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They're Playing A Tango, John W. Reed

Other Publications

An address at the State Bar of Michigan Annual Meeting Luncheon, September 22, 2005.

Tribute To John Pickering, William J. Perlstein

Michigan Law Review

One of my colleagues asked me soon after John died, "How could someone live to be eighty-nine years old and yet there is no one who had a bad word to say about him?" This is an intriguing question. It is not because John Pickering did not have strongly held views about things. Anyone who ever tangled with John in crafting a brief knew how tenacious he was. John was direct and candid and you knew where he stood on any matter. It is not because John was easygoing. When he saw something that he wanted changed, he did not …

Tribute To John Pickering, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Michigan Law Review

John Pickering was a grand human whose life is just cause for celebration. He taught constantly, through his own work and deeds, how lawyers in private practice can contribute hugely to the public good. John's dear friend, my revered D.C. Circuit colleague, Carl McGowan, spoke of the lawyer of technical competence content to be a working mason. The best of lawyers, Judge McGowan said, serve as architects, planners, builders in law. Along with high technical competence, the best of lawyers have a deep understanding of the nature and purposes of the law, which makes them wise and reliable counselors, broad-gauged …

Tribute To John Pickering, Raymond C. Clevenger

Michigan Law Review

This is my homage to John. I ask you to summon up in your imagination today a grand circus, a sort of Cirque du Soleil of lawyers: full of shining talents performing legal feats of wonder, but presided over by a grand ringmaster. This ringmaster knows his performers very well. He knows how to train and stroke them to high achievement. He knows how to groom the younger workers. He can keep his stars in check. He knows when to sit back with a smile, letting his charges perform and claim the applause, even when the applause rightfully belongs to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Timothy B. Dyk

Michigan Law Review

It is very appropriate that we are here today to honor John Pickering, who, for more than five decades, was a leading member of our bar. I first met John when I joined the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in 1964, two years after it was founded. The three founding fathers of the firm were formidable figures, particularly to a young lawyer, and John Pickering was no exception. I do not mean that John was unkind. He was the kindest of people. But there was something particularly serious about him, and I always wondered whether that had to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Marcia Greenberger

Michigan Law Review

This room is filled with many women lawyers. All of us loved John Pickering and are in his debt, but we are only a small number of those who do. For many decades, John guided young, and I must admit not so young, women lawyers to positions where they could stand up for their own rights and the rights of others. He worked with us to champion the causes that matter most to women and their families. John used his great stature and the enormous respect that he garnered to open doors for women to leadership positions in the bar, …

Tribute To John Pickering, Elaine R. Jones

Michigan Law Review

This talented, persuasive, committed lawyer-leader, John Pickering, had several abiding personal and professional interests, two of which enhanced my life directly, and most of which enhanced my life indirectly. The first was the great personal interest he took in lawyers younger than himself, and the second was his passion about civil rights and combating the effects of racial discrimination.

Tribute To John Pickering, Noël Anketell Kramer

Michigan Law Review

I knew John Pickering from the time that I was a second-year law student- just a few years ago, it seems-when he and Sally Katzen recruited me to join what was then the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. We remained friends thereafter, sharing among other interests an avid loyalty to the University of Michigan.

Tribute To John Pickering, Esther Lardent

Michigan Law Review

I want to talk to you about the lessons that so many of us have learned from John, and the qualities that made him so memorable and so extraordinary. The first was his unerring ability to know what was right. Now, many of us want to do right, but John always knew what the right thing was. Despite growing up in a time and place where women and people of color were not valued, where the homeless, the despised, the poor, and the disadvantaged were not considered worthy, John cared deeply about doing right by all of these people.

Tribute To John Pickering, Louis F. Oberdorfer

Michigan Law Review

John left word that he did not want a lot of eulogies, so there is much I could say about him that I do not because I honor his request.

Tribute To John Pickering, John Payton

Michigan Law Review

I want to reflect on what we have heard here today, and over the course of the last several weeks, about John Pickering. We have heard simply remarkable things about a remarkable man of consequence. He was not just a remarkable person. He was more than that. He was a remarkable person who did things that actually changed everyone's lives. He mattered. We heard a lot of things today and some of them we heard for the first time. But I do not think that any of us was surprised to hear any of them about John Pickering. We just …

Tribute To John Pickering, James Robertson

Michigan Law Review

John Pickering was so much involved with both the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and with the bar of this city. It would take too long to recite all of the ways in which John supported and helped our Court and the Court of Appeals, but I will note that, in every one of the ten years since I have been on this bench, John has been invited to speak at the Law Clerks Luncheon Series. That is a big deal. The law clerks …

Tribute To John Pickering, Stanley L. Temko

Michigan Law Review

John was a close friend and a professional colleague of mine for more than fifty years, and he was admired by and very close to a number of members of our firm. Everyone knows his substantial contributions as a lawyer. I will just mention a couple.

The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Constitution In Executive Hands, Cornelia T.L. Pillard

Michigan Law Review

Many leading constitutional scholars now argue for greater reliance on the political branches to supplement or even supplant judicial enforcement of the Constitution. Responding to our national preoccupation with the judiciary as the mechanism of constitutional enforcement, these scholars stress that the executive and legislature, too, bear responsibility to think about the Constitution for themselves and to take steps to fulfill the Constitution's promise. Joining a debate that goes back at least as far as Marbury v. Madison, current scholars seek to reawaken the political branches to their constitutional potential, and urge the Supreme Court to leave the other …

The Death Of The Living Will, Carl E. Schneider, Angela Fagerlin

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Enough. The living will has failed, and it is time to say so.

We should have known it would fail: A notable but neglected psychological literature always provided arresting reasons to expect the policy of living wills to misfire. Given their alluring potential, perhaps they were worth trying. But a crescendoing empirical literature and persistent clinical disappointments reveal that the rewards of the campaign to promote living wills do not justify its costs.

Events

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

No abstract provided.

The Real Impact Of Eliminating Affirmative Action In American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique Of Richard Sander's Study, David L. Chambers, Timothy T. Clydesdale, William C. Kidder, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In 1970, there were about 4000 African American lawyers in the United States. Today there are more than 40,000. The great majority of the 40,000 have attended schools that were once nearly all-white, and most were the beneficiaries of affirmative action in their admission to law school. American law schools and the American bar can justly take pride in the achievements of affirmative action: the training of tens of thousands of African American (as well as Latino, Asian American, and Native American) practitioners, community leaders, judges, and law professors; the integration of the American bar; the services that minority attorneys …

Conclusion: 'If You Don't Pull Up . . .'., James J. White

Other Publications

Today I am going to talk about a lawyer duty that is just as important as the duty to exercise warm zeal on behalf of a client, but it is a duty that is unknown to the popular culture and rarely touched on in law school. That is the duty to say no to your client, to step in front of a client who is determined to do something stupid, or in violation of the civil or criminal law.

Legal Reasoning, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

For more than a century, lawyers have written about legal reasoning, and the flow of books and articles describing, analyzing, and reformulating the topic continues unabated. The volume and persistence of this "unrelenting discussion" (Simon, 1998, p. 4) suggests that there is no solid consensus about what legal reasoning is. Legal scholars have a tenacious intuition - or at least a strong hope - that legal reasoning is distinctive, that it is not the same as logic, or scientific reasoning, or ordinary decision making, and there have been dozens of attempts to describe what it is that sets it apart …

Non-Adversarial Case Resolution, Donald N. Duquette

Book Chapters

Professionals who work with children and parents have become increasingly dissatisfied with the customary reliance on the traditional adversarial system in resolving family-related disputes, including cases involving children's protection, placement, and permanent care. The power struggle in contested cases and hearings relating to child welfare may foster hostility among the parties and dissipate money, energy, and attention that could otherwise be used to solve problems cooperatively. Parties may become polarized, open communication may be discouraged, and there may be little investment in information sharing and joint problem solving. Children may suffer when adversarial tensions escalate and ameliorative services are delayed.

Representing Children And Youth, Donald N. Duquette, Marvin Ventrell

Book Chapters

Quality legal representation of all parties is essential to a high-functioning dependency court process. Quality legal representation of children in particular is essential in obtaining good outcomes for children. An adversarial court process that depends on competing independent advocacy to provide information will not produce good outcomes for litigants who lack competent advocates. Dependency court decisions are as good as the information on which the decisions are based. In order to promote the welfare of children in dependency court, therefore, children must be provided with competent independent legal representation.