SPEAKING OF JUDGES,
WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING? Michael
Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where
Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on
the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of
Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest. I was happy to see that age has not mellowed
our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost anything off his
fastball. Chotiner asked, “How well did
you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac,
we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds. So you got to know your section very
well. But I didn’t know who Scalia was
until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal
Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart. It is 1960.
We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this
guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long
dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and
take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew,
if you were a black defendant, forget it.
And this went on for about three weeks.
I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that
guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’ And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to
be black in the South?’ A bright guy –
yeah. But he was to the right of Marie
Antoinette for Christ’s sake. There was
no consistency in his so-called philosophy.
Money is corporate speech. This
is all preposterous.” I strongly recommend
you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/michal_dukakis_on_the_bush_family_antonin_scalia_and_donald_trump
WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT,
COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts attorney
general, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret
McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways. A nod of her head during a conversation over
coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it. It’s not hard to see why she may have been
interested. Coakley is a good and honest
person. No doubt she was sincerely
sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be out of work. But that sorrow would not have kept Coakley, or most
people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna. Most everyone in that situation would have
reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone
is going to replace her, so why not me? And by now everyone who follows the news is familiar with the story of the embattled university president
who survived a coup attempt. On Jan. 29,
you will recall, the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president
Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations
with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has
the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to
a (never identified) person close to the university.” The
article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations (emphasis added) with former
state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to
the same (unidentified)person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the
developments.” Coakley, the article
said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter. The Globe story was obviously planted by
someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into
concluding her situation was hopeless and deciding to resign in order to avoid being fired. It was a bluff. McKenna called
it. Soon, an impressive array of persons
and groups materialized in her defense. The tide
turned quickly in her favor. Around Day
3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate
for the Suffolk presidency and not interested in the job. One can infer that Coakley had come under
pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered: Why do
you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been
on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the
board? The situation culminated with surprising rapidity in an agreement between the university and McKenna, which
stipulated that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term
expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months. My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months hence, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially
different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract
extension. Things at Suffolk could be going so swimmingly
by then they'll have
to implore President McKenna to stay.
LET’S HEAR IT FOR
POLITICS! Justice Robert J. Cordy
has received some serious praise since announcing earlier this month his
intention to leave the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court this summer, three
years before he would have had to retire at age 70. Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel to the
Massachusetts Bar Association, hailed Cordy as “a leading voice on criminal
justice issues and an intellectual powerhouse on constitutional law,” and said,
“Justice Cordy has played a vital role in modernizing court operations, which
will leave a lasting legacy on the administration of justice for years to
come.” Ralph Gants, chief justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court, told a reporter for The Republican newspaper and
MassLive web site that Cordy’s productivity on the court is “the stuff of
legend,” adding, “He (Cordy) leaves an enduring legacy as a justice of this
court, not only because of the over 360 carefully crafted and reasoned majority
opinions he has authored so far, but also because of the countless unseen
contributions he has made to maintain the excellence of this court.” Cordy has a double-barreled Ivy League
education: an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a doctor of laws from
Harvard. He had a successful career in
private legal practice and served with distinction as managing partner of the
Boston office of McDermott, Will & Emery, an international law firm. However, he never served as a judge before being
nominated for the supreme court in late-2000 by Gov. Paul Cellucci, God rest
his soul. Thus it’s impossible to
imagine him getting to the top court had it not been for his prominence in
Republican circles and his cachet within the Weld-Cellucci administration,
which preceded the Cellucci-Swift administration. Cordy was Gov. Weld’s chief legal counsel for
three years in the early-Nineties. (The
legal counsel, I should point out, is definitely not a part of a governor’s
political apparatus. Those holding the job dispense legal advice to the
governor and work to ensure that the administration functions properly, from a
legal standpoint, across the board.
They’re prized most for their legal acumen; should they possess
political skills, all the better.) The
Governor’s Council confirmed Cordy’s appointment to the court on a unanimous
8-0 vote in early-January, 2001. A
number of Democrats endorsed him during the confirmation hearing, including
then House Speaker Tom Finneran and former Attorney General Frank
Bellotti. “I hope you will learn I am
fair-minded. I am not by nature a
partisan person or one who’s afraid of responsibility,” Cordy told the Council,
according the account of the hearing from the files of the State House News
Service. That they did! Cordy will end
his public service as a total judicial success, with not a single blemish – and
many a high point -- on his long (15 years-plus) SJC record. He will also leave as a living-breathing
refutation of the view that our political system can’t ever get anything really
right. It was good GOP politics that
made Bob Cordy Mr. Justice Cordy. And
good justice.
SPEAKING OF JUDGES,
WHAT’S THE DUKE THINKING? Michael
Dukakis is doing his usual winter stint as a professor at UCLA, which is where
Slate’s Isaac Chotiner caught up with him earlier this week to get his views on
the late US. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a classmate of
Dukakis’s at Harvard Law, and on other subjects of current interest. I was happy to see that age has not mellowed
our former governor, who is 82 and hasn’t lost even a bit off his
fastball. Chotiner asked, “How well did
you know Scalia at law school?” Dukakis said, “Not well…in those days, Isaac,
we had a class of 475 that was divided in thirds. So you got to know your section very
well. But I didn’t know who Scalia was
until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class called Federal
Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named Henry Hart. It is 1960.
We are in the middle of the civil rights revolution. And there’s this
guy in class who begins engaging Professor Hart every day in these long
dialogues over whether it was appropriate for federal judges to reach in and
take cases away from Southern criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew,
if you were a black defendant, forget it.
And this went on for about three weeks.
I finally turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that
guy?’ He said, ‘That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.’ And I said, ‘Does he know what it’s like to
be black in the South?’ A bright guy –
yeah. But he was to the right of Marie
Antoinette for Christ’s sake. There was
no consistency in his so-called philosophy.
Money is corporate speech. This
is all preposterous.” I stromgly recommend
you read the entire Chotiner-Dukakis interview. Go to:
WITH ALLIES LIKE THAT,
COAKLEY NEEDS NO ENEMIES. Martha Coakley, a former Massachusetts Attorney
General, might have evinced interest in the outcome of a plan to oust Margaret
McKenna, president of Suffolk University, in the slightest of ways. A nod of her head during a conversation over
coffee or a murmured “Umm, umm” over the phone could have done it. It’s not hard to see why she may have been
interested. Coakley is a good and honest
person. No doubt she was sincerely
sorry to learn that President McKenna might soon be history. But that would not have kept Coakley, or most
people, for that matter, from entertaining the idea of succeeding McKenna. Most everyone in that situation would have
reasoned that, if McKenna is leaving, someone
is going to replace her, so why not me? By now, everyone who follows the news in
Massachusetts is familiar with the story of the embattled university president
who survived a coup attempt. On Jan. 29,
the Boston Globe published an article stating: “Suffolk University president
Margaret McKenna, whose short tenure has been marked by tumultuous relations
with the school’s governing board, has been told privately that the board has
the votes to fire her if it chooses and has been asked to resign, according to
a person close to the university.” The
article also said: “At the same time, the board is in negotiations with former
state attorney general Martha Coakley to take over as president, according to
the same person, and confirmed by a second person briefed on the
developments.” Coakley, the article
said, had not returned calls from the newspaper seeking her comments on the matter. The Globe story was obviously planted by
someone on the Suffolk board who hoped the publicity would scare McKenna into
concluding her situation was hopeless, and that she should resign and quietly
go away. It was a bluff; McKenna called
it. Soon, an impressive array of persons
and groups came to her defense. The tide
turned quickly in her favor. Around Day
3, Coakley made her first public comment, announcing she was not a candidate
for the Suffolk presidency and not interested in the job. One can infer that Coakley had come under
pressure from friends, acquaintances and random budinskis, who wondered, Why do
you want to be associated with the ouster of a woman college president who has been
on the job only seven months and is being railroaded by the old boys on the
board? The situation ended with an agreement between the university and McKenna
stipulating that the chair of the board would leave the board when his term
expired shortly and that McKenna would keep her job for another 18 months. My wish for McKenna is that, 18 months from
now, when the makeup of the Suffolk board is likely to be substantially
different from what it is today, she’ll be granted a three-year contract
extension. Things could be going so well
at Suffolk by then that they will have
to ask her to stay.
No comments:
Post a Comment