New and events of the Philadelphia Bar Asso.
Issue link: https://thephiladelphialawyer.epubxp.com/i/434516
12 the philadelphia lawyer Winter 2015 Well, this old badger at the bar says, "It ain't necessarily so," and says it based not on anecdote but personal experience. Not to put too fine a point on it, it took a while – 45 years to be exact – but I finally did make real good practical use of something I learned in law school; something I learned in my very first class on my very first day. It's a short enough story, so I'll take a moment to set the stage. Little Louie, originally Luigi, was a small, wiry, 60-ish man of Italian ancestry, who, after 40 years in this country, still spoke English with an accent heavy enough to convey that he was still more comfortable speaking in his native tongue. He had been referred to me by a fellow inmate in connection with his punitive confinement in administrative detention, aka "the hole," based on an alleged infraction of the rules of the house; that is, the Federal Correctional Institution at Allenwood, to which he had already been transferred from Allenwood Prison Camp for some prior infraction there. To convey an accurate sense of the bizarre nature of his then current circumstance, consider the following scenario: Louie's initial offense was failure to pay some employment taxes incurred by his cement contracting company, for which he went to trial, was convicted by a jury, and sentenced to serve 51 months; a bad break indeed. He had served 33 months when matters went from bad to worse. The offense that resulted in Louie's transfer from the Camp to behind the wall was his alleged participation in assisting, or at least dummying-up for, a fellow inmate who managed to smuggle his semen to his visiting wife, who then transported it in an insulated container to her doctor waiting in a car outside the camp, where he inserted her husband's bounty, impregnating her. When she gave birth in due course, her husband bragged about it, and word spread through the prison grapevine. The authorities got wind of it and punished him, C ynics, lawyers all, have been heard to say, with the straightest of faces, that the only law learned in the hallowed halls of law school is the law a student learns in the halls; in other words, in more practical venues. That epigram is often expressed, "You don't learn spit in the classroom; you learn it by practicing in the courtroom." A n n A l s o f j u s t i c e B y s t e v e l a c h e e n A TexTbook CAse