I was covering the Supreme Court when it decided Gideon v. Wainright, and the case has always had special meaning for me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We're lawyers. We present the arguments, and the court sorts out the merits.
I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.
I had only one idea before me throughout the trial, i.e. to show complete indifference towards the trial in spite of serious nature of the charges against us.
The trifle now inscribed with your name. was occasioned by a particular fact; but to the disgrace of human nature, the subject is sufficiently general to interest every heart not totally impenetrable.
One of the challenges for lawyers can be explaining, first of all, what the legal issue is and, second, its significance. And both of those are important.
I am a trial lawyer. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.
I was a trial lawyer when I was elected to Congress.