The marble statues and bronze doors notwithstanding, justice was an ethereal concept, a divine ideal, which like sainthood was rarely seen on earth. Justice was the pearl in the oyster. Keep on shuckin’ and good luck huntin’. Despite the lofty notions she’d learned from the law books, her views were shaped by her own experiences. Weren’t everyone’s? What was it Justice Cardozo had said? “Try as we might, we can never see with any eyes except our own.”
And what my eyes have seen.
Now, after four years at Berkeley, summa cum laude-thank you very much-three years at Stanford Law, magna cum laude with a prize-winning law review note, and one year clerking for a federal court of appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit, she had all the credentials. So why did she consider herself a fraud?
She wanted to believe, but damnit, Max had pressed the right buttons. She was a priest without faith, a pagan inside the holy tabernacle. To Lisa Fremont, the law was not majestic. The slogan carved into the pediment-equal justice under law-was a benediction for the Kodak-toting tourists. The law was as cold as the marble of its sanctuary.
Disregarding the lofty symbols and images, she thought of the legal system as a dingy factory with leaking boilers, broken sprockets, and rusted cogs. The law was bought and sold, swapped and hocked, bartered and auctioned, just like wheat, widgets… and girls who run away from home.
In the upcoming term, she knew the Court would be asked to consider nearly seven thousand cases but would issue fewer than one hundred rulings. Law clerks, whose first function was to summarize and analyze the petitions seeking review, frequently complained about the workload. No problem, Lisa thought.
If I get the job, I’ll read them all. I’ll plow through the research, draft the justice’s opinions, and make his coffee, if that’s what he wants me to do.
She’d know the legislative history of the statutes and the precedential value of the cases. She’d master the procedure and the substantive law. She’d write pithy footnotes and trace the source of a law back to Hammurabi. She’d prepare incisive pool memos for the judicial conferences and brilliant bench memos for her boss. She’d stay up all night with the death clerk on execution stays, and she’d be at work at 8 A.M. sharp.
She’d be prepared to search for the truth, to do justice.
She’d do all of those things in every case… except one.
The case of Laubach v. Atlantica Airlines, Inc., would be different. She already had read the file. She knew the issues and the arguments on both sides. Even more important, she knew who had to win.
“I’ll do it, Max. I’ll do it for you.”
“Great! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” The tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. “We make a great team, Lisa.
When your clerkship’s up, you should come into the airline’s legal department. Pete Flaherty’s going to retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general counsel?”
“Max, please stop planning my life. Let’s just get through this.”
“Whatever you say, darling.”
His smile was still in place. He had done it. And he hadn’t even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have rushed to help him. But this way was better.
She’s doing it for love, not pity.
Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her judge-the swing vote, according to Flaherty-to go their way. But he had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was trusting her with his life.
Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn’t know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was never part of the bargain.
She would do it because her loyalty to Max outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all along.
She didn’t believe in the words carved into stone.
Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as icy.
Deep inside, she was just like him.
NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF CRASH
WASHINGTON D.C.-(AP) The National Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.
Citing contradictory evidence and the failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane pointedly stated that there was “substantial evidence” to support the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever the hydraulic lines.
“ Traces of PETN were recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not found,” McGrane said. “Presumably, they are buried in the muck of the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive conclusion.”
PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the number two engine.
Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station. He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None of the jets reported firing a missile.
Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport. The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the New York-to-Miami flight.
CHAPTER 2
The Junior Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat here. Oh, not in this chair. Not even in this building, if we’re being tediously literal about it, Sam Truitt thought.
But Holmes sat here, at the far end of the bench, to the chief justice’s left, when he was the junior justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
So what the hell am I doing in old Ollie’s chair?
Which was also, at various times, figuratively at least, the chair of Brandeis, Cardozo, Black, Frankfurter, and Brennan. Giants of jurisprudence whose thundering pronouncements were engraved in stone for the ages. Men of soaring intellect and towering integrity.
How will I even begin to measure up?
It was a rare moment of insecurity for Sam Truitt, who frequently was described as egotistical and vain, even by his friends. His enemies called him a left-wing, Ivy League intellectual snob who was out of touch with the real world. But friends and enemies alike agreed that he was brilliant and eloquent. His opponents feared that eventually, with a long enough tenure, he would be worth two or three votes on the Court, using his superior intellect and persuasive skills to sway others.