TO-WIT: THE BEST OF TIMES
I have been in this business long enough to know that lawyering has its cycles of both good times and bas, times when the profession pays huge dividends, other times when it drives its practitioners into emotional bankruptcy. Primarily because the periodicity of the cycles is so variable, so unpredictable, so much a matter of desultory ebbs and flows, it is essential for lawyers to husband the emotions generated by the good times, however vagrant, as against the inevitable drought of the bad.
For instance, I was recently retained in a collection case to enforce an out of state judgment against a debtor who was about as down and out as a person could get. He had no job, no money, no family, no assets and no hope. It was my task to subpoena him to come to my office with his mangy financial records for a deposition, thereby assisting him into even lower depths of degradation by obliging him to recite under oath the complete litany of his failures.
Some job, huh? Fortunately however there are just enough moments like that in my practice to nourish and sustain me when things aren’t going so well.
Of late though I have had lots of other things to be cheery about, for these are truly golden times for lawyers. Thanks in large part to increasingly sensationalistic media coverage of contemporary legal events, many of my lay friends now frequently seek out my opinion on things, as if my professional observations somehow lends comprehension to a world that appears to them to be more and more litigiously demented.
It is flattering to have so many people hanging on my every word, drooling after my every nuance. Why hardly a cocktail party goes by any more that I don’t feel sort of like Rush Limbaugh, except with an IQ.
“Are the Mendenez brothers going to jail” they ask.
“What’s going to happen to Tonya Harding,” they query.
‘What the hell’s the matter with Bill Rehnquist,” they want to know.
But of course the singular legal event of this otherwise dreary winter has undoubtedly been the malicious wounding trial of Lorena Bobbitt. At first report it seemed too improbable to believe. In fact, for the longest time I was certain the whole thing was some kind of trumped up movie publicity stunt for the pending release of “Thelma and Louise, Part Two.”
Both the media and the public have been fascinated with the matter, and it’s easy to understand why. The Bobbitt affair has sufficient componentry – sex, infidelity, spousal abuse, rage, violence, revenge and surgery – to mobilize every public interest group both for and against such causes. The trial itself became such a hot ticket item that the TV broadcast rights were immediately snatched up by Court TV who had no trouble selling off all available advertising time to NOW and Gillette.
Throughout the weeks of the trial, television commentators consistently referred to the affair as “the Bobbitt trial.” I can’t remember the last time I head a phrase that so aptly fit both the actor and the act. Bobbitt was her name, and by God, that’s exactly what she did. This has to be one of the best etymologic events in the English language since Watergate.
Because the phrase “malicious wounding” just doesn’t seem to satisfactorily describe this sort of behavior, some states, fearing the start of a trend, have already adopted criminal statutes that make bobbitting a specific crime. In fact there is some discussion going on in the Texas legislature about making recidivist bobbitting a capital offense.
I was pretty much convinced from the get-go that Lorena’s little fit of pique was not the first episode in the annals of the legal profession in which the name of the actor became anchored to the act. A quick review of Blackstone’s “Origin of Specious” proved my intuition once again to be dead on.
In the mid-19th century, there was a Kansas lawyer named F.R. Blundgitt. He undertook the representation of a plaintiff whose horse had stopped to yield the right of way to a cattle drive and was rear-ended. The plaintiff had been thrown beneath the hooves of the hungry cattle and was almost grazed to death. There was a plentitude of cross-claims and counterclaims and during the trial old man Blundgitt got confused. He inadvertently moved for a compulsory non-suit at the conclusion of his own case and was obliged to appeal his own victory when it was granted. To this day, whenever a lawyer gets really confused, you can still hear his colleagues inquire with a fair measure of disdain “Is this guy F.R. Blundgitt or what?”
In time though, the Mendenez brothers will fade, the Tonya Harding affair will wither and die and the life of Lorena Bobbitt will pass back into the quiet desperation from which it emerged. And when such matters fall off the front pages, I fall off the invitation lists all together.
That’s okay with me though. What with all the cocktail parties and brunches and soirees I’ve been attending lately, I’ve put on a little weight, and the inevitable respite will give me a chance to take it off. Sooner or later some other event with legal ramifications will make headlines and I will once again be in demand. Until that happy day when someone takes it upon themselves to maim, murder, abduct or abuse a fellow human being, I will survive on the warm afterglow of many wonderful memories. Is this a great job, or what?
© 1994, S. Sponte, Esq.