The Pleasure of It

1. A dirty little secret.Here is an admission against interest: if I want to keep something secret, I’d best post it on my blog. Because on any given day, I could fit my blog visitors into a hot tub. Which, by the way, I am keen to do. (If I knew who they were; my blog host tracks the number of visits to my blog, but not the identity of visitors.)

So I was taken back by a conversation I had with a friend. He is a lawyer, but he also is a philosopher by training. And he is a writer of (unpublished) letters to the editor. Sensing a Man with Things on his Mind, I solicited him to join the universe of bloggers. But he doubted that he had any recipe for a blog that would draw a hungry following.

A hungry following? Seriously? He says this to me, who, on any given day, doesn’t have enough blog visitors to serve as pallbearers at my funeral?

Yet here I go again.
2. For the joy of it.The point is not renown, but love of writing. I would write if I were a bearded hermit in a smoke-smudged cave, and I had to write with a bone and berry juice on skins of animals that I felled with a flint knife. I so love to write that I sometimes stay awake until four o’clock in the morning to complete a post.

I learned to love writing late in life. Starting in my fifties, I got excited about how some words mesh in a sentence, and I learned to enjoy manufacturing metaphors and similes. I now write with a thesaurus close by, to find the best word, and a dictionary, to make sure that it is the right word. I study what words are funny and what words are serious. (Pistachio is funny; almond is serious.) Late into the night, I read essays and books not just for the subject, but because the author takes me to school about the writing craft.

To say you will blog only if you know that you will attract a wide following is like saying that you will have children only if you know that they will grow up to be generals and senators. Accomplished offspring are a good thing. Acclaim is a good thing. But if fame never RSVPs me, that won’t shrink my joy in writing or burden me with a sense of failure.

It would be great to be a Joan Didion or a Maureen Dowd. But writing is like any occupation, pyramid-shaped, with the few and famous at the tapered top, down to the rest of us, unacclaimed, at the broad base.
3. For the future.But writing is more than pleasure for me. I never married, and I have no children; I won’t project progeny into the future. I can project my writings into the future, however. One day, friends and relatives might remember me by visiting my blog. My blog will reflect my personality more than a headstone over my buried bones or an ash-filled urn.

I hope that people will visit my blog at least until nobody lives who has a living memory of me. When I am dust, my writings might provoke a thought or two.
4. For the craft.I value learning the craft, too. Six hours writing an essay does more for me than the same amount of time watching television, a unhappy habit. Being a better writer makes me a better lawyer. And that benefits my clients.
5. For the children.And my writing could turn into a living legacy. Though I have no children, I have friends with children. I imagine one day sharing with them the secrets of writing an essay, teaching them to love writing at an age far earlier than I learned that love. If they learn to love it earlier than I did, they easily might surpass my abilities. And if someone someday were to compliment their brilliant writing, it would please me if my pupil remembered my role in making them the gifted writer that they became.
6. Joy for today, dreams for tomorrow.But in the present, I am glad of everybody who reads what I write. It makes me feel like the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass, showing his creations to Alice, proudly saying, "It’s my own invention."

And yet. Part of me hopes that my blog catches on. I even fantasize that a big-time website will discover me and invite me to post with them. And pay me to do it. As much as I love practicing law, I would be thrilled to earn a living by writing about ideas that interest me. We all have dreams.

Lawyers who Lie

1. Lies: a true story.

A lawyer from [Orange County law firm] opposed my motion for attorney’s fees with a brief dense with lies. Five-lies-on-a-page dense. This-drains-me dense. Pull-back-the-refrigerator-and-watch-the-cockroaches-stream-up-the-wall dense. And he didn’t only lie about things beyond proof – like what motives percolated under his skull. He lied about record evidence.

He and my law partner had had a meeting at his office, and this lawyer had had a court reporter record the meeting. He claimed in his brief that my law partner had refused to engage the issues at hand, but instead had obsessed about the attorney’s fees my law partner wanted to win. This made my law partner look shallow and greedy, an impression sure to sour the judge on our cause.

The lawyer attached the transcript from the meeting to his brief. I examined it. His claim that my law partner had obsessed about attorney’s fees was no exaggeration. It was outright fabrication. There was no mention of attorney fees in the entire 20 pages of the transcript. Nada. Null. Nyet. Zero. Zip.

To be clear: this lawyer made corrupt claims that could be proved so just by reading a transcript. He himself supplied that transcript to the judge and to me precisely so that we could see whether he was telling the truth.

This is more than inexplicable. It is dead-hooker-in-the-freezer inexplicable.

2. Lies as a growth industry.

This is also increasingly common. There have always been lawyers willing to exploit your inability to prove them wrong. Increasingly, though, contrary proof doesn’t matter. It’s like the philanderer in caught in bed with his mistress, telling his wife, "Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?"

Another example: a prosecutor named [name withheld] filed a brief to gain the opportunity to continue to prosecute my client. He lied in the brief. To prove his points, he cited page and line of a hearing transcript. The problem was that the evidence wasn’t there. It was nowhere in the transcript. His whole Statement of Facts, a page long, contained one – one – sentence without a falsehood. It wasn’t just lying. It was an orgy of misrepresentations.

It torments me that a prosecutor, with all of his power to ruin lives, would lie to try to put a man in prison. St. Augustine wrote the Christian classic Confessions. In it he regretted that in his early life he taught rhetoric to would-be lawyers. But by way of mitigation, he explained that he taught the tricks of rhetoric so that the guilty might go free, not so that the innocent might suffer.
I’ve given two examples, but I could go on.

3. Stabbing the heart of the profession.

As pernicious as lying is in a prosecutor, it is unpardonable in any lawyer. After all, truth and justice supposedly are our reason for being, our whole purpose. To think that we can grow justice from lies is like thinking that we can water plants with piss. And falsehoods poison the pursuit of truth.

So when a lawyer lies, he stabs the heart of our profession. Like when a pastor molests a young boy, afflicting him with a life-long spiritual malaise. Or when a doctor makes his patient sick. Or when a police officer arrests an innocent man.

Not only lawyers lie. But because the justice system is entrusted to our ministrations, lying is betrayal. And because the justice system is dedicated to the discovery of truth, and truth is sacred, lying lawyers desecrate that system.

4. Personal confession.

I don’t want to present painted-on piety. I have had clients whom I suspected of lying, or who were not completely honest. And falsehoods are not unknown to my own unclean lips. But I’m a amateur, a dilettante. I’m the guy in the weekend touch-football league watching a pro quarterback. I’m a rag-picker among dissemblers. But I know swami masters of mendacity. I know aristocrats of verbal embroidery.

5. Scruples leave, but sensitivity remains.

Lying might be more common and less cabined than before, but one thing hasn’t changed: sensitivity. People with no scruple about lying resent being called liars. Of two prosecutors whom I have called out for factual inventiveness in the last two years, neither now speaks to me. But if that is the price of speaking the truth, I welcome their hatred.

I suppose that these prosecutors have no choice. After all, if they let me call them liars, soon everybody would. Their life is the opposite of the aphorism: "Take care of your character, and your reputation will take care of itself." They think their reputations are under attack from me; but their reputations really are under attack from their characters.

6. Tracing origins.

Why the flood of falsehoods in these times? No easy answer presents itself. But I suspect that it has something to do with the ascent of lies in politics and the media. Lies stream from high office and from costly media centers. Success and status make mendacity appear to be the easy way to rise to the top.

And judges seem indifferent to dishonesty. I have never seen a judge penalize a lawyer for lying. This permissiveness emboldens the veracity-impaired. With judges unwilling to penalize dishonesty, the upside is winning, and there is no obvious downside.

Looking for a religious reason for this infernal trend, maybe we live in an era of cheap grace. We believe that salvation is easy. It’s all grace. At one time, the concept of grace-plus-nothing was a humble acknowledgment of our entire dependence on God for our salvation. That grace evoked gratitude, and that gratitude evoked effort to please the one who conferred salvation. But in this era of take-for-granted grace, we feed at the table of sin, and when the grim reaper presents the check, we jamb our thumb over our shoulder and say, "Give that to the guy over there, dying on the cross." So, to the modern American mind, lying or truth telling isn’t a matter of hell or heaven.

But the problem is not only a feeble theology of grace. Quasi-rigorous religious sensibility is increasingly rare. Truth be told, few among us care more to please God than to satisfy our craving for comfort, property, consumer goods, and stimulation.

7. Earthquake warning.

It drains me to deal with liars. I was drained to deal with this brief I talked about at the beginning. Facts and reality are the foundation of everything else. On a foundation of facts, we construct values, love, politics, future plans, finances, health-care decisions, family choices, friendships, and religion. When confronted not just with lies but with brazen lies that proclaim that truth doesn’t matter, it’s like fissures open up beneath me.

And these fissures threaten society’s foundation. Democracy depends upon debate. We debate values, ideas, the direction of our country, and who should lead it. But we can’t effectively debate these high matters if we lack agreement on basic facts. Ability to agree on basic facts cannot be assumed in these times.

8. The promise.

If lying succeeds, why tell the truth? Someone I respect recently said that if lying succeeds, it’s brilliant to lie. Why is he wrong? For two reasons. First, in God there is no shadow of turning; his adversary is the liar and the father of lies. When you chose to be a truth teller or a liar, you take sides. Second, if you tell the truth, you dwell in fellowship with other truth tellers. You live in their respect. That fellowship and that respect have innate value.