TO-WIT: MAY THE FORCE BE WITH ME
It was luck, he said, but I assure you luck had nothing to do with it . "He" was the president judge of family court and "I" was out of my mind for being there. For health reasons, I had abandoned the practice of matrimonial law many years previously. After having done i t for fifteen years or so, I had developed an acute allergy to chaos, mayhem and the maddening ad hoc approach to due process so endemic to family court. It made my eyes water something fierce.
Nonetheless, I have never been able to turn down an intellectually juicy case, and when the local child support office wrongfully intercepted my client's income tax refund to cover what it claimed was a delinquency in payments, a decision based on a shortsighted, fundamentally unfair and just plain wrong interpretation of the term "delinquent," I was gloriously outraged. I said something to the family court administrator, I said something to the family court judges, and when they refused to listen I said something in a complaint seeking injunctive relief, naming all of them as defendants. I made no friends on the bench suing some of their own, but I did receive unqualified anonymous support from every lawyer on the Family Law Committee.
The case settled the day before trial when the defendants, in desperation, looked at the law and found for themselves the case I was relying on, a case that established the incontrovertible correctness of my position. Okay, so technically the case had eluded my research completely, and yes, I was happy to have had their assistance in tracking it down. Thanks, fellas. But I knew all the time the case was there because it just had to be. It wasn't a matter of luck, no, matter of instinct.
When Columbus left Lisbon, he knew that America was out there. Sure, he thought he'd found India, but that's just splitting hairs. And E=MC2, that was no shot in the dark. Einstein knew that MC2 had to equal something and i t only took him fi v e letters of the alphabet to find it.
Neither event was born of luck. Rather they gestated from intellect, experience, intuition and a strongly developed sense of what must surely be. That precious, vaporous quality upon which so much of the world's fate has hinged, that's instinct.
What has always been true for the gifted and the great is also true for lawyers. Sometimes we develop an instinct, a second sight, that coalesces from the b i t s and pieces of our experiential ether. When that happens we gain entrée to the mystical, massive collective of conscious awareness, unconscious memories and intuitive sensory perceptions by which we are able to know without knowing and see without seeing.
"Use the Force," Obi Wan said to Luke in Star Wars, and thus emboldened, Luke turned off his targeting computer and relying on naught but his instincts and a well placed photon torpedo blew the Death Star all to hell. Likewise, when all has seemed lost for me, my head seems guided by an element unknown, and time and again i t has enabled me to prevail over seemingly superior forces and overwhelming odds. The Force i s not always with me, but when it is, I'm king of the World.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that if we ever go head to head in a courtroom you might just as well surrender the fort rather than go up against the likes of me, that with the Force as my ally, you're doomed ab initio, that you haven't got a chance. I'd never say that, I'm far too modest, but I have to tell you, I do like the way you think.
©2007, S. Sponte, Esq.