions with a Dr. Goebbel. He went back to the origins of law, the origins of writs and motions that make up the Anglos Saxon background. For example a writ of Habeas Corpus might trace back to the Roman era. Certain writs were traced back to the middle ages and of course our consensus opinion was ‘Why do we have to know all of this?’ Those who voiced this question were told in no uncertain terms that they weren’t being taught just to be clerks in the law, but to understand the background of law in order to be prepared, and teach us to be judges, and needed the background of law to be prepared. The course itself was composed of mimeographed sections not numbered in any consecutive order, not numbered as to particular date, but loose sections about different writs and laws and the background of the law. The professor worked in the classroom with two or three hundred students. He walked around the back of the class and pounced on people and asked them particular questions about a particular point. In many cases a lot of the students were not sure which mimeographed section he was referring to and it was very embarrassing when he pursued the question over and over.
I met some fellow students from Larchmont who were going to law school with me, one ended up as a judge, another as the director of personnel at R.H. Macy. I did not end up that well by comparison. We took these mimeographed sections and developed our own continuity and in effect made up a course by ourselves producing a mimeographed paper summarizing the pages we had received like a table of contents for a book. We each took a group of sections home with us and we summarized the sections we had taken and then we reported back. We developed a course curriculum that turned out pretty well as we eventually discovered on our final exam. The fellow who eventually became a judge scored an A minus, I fearing the worst because I couldn’t stay up with that course received a B plus, and was very pleased. However I don’t know if any of them have ever used their knowledge of the development of legal institutions. But it certainly was a good introduction to the law. Other courses included real property, real estate, criminal law, contact law and methods of pleading. This was the beginning summary of the very extensive courses we took in the following two years. I do remember one contract course taught by a professor named David Llewellyn, who had transferred from another college. He called his book on contract law “The Bramble Bush”. What he did very successfully was to summarize contract law into some actual cases with different circumstances, and very frankly made the contract course easier due to his ability as a teacher. While I was at Columbia Law School there was a class election. I selected as my candidate Wendell Wilkie’s son who came from the Middle West, always wore a blue serge suit which became shiny after a while. The other candidate was a man named Sam Davis who came from the lower east side of NYC. He knew Yiddish, which is spoken by Jewish immigrants and he also knew Latin in which he had been was trained by the Catholic Church. His Irish charm won the election and he went ahead as president of the class, and eventually married a daughter of the Horn & Hardart restaurant chain. He and I became good friends after that and I was not so unhappy that my candidate lost.
In the mean time things that were happening to my father did not make me happy at all. I remember taking one of our paintings to the presiding partner at one of the larger law firms in the field. When I asked my father why I was doing this, he replied that he was just loaning him the picture to see how he liked it, and it was only on a trial basis. I later learned that this was to raise money for a mortgage payment that was past due. The following day, my father and I had a serious talk. He told me about the disciplinary procedure that he faced in the federal court, having to do with a case in which he had been involved for several years. The charge was that he had made a deal with another attorney to split a fee based on the results of the case. The unusual part of this was that the fee supposedly involved with the other attorney was very small, compared to the very large fee my father would have gotten for three years work concerning the bankruptcy committee hearings on the Hotel Governor Clinton. For a smart man it would have been stupid to jeopardize this fee for the extra money he might have made on a separate deal with this other attorney.
At about this time my father had to go to New England to try a case, the most important case of his life. The Federal Judge, Robin Patterson had suspended my father from the practice of law and appointed a referee to hear the case as to whether he should be disbarred. I knew he had troubles; at this point the enormity of these troubles finally hit me.
The legal case itself was held in a small schoolhouse in Framingham, Massachusetts. The presiding Judge, Philip Woolsey who was famous for his ruling on the James Joyce case, for his Ulysses classic novel. My father had two fine lawyers from a large law firm and of course the Federal Government had their own group of lawyers.
The gist of the case was that my father represented two owners of the Hotel Governor Clinton, who were going into bankruptcy. They had made a sweetheart deal with a tenant known as Terminal Barber Shop to get their lease back in the hotel which had gone bankrupt. Supposedly an offer was made by the attorneys for the barber shop to get their lease back, but my father said he never saw the offer, and in turn he made a deal with the lawyer whose fee was based on how much he could save on the original lease value of the barber shop and what they would finally settle for. When you say barber shop it may sound petty, but it was a barber shop with twenty chairs, and four or five manicurists. It was a good sized operation. Judge Woolsey found for my father and sent the papers back to Judge Patterson. Judge Patterson took no more than 72 hours to read the papers which amounted to over 300 pages of transcript of testimony, and without any comment to his referee, he disbarred my father.
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"LIFE IN THE MARGIN" by Morton Gladstone