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“Six Flags cannot take the fright out of Fright Fest, just as baseball teams cannot remove their bats and balls without fundamentally changing the game,” the opinion reads.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1690823?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-06-21&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=0?copied=1

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LP Somerville Here’s a link to my post comparing my memories of LP to jury selection in the trial of Sid Hatfield.

LP Somerville and Sid Hatfield

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But the author suggests the truth is essentially different. It isn’t important to see him as a player on either of those teams. Cash practiced what Foley calls the “politics of empathy”, the simple art of being able to see things from another person’s perspective. The stories of his family rising out of the Depression in Dyess, Arkansas are legendary: the journey from sharecropper to cotton farming landowners was back-breaking and set him on his course.

Trial lawyers tell the same kind of stories in court that Cash did in song. We ask jurors to put themselves in another’s shoes and do a little justice on the way.

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[Aside] He was an honest man, and a good
bricklayer.

It was not his most famous line from Henry VI, Part 2, but at least it’s a positive contribution to the plot. In the end, we want people to like and respect us. Reputation is an important – but not the only – thing.

These are extraordinary times. The J6 hearings yesterday focused on the Department of Justice and how the Attorneys General there responded to the pressure applied to them by the country’s leader to overturn a national election. It made me think of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI. The hearing also made me proud to be a lawyer. Not in the sense that DOJ lawyers were heroes – they clearly were not. They could have come forward at the time – when our democracy’s knees were buckling – and told the Congress what was happening. Or they could have stepped forward as Impeachment witnesses. After all, they don’t represent the President and there is no privilege to protect. But they did not. At least they didn’t save it for a book advance (like some of the non-lawyers).

Back in 2018, I wrote a post called The Lost Badge Of Innocence. Looking back on it is kind of cringeworthy. My writing style changed a lot over the last few years (I worked hard on it). But I still like this part.

My family’s Appalachian experience is a composite of Catholic and Protestant steel foundry workers, circuit riders, train flagmen, coal miners and barons, lawyers, teachers, car salesmen, card sharks, and housewives. We are descendants of early American settlers, farmers, merchants, Revolutionary and Civil and Spanish-American War soldiers. We brokered steel, commanded Navy vessels, prosecuted rural crime, led communities and traveled the world seeking adventure. These American ancestors are, in turn, hodgepodge heirs of European descent: English tanners, Irish horse thieves, Flemish dyers and one or two “touched” uncles hiding in castle towers in the European tradition.

Dick the Butcher’s staged advice about “killing all the lawyers” was more than a little cynical and, for a King, certainly self-serving. Even back-handed compliments are compliments, after all. And when you think about it, there may be an implied put-down when Dick opines on the honesty of “good bricklayers”. At the end of the day (or the play), the best characters are, in fact, characters – real, human, and full of contradictions and surprises.

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Lawyers’ war stories typically revolve around raucous and sometimes hilarious exaggerations (or not) of tumult and upset: epic fits and crying jags … confusion or hysterical screaming, crying, or babbling … horrifying threats and recriminations. All the better when those are punctuated with an impossibly favorable result for the client. Or maybe that’s just the lawyers I run with.

In truth, most consequential work is done in the still of silence – surrounded by stacks of books (or their digital equivalent piled up under tabs on a monitor), yellow-lined notepads filled with scribblings, and Post-It notes flying around the room. These are the moments that produce epiphanies that fuel the fire of good war stories that occur later. Without the quiet work, there would be no war story. Not one worth telling anyway.

Father’s Day just passed and I spent a lot of time remembering my Dad and all the great stories we used to share. I miss him.

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For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by US Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance. This withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not withdraw into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

That handsome dandy on the left in the turn of the century photo is Lawrence Purdy (LP) Somerville from Ravenswood, West Virginia. He was my great grandfather on Mom’s side. A lot has been made lately of Appalachia mountain culture – Hillbilly Elegy has been on the NYT bestseller list for a while now. That book isn’t the  first to fetishize mountain folk and it won’t be the last. But assuming book sales ain’t gonna change their lot, you can ignore them at your peril. All you have to do is look in LP’s eyes in that photo to know I’m not lying. When a Union got busted, he crawled into the mines as a ‘scab’ – knowing the additional dangers that posed. And just like in a Dean Woodrell story or a Drive-By Truckers song, if it suited him he’d dig a hole for you too.

When confronted with a seemingly intractable problem, I like to wonder what my ancestors would have done. Besides diggin’ a hole.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon wrote about a secret society using a surreptitious mail system called “WASTE” to communicate – cans with cantilevered lids marked WASTE were scattered under the city’s elevated highways and the secret mail was picked up and dropped off in these cans. The secret symbol for this network was the ‘post horn’ – tattooed on the hands of the initiated and stamped on the letters and packages they sent to one another.

Pynchon’s fantasy dystopia would be a welcome comfort here now. The evidence is mounting that foreign adversaries continue to attack our democratic process from the inside, using social media to exploit our differences. The unprecedented levels of acrimony and partisanship erupted last week when the President released a partisan memo summarizing classified documents the authors had never seen – against the express warnings of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

How it lingers. This question of a Government alienated from the people it purports to represent – a broken thing. And what to do about it. The tea party and occupy movements can both be seen as outgrowths of the same question. The news today makes you wonder whether to give in and, if not, what to do.

In a blog last June (Common Sense) I wrote that

Today, our Government is in disarray – polarized by hostile political forces that seem determined to tear one another apart. The news every day reveals some fresh shocking horror that nobody could have expected. The one constant trying to steer our society back on course? The Constitution as applied by and through our Courts, Judges and our lawyers. From Preet Bharara to Sally Yates to James Comey and the lawyers fighting out Constitutional challenges to the recent Immigration executive orders – lawyers are proving themselves to be the beating heart of our democracy.

Then a month later, in July (The Weight)

On most days, I’m relatively impressed that our institutions have not crumbled or even buckled much under the pressure – especially Branch3. But it’s only July.

Now it is February 2018 and we seem closer to a constitutional crisis than ever. You either go back to bed and pull the family quilt over your head or do something. “Shit er git off the pot,” as the Somervilles liked to say.

Business men, they drink my wine
Plowman dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
Hey, hey

All Along The Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix

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Specialty services were not available for weeks and required a three-hour drive (each way). We got that consultation done Monday and the MRI helped us identify a bone infection that can be cleared up with a long course of antibiotics. Along with temporary prednisone, this has Eddy back on his feet. We are expecting a full recovery. He’s 12 and the high cost of all this care will be well worth it. I watched him resting comfortably at my feet this morning for the first time in almost a month and it made me feel tremendously blessed.

Also, it felt good to get out of town … Chuck Taylors and out of my own head for a few hours … and away from work. Contributing to the wellness of someone beloved in your family is a privilege, not a burden.

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