Category Archives: law school

Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman

Posted on February 15, 2021 | 3 comments

POST # 6

This is the sixth in a series of posts recalling what it was like to serve as a law clerk to Judge Julius J. Hoffman during 1967 to 1969.

Sitting on the Seventh Circuit

            Judge Hoffman was always worried about the fate of his rulings in the appellate court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which reviewed the rulings of the district courts in the circuit, including ours.

            The Seventh Circuit was made up of appellate judges who sat in three-member panels in a courtroom in the same courthouse as the district court courtrooms.  But, as I recall, the Seventh Circuit courtroom was larger, was on a higher floor than the district court courtrooms, and was grander in every way.  The court, as an appellate court, also conducted its proceedings in a far more rarefied atmosphere than the one that permeated the more rough-and-tumble atmosphere at the trial court level.

            Hoffman was frequently reversed by the Seventh Circuit.  In the process, he was often severely criticized by one or more appellate judges for the way he had conducted a trial or reached a legal conclusion.  The South Holland school-district case was a prime example.  Another example was the Amabile case, in which the Seventh Circuit opinion pointed out how easily Hoffman could have avoided reversal if he hadn’t so adamantly refused to ask the jury about the influence of the media on the jury’s thinking.

            Of course, the “Chicago 7” trial was the leading case in which Hoffman was eventually slapped down by the Seventh Circuit.  (I’ll say much more about that trial soon.)

            In early 1969, despite his spotty record with the Seventh Circuit and several months before the “Chicago 7” trial, Hoffman was asked to sit “by designation” on a panel of the Seventh Circuit.  The U.S. Courts of Appeals were at that time frequently overwhelmed by their caseloads, and they would ask retired judges or district court judges to sit by designation on a panel made up of two regular appellate court judges and one non-regular judge. 

            There was great excitement in Hoffman’s chambers when he was asked to do his bit for the Seventh Circuit.  He was thrilled to play the role of appellate judge for a change.  I’m quite sure that he longed to be appointed to the appellate court (he called it being “kicked upstairs”), but that plum had never been offered him.  At least he could now be Appellate Judge for a Day.

            As senior clerk, I was assigned to assist the judge in this new and challenging role.  So when the briefs in the case he was to hear arrived in our chambers, he asked me to read them and prepare questions he could ask during the oral argument.  This sounded reasonable enough.  He was busy with his routine courtroom work and didn’t want to devote much time to the appellate briefs. 

            Still, I did expect him to scan the briefs and have some knowledge of the issues before the oral arguments would be heard.

            I was myself excited about assisting the judge with his new role as appellate judge.  I hadn’t applied for a clerkship with an appellate court, a clerkship that was (like the role of appellate judge vs. that of trial-level judge) more prestigious than the clerkships I applied for with the Northern District of Illinois.  Looking back, I probably didn’t explore the possibility of an appellate clerkship because I was pretty sure that I had a better chance of getting a clerkship with the district court, when securing even one of those was a challenge for a woman applicant in 1967. 

            I’d therefore resolved that if I was offered a clerkship with the Northern District, which was based in my hometown of Chicago, I would grab it and forgo my inclination to work as a lawyer in Washington, D.C. 

            I’d always been fascinated with being at the center of power in D.C.  But at the time of my last year in law school, Lyndon Johnson had squandered the remarkable record he’d acquired on domestic issues (for example, propelling the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and creating the Office of Economic Opportunity) by plunging further and further into the disastrous Vietnam War.  I decided to await the results of the presidential election of 1968 before committing to D.C.  So I was quite happy to accept a district court clerkship in Chicago.

            My own affinity for appellate-level work had been sparked when I participated in my law school’s moot court program, the Ames Competition.  In my first attempt at appellate brief-writing in the fall of my first year, I’d triumphed over a male classmate who was openly miffed that he was assigned to compete against a woman student.  He was overheard complaining that “If you win against a girl, you’ve only beat a girl.  And if you lose to a girl, you’ve been beaten by a girl!” 

            Some of my closest and longest-lasting friendships began in law school, and a great many of them are with male classmates.  But it’s entirely possible that, at that time, there were some others among my male classmates who shared the same misguided notion as my Ames opponent. 

            All of which made my victory especially delicious when I walloped him in moot court.  I earned a higher score from our three male judges, both on our oral arguments and on our briefs.  I almost felt sorry for my opponent.  His lawyer-father had traveled a thousand miles from the Midwest to witness his son’s humiliating defeat.

            Competing in moot court, I discovered my love of brief-writing, and I continued to compete in the Ames Competition as long as I could, hoping to do brief-writing during my career as a lawyer.  As things turned out, I did write appellate briefs during my career, and I went on to teach appellate brief-writing to students at law schools like Northwestern and the University of Michigan.

            The day Hoffman sat on the Seventh Circuit, I was present in the imposing courtroom, perched on a chair just behind the judges.  Once the oral arguments began, the judges were free to interrupt the lawyers with questions, and I had provided Hoffman with a list of challenging questions for both sides. 

            I was shocked when Hoffman finally spoke and revealed his vast ignorance of the legal arguments presented in the briefs. 

            He asked the right questions, of course (I had written them out clearly for him), but he asked them at the wrong time.  Once or twice, he asked a question that a lawyer had already answered, and the lawyer was forced to repeat what he had said a few minutes earlier.

            Hoffman also asked some questions completely out of context, revealing his total lack of understanding of the issues.  As the appellate lawyers struggled to complete their well-prepared presentations, I cringed.  The man was smart enough.  He simply hadn’t bothered to learn anything about the case being argued in front of him, and it showed.

            After the argument, the three judges and their law clerks adjourned to the chambers of one of the appellate judges, and the judges took an informal poll of where they stood.  Once the two appellate judges announced how they were leaning (the two were tentatively in agreement), Hoffman of course jumped in and agreed.  He was then assigned the task of writing the court’s opinion.

            Back in our chambers, Hoffman asked me to write the opinion.  I was excited and eager to bite into the apple of appellate opinion-writing, something I’d never expected to do while working for a trial court judge.  I immediately immersed myself in the law that applied to the case. 

            The law turned out to raise serious constitutional questions.

            The legal issues were complex, and I discovered that I was not completely sold on the outcome the three judges had tentatively agreed upon.  I began going back and forth, one day deciding in favor of the appellant, the next day agreeing with the appellee. 

            Looking for help, I sought out one of the appellate judges’ law clerks.  He was a friend I’d known in law school, and I was sure that he could give me some guidance.  But, like me, he seemed uncertain which way to go, so our brief discussion didn’t help me resolve my internal debate.

            Once or twice, Hoffman asked me how my opinion was coming.  I assured him that I was researching the applicable case law and giving the issues a great deal of thought.  I stated quite clearly that I was deeply involved in pondering these important issues and that I wanted to write an opinion he would take pride in.

            I didn’t see any reason to rush to judgment.  I preferred to think through the issues and come up with a well-reasoned ruling.  Appellate court opinions are often not issued for many months after oral argument.

            But Hoffman’s obsession with speeding through his caseload triumphed over my desire to do a thoughtful and thorough job. 

            One morning I arrived in chambers and was abruptly informed by Hoffman’s secretary that the opinion was written and I no longer needed to do any work on it.  After catching my breath, I asked, “What happened? Did the judge write the ruling himself?”

            Of course not, I was assured.  He had hired someone to write his opinion for him.  Although the secretary didn’t reveal the name of the author, it was a professor at a local law school. 

            So, without telling me, Hoffman had turned the case over to a law school professor, whom he paid out of his own pocket.

            I was astounded.  If Hoffman had given me a deadline (say, “If you don’t write this by June 1st, I’ll have to take it out of your hands”), I would have finished writing an opinion by the deadline.  And it would have been as good as, or better than, whatever the law professor came up with.

            But I wasn’t given any deadline.  After I spent weeks doing difficult legal research and evaluating the merits of the competing issues, the case was yanked out of my grasp and turned over to someone else.

            I never checked to learn how the opinion fared.  Did the two other judges go along with it?  Did the parties appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court?  The truth is that, after the shock wore off, I really didn’t care what happened, so I never bothered to find out.

            Looking back, I probably should have realized that Hoffman desperately wanted to get the appellate case out of the way so he could get back to his everyday routine.  I had assumed that he could separate his appellate court role from his obsession with being in first place in the district court’s statistics.  While he waited for a well-reasoned opinion, he could have speeded through his trial-level caseload the same as always. But I was mistaken on that score.  He couldn’t separate the two roles. 

            In retrospect, maybe I could have proceeded differently.  Maybe I spent too much time going back and forth on the complex legal issues.  Maybe I should have set aside my trial-court responsibilities and focused exclusively on the appellate case.

            I could have simply sat myself down and written an opinion that favored one side or the other.  And been done with it. 

            But I still think that Hoffman was unforgivably wrong to do exactly what he did.

            As disillusioning as so much of my experience with him was, I view this entire episode as one of the worst examples of Hoffman’s high-handed behavior.

3 Comments

Posted in 1960s, Chicago, law, law school, lawyers, U.S. federal courts, Washington DC

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman

Posted on November 13, 2020 | 3 comments

This month I’m beginning something new.

I’m beginning a series of posts that will focus on my personal recollections of working as a law clerk for a federal judge–a judge who became notorious shortly after I left my clerkship.

Judge Julius J. Hoffman was a U.S. district court judge in Chicago who became notorious when he presided over the “Chicago 7” trial that began in the fall of 1969.

As Hoffman’s law clerk from 1967 to 1969, I observed him closely throughout my two-year tenure with him. This two-year period included, in its final months, the road that led to the “Chicago 7” trial.

This trial is now the subject of a new film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Because the film has inspired new interest in Judge Hoffman, this seemed to be an appropriate time to publish my recollections.

As Judge Hoffman’s law clerk during the two years before the trial began, I could foresee much of what would happen in his courtroom.  I later sat in on the trial, as a spectator, on two very cringe-worthy occasions.

This is the first post in a series that will examine what it was like to clerk for a judge like Hoffman. I’ll begin at the beginning: my first encounter with Judge Hoffman and how I came to work for him.

I’ll go on to describe a wide range of issues that arose during my tenure. These will include my observations during the frenetic time just before and during the “Chicago 7” trial. I’ll conclude with my final communications with the judge, just before I left Chicago in 1970.

Post #1

          In the fall of 1969, Judge Julius J. Hoffman moved from relative obscurity into the spotlight of national attention.  Although he had earned a reputation within the Chicago legal community as an irascible judge with a strong conservative bent, he was otherwise a little-known figure.  The public knew him only as one of Chicago’s U.S. district judges, and as such, he was generally respected.  Even lawyers who had appeared before him were compelled to admit that, despite his personal shortcomings, he could sometimes be an excellent judge.

          All that changed in the fall of 1969.  Assigned to be the presiding judge in what became known as the “Chicago 7” trial, Hoffman was suddenly the focus of journalists and lawyers from every corner of the United States, even the world.  Suddenly his courtroom demeanor was under a microscope, probed for rationality and fairness.  And just as suddenly, he became a national villain, even a national joke.

My first encounter with the judge

          In his custom-made elevator shoes and his black robe (double-stitched for longer wear), Judge Julius J. Hoffman would stride imperiously into his courtroom.  He would seat himself behind his imposing judicial bench, his tiny figure almost lost in the high-ceilinged courtroom he occupied on the 23rd floor of the federal courthouse in Chicago’s Loop.

“The motion will be dee-nied!”

                I can still hear the judge spouting those five words, the five words he must have said a thousand times during the two years I worked for him.  He always seemed to be denying motions rather than granting them.  But that was just one feature of this eccentric and soon-to-be-notorious judge.

          Julius Hoffman was a diminutive, bald-headed man with a prickly ego that was easily punctured.  But when I met with him over the Christmas holidays in 1966, he struck me as a charming and altogether reasonable person to clerk for.  I was in my last year of law school, and Hoffman was one of only three U.S. district judges in Chicago who had agreed, in that benighted era, to interview me, a woman, for the job of law clerk.

          For a number of reasons, Hoffman became my first choice of the three, and when he offered me the job, I decided to take it.  Although I had done almost no research into what kind of judge Hoffman was, I was thrilled with the simple prospect of being any federal judge’s law clerk.

          My failure to research Hoffman’s reputation later came back to haunt me.  I soon discovered that I was working for an irascible, difficult man who had unusual proclivities and a bizarre personality that often played itself out on the bench.  So although I loved my job as a federal judge’s law clerk, and I learned a great deal from my experience working in the federal courts, I was sometimes sorry I had so quickly settled on Hoffman as the federal judge to clerk for.

3 Comments

Posted in 1960s, American culture, American history, Chicago, films, gender roles and stereotypes, Illinois, law, law school, lawyers, movies, sexist attitudes, U.S. federal courts, women

Tagged , ,

RBG in ’72

Posted on October 13, 2020 | 6 comments

Countless words have been, and will continue to be, written about the incomparable U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who served on the high court for 27 years.

I will leave discussions of her tenure on the Court to others.

What I will do here is recount the one and only time I encountered her in person, at a law school conference, at a pivotal point in her career.  If you’re interested in learning about that encounter, please read on.

In September of 1972, I was a full-time faculty member at the University of Michigan (UM) Law School.  Notably, I was the only full-time faculty member who was a woman.

The law school had a desirable setting on the UM campus, whose multitude of elm trees were unfortunately denuded of leaves, thanks to Dutch elm disease. The law school buildings made up the stunning Law Quadrangle, featuring beautiful old buildings constructed in the English Gothic style.

My role on the faculty was to help first-year law students learn the basics of legal education:  how to analyze court rulings (the kind they would read in the books assigned to them in courses like Torts and Contracts); how to do their own research into case law; and how to write a readable legal document, like an appellate brief aimed at persuading an appellate court to decide in their favor.

I was one of four young lawyers hired to fill this role.  The three men and I each taught one-fourth of the first-year class.  As I recall, we got to choose our offices in the law school library, and I immediately chose a plum.  It was an enormous wood-paneled room with charming hand-blown stained glass windows.  One entered it via a stairway leading upstairs from the library’s impressive reading room.  I treasured my office and happily welcomed meeting with students there.  And I wonder, in light of renovations at the law school, whether that glorious office still exists.

At some point early that fall, I learned that a conference on “women and the law” would be held at the New York University School of Law in October.  This was a bold new area of law that most law schools didn’t consider worth their attention.  NYU was clearly an exception. 

The idea of the conference immediately grabbed my attention because I had a longstanding interest in its stated focus.  One reason why I had myself attended law school a few years before was that, beginning very early in my life, I was and remain concerned with achieving equity and justice, including equal rights for women.

This focus had led me to attend law school during the mid-’60s.  My first job was that of law clerk to a U.S. district judge in Chicago.  After finishing my clerkship, I became a practicing lawyer as a Reggie assigned to my first choice, the Appellate and Test Case Division of the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau.  [I discussed the Reggie program in a blog post, “The Summer of ’69,” published on August 7, 2015.]

And so, three years earlier, in October of 1969, I had begun working on a lawsuit that had a significant bearing on women’s rights because it would challenge the constitutionality of Illinois’s restrictive abortion law. This law had an enormous impact on the lives of women, especially poor and non-white women.

I worked with Sybille Fritzsche, a lawyer with the ACLU in Chicago, who became my close friend.  Sybille and I spent months preparing our case.  We filed our lawsuit in February 1970, argued it before a three-judge federal court in September, and won a 2-to-1 ruling in our favor in January 1971.  (The ruling in that case, Doe v. Scott, and the events leading up to it, are the focus of a book I’m currently writing.  In the meantime, you can read about our case in historian Leslie Reagan’s prize-winning book, When Abortion Was a Crime.)

Now, in the fall of 1972, I learned about the conference at NYU.  Because I was extremely interested in attending it, I decided to ask the UM law school’s dean, Theodore St. Antoine, whether the school might send me to New York to attend it.  I thought I had a pretty persuasive argument:  I was the only full-time woman on the law school faculty.  Didn’t the dean think it would be a good idea to send me to represent UM at the conference? 

How could he say “no”?  Ted thought about for a moment, then gave his approval.  So off I went, my expenses paid by the kind patrons of UM. 

My hotel, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, located near NYU’s law school, had sounded appealing on paper, but it turned out to be something of a dump.  It suited me just fine, however, because I barely spent any time there.  I was too busy attending the conference sessions and, when I could, taking a short break to reconnect with a couple of law-school classmates and briefly sample life in New York City, a city light-years removed from less-than-exhilarating Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The conference, held on October 20-21, turned out to be a symposium sponsored by AALS (the American Association of Law Schools), “The AALS Symposium on the Law School Curriculum and the Legal Rights of Women.”  It featured a number of prominent speakers, mostly law professors and practicing lawyers who had turned their attention to “the legal rights of women” in areas like tax law, property law, and criminal law.  I attended most of these sessions, and each of them was excellent.

But the only session I was really excited about was a talk by someone named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  I was quite certain that I would relish hearing her talk, “Toward Elimination of Sex-Based Discrimination: Constitutional Aspects,” because the topic was right down my alley.

Looking back, I don’t think I knew anything about RBG at the time.  But when she was introduced (by NYU dean Robert McKay) and began to speak, I was riveted by every word she uttered.  She spelled out everything she had already done and planned to do to achieve gender-equity.

So although I was not already familiar with her, I knew immediately that she clearly was and would continue to be a brilliant leader in the field of women’s rights.  I filed her name away in my memory so I could follow whatever she would do in the coming years.  And I did just that, enthusiastically following the many astounding accomplishments she achieved after 1972.

Your image of RBG may be that of the frail, petite woman who took center stage in our culture in her 80s.  But the RBG I saw in 1972 was very different.  She was an amazingly attractive young woman of 39.  You can see photos of her at that time in The New York Times of September 18 (in Linda Greenhouse’s long review of her life and career) and in a recent issue of TIME magazine (Oct. 5-12, 2020). Although much has been made of her short stature (one I share), she was so very energetic and focused that one quickly forgot how small she was.

It turned out that she had attended Harvard Law School about a decade before I did.  Like her, I’ve been called a “trailblazer” and a “pioneer,” and I also confronted gender-bias at every turn throughout my life.  My path was only a bit less rocky than hers:  My class at HLS included the whopping number of 25 women in a class of 520, while hers had only 9.

I’ve since learned that October 1972 marked a pivotal time in RBG’s career.  She had just switched her teaching position from Rutgers Law School to Columbia Law School (a considerable upgrade).  And she had just assumed another new position:  Director of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, a project she had helped to found a short time before. 

So I’m left wondering…did she know about the case Sybille (an ACLU attorney in Chicago) and I brought in February 1970, a case that put a woman’s right to reproductive choice front and center?

RBG was an ardent supporter of reproductive rights during her tenure on the Supreme Court.  She discussed her views on abortion and gender equality in a 2009 New York Times interview, where she said “[t]he basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.”

But I know that she had also stated that she wasn’t entirely happy with the way in which Roe v. Wade gave every woman in the U.S. that choice by bringing cases like Doe v. Scott in the federal courts.  She stated that she would have preferred that the argument had been made, over time, in each state’s legislature, with the right to choose being gradually adopted in that way rather than in one overriding court ruling that included every state.

Notably, on the 40th anniversary of the court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, she criticized the decision because it terminated “a nascent democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws” that might have built “a more durable consensus” in support of abortion rights.

She had a point.  A democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws would have been the ideal route, and might have been a less contentious route, to achieving abortion rights throughout the country. 

But I think her position was influenced by her own life story. 

It stemmed, at least in part, from the fact that in April 1970, she was living and working in New York, where the state legislature had passed a new law allowing abortion, and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had signed it on April 11, 1970.  New York became only the second state in the U.S. (after Hawaii) to permit abortion, and only a few other states had carved out any sort of exception to what was otherwise a nationwide ban on abortion.

RBG may have optimistically believed that other states would follow New York’s lead.  But history has proved otherwise.

If women had waited for each of the 50 states to accomplish the goal of women’s reproductive choice, I think we’d still have many states refusing to enact laws allowing choice.  In support of my view, I ask readers to consider the situation today, when some states are trying to restrict abortion so frenetically, with or without achieving a complete ban, that they’re now simply waiting for a far-right conservative Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Whether or not RBG was aware of what was happening in the courtrooms of Chicago in 1970, I think I could have persuaded her that Sybille and I were doing the right thing.  

By advocating that the federal district court hold that the restrictive Illinois abortion law was unconstitutional, and persuading the court to decide in our favor, we achieved our goal of saving the lives and health of countless women who would have otherwise suffered from their inability to obtain a legal and medically safe abortion.

What greater achievement on behalf of women’s rights could there have been? 

I like to think that, after hearing my argument, RBG would have approved.

6 Comments

Posted in 1960s, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Chicago, gender equality, gender-equity, Harvard, Hawaii, Illinois, law, law school, lawyers, legal assistance to the poor, New York City, Reggie program, The New York Times, U.S. Supreme Court, women, women"s interests

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Life as a Shopper

Posted on September 28, 2019 | 1 comment

I have a new outlook on shopping.  I’m no longer shopping the way I used to.

Why?

I’ll start at the beginning.  My long history of shopping began when I was very young.

My parents were both immersed in retailing.  My mother’s parents immigrated to Chicago from Eastern Europe and, soon after arriving, opened a clothing store on Milwaukee Avenue.  Their enterprise evolved into a modest chain of women’s apparel stores, and throughout her life my mother was intimately involved in the business.  She embedded in me the ethos that shopping for new things, especially clothes, was a good thing.  Under her influence, I gave away countless wearable items of clothing in favor of getting something new, preferably something sold in one of her family’s stores.  (I later regretted departing with some of the perfectly good items I could have continued to wear for many more years.)

Even though my father received a degree in pharmacy from the University of Illinois, and he enjoyed some aspects of his work as a pharmacist, he was himself attracted to retailing.  At a young age, he opened his own drugstore on the South Side of Chicago (I treasure a black-and-white photo of him standing in front of his store’s window).  After marrying my mother, he spent a number of years working in her family’s business, and in the late ‘40s the two of them opened a women’s clothing boutique on Rush Street, a short distance from Oak Street, in a soon-to-be-trendy shopping area.  Ahead of its time, the boutique quickly folded, but Daddy never lost his taste for retailing.

In view of this history, I was fated to become a “shopper.”  After Daddy died when I was 12, our family wasn’t able to spend big wads of money on anything, including clothes.  But my mother’s inclination to buy new clothes never really ceased.

Thanks to generous scholarship and fellowship awards, I made my way through college and grad school on a miniscule budget.  I saved money by spending almost nothing, savoring the 99-cent dinner at Harkness Commons almost every night during law school to save money.  And because I began my legal career with a $6,000 annual salary as a federal judge’s law clerk and, as a lawyer, never pursued a high-paying job (I preferred to work on behalf of the poor, for example), I got by without big-time shopping.

Marriage brought little change at first.  My darling new husband also came from a modest background and was not a big spender, even when our salaries began to move up a bit.

But things eventually changed.  Higher salaries and the arrival of new retail chain stores featuring bargain prices made buying stuff much more tempting.  I needed presentable clothes for my new full-time jobs.  Our daughters needed to be garbed in clothes like those the other kids wore.  Our living room chairs from Sears began to look shabby, propelling us toward somewhat better home décor.

A raft of other changes led me to spend more time shopping.  My boring law-firm jobs were more tolerable if I could escape during my lunch hour and browse at nearby stores.  The rise of outlet malls made bargain shopping easier than ever.  And travels to new cities and countries inspired buying small, easily packable items, like books and jewelry.

After I moved to San Francisco, having jettisoned possessions I’d lived with for years in my former home, I needed to acquire new ones.  So there I was, buying furniture and kitchen equipment for my sunny new apartment.

At the same time, our consumption-driven culture continued to push buying more and more, including the “fast-fashion” that emerged, offering stylish clothes at a temptingly low price.

But this emphasis on acquiring new stuff, even low-priced stuff, has finally lost its appeal.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t need it.

My overall goal is to simplify my life.  This means giving away a lot of things I don’t need, like stacks of books I’ll never read and charming bric-a-brac that’s sitting on a shelf collecting dust.  Like clothes that a disadvantaged person needs more than I do.

My new focus:  First, use what I already have.  Next, do not buy anything new unless I absolutely need it.

Choosing not to acquire new clothes—in essence, reusing what I already have, adopting the slogan “shop your closet”–is a perfect example of my new outlook.

I’ve previously written about confining one’s new purchases to “reunion-worthy” clothes.  [Please see my blog post of October 12, 2017, advising readers to choose their purchases carefully, making sure that any clothes they buy are flattering enough to wear at a school reunion.]

But that doesn’t go far enough.  New purchases should be necessary.

I find that I’m not alone in adopting this approach.

Many millennials have eschewed buying consumer goods, opting for new experiences instead of new material things.  I guess I agree with the millennials’ outlook on this subject.

Here’s other evidence of this approach.  An article in The Guardian in July 2019 shouted “’Don’t feed the monster!’ The people who have stopped buying new clothes.”  Writer Paula Cocozza noted the growing number of people who love clothes but resist buying new ones because of the lack of their sustainability:  Many consumers she interviewed were switching to second-hand shopping so they would not perpetuate this consumption and waste.

Second-hand shopping has even taken off online.  In September, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the “wave of new resale apps and marketplaces” adding to longtime resale giants like eBay.  At the same time, The New York Times, covering Fashion Week in Milan, wrote that there was “a lot of talk about sustainability over the last two weeks of collections, and about fashion’s role in the climate crisis.”  The Times added:  “the idea of creating clothes that last—that people want to buy and actually keep, keep wearing and never throw out, recycle or resell”—had become an important part of that subject.  It quoted Miuccia Prada, doyenne of the high-end clothing firm Prada:  “we need to do less.  There is too much fashion, too much clothes, too much of everything.”

Enter Tatiana Schlossberg and her new book, Inconspicuous consumption:  the environmental impact you don’t know you have (2019).  In the middle of an absorbing chapter titled Fashion, she notes that “There’s something appealing about being able to buy really cheap, fashionable clothing [..,] but it has given us a false sense of inexpensiveness.  It’s not only that the clothes are cheap; it’s that no one is paying for the long-term costs of the waste we create just from buying as much as we can afford….”

Some scholars have specifically focused on this issue, the “overabundance of fast fashion—readily available, inexpensively made new clothing,” because it has created “an environmental and social justice crisis.”  Christine Ekenga, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has co-authored a paper focused on the “global environmental injustice of fast fashion,” asserting that the fast-fashion supply chain has created a dilemma.  While consumers can buy more clothes for less, those who work in or live near textile-manufacturing bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards.  Further, millions of tons of textile waste sit in landfills and other settings, hurting low-income countries that produce many of these clothes.  In the U.S., about 85 percent of the clothing Americans consume–nearly 80 pounds per American per year–is sent to landfills as solid waste.  [See “The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion” in the journal Environmental Health.]

A high-profile public figure had an epiphany along the same lines that should influence all of us.  The late Doug Tompkins was one of the founders of The North Face and later moved on to help establish the apparel chain Esprit.  At the height of Esprit’s success, he sold his stake in the company for about $150 million and moved to Chile, where he embraced a whole new outlook on life and adopted an important new emphasis on ecology.  He bought up properties for conservation purposes, in this way “paying my rent for living on the planet.”  Most tellingly, he said, “I left that world of making stuff that nobody really needed because I realized that all of this needless overconsumption is one of the driving forces of the [environmental] crisis, the mother of all crises.”  [Sierra magazine, September/October 2019.]

Author Marie Kondo fits in here.  She has earned fame as a de-cluttering expert, helping people who feel overwhelmed with too much stuff to tidy up their homes.  Her focus is on reducing clutter that’s already there, so she doesn’t zero in on new purchases.  But I applaud her overall outlook.  As part of de-cluttering, she advises:  As you consider keeping or letting go of an item, hold it in your hands and ask:  “Does this item bring me joy?”  This concept of ensuring that an item brings you joy could apply to new purchases as well, so long as the item bringing you joy is also one you really need.

What should those of us enmeshed in our consumer culture do?  In The Wall Street Journal in July 2019, April Lane Benson, a “shopping-addiction-focused psychologist and the author of ‘To Buy or Not to Buy:  Why We Overshop and How to Stop’,” suggested that if a consumer is contemplating a purchase, she should ask herself six simple questions:  “Why am I here? How do I feel? Do I need this? What if I wait? How will I pay for it? Where will I put it?”

Benson’s list of questions is a good one.  Answering them could go a long way toward helping someone avoid making a compulsive purchase.  But let’s remember:  Benson is talking about a shopper already in a store, considering whether to buy something she’s already selected in her search for something new.  How many shoppers will interrupt a shopping trip like that to answer Benson’s questions?

I suggest a much more ambitious scheme:  Simply resolve not to buy anything you don’t need!

My 11-year-old granddaughter has the right idea:  She’s a minimalist who has rejected any number of gifts from me, including some fetching new clothes, telling me she doesn’t need them.

When I reflect on my life as a shopper, I now understand why and how I became the shopper I did.  Perhaps, in light of my family history and the increasingly consumption-driven culture I’ve lived through, I didn’t really have an option.

But I have regrets:  I’ve wasted countless hours browsing in stores, looking through racks and poring over shelves for things to buy, much of which I didn’t need, then spending additional hours returning some of the things I had just purchased.

These are hours I could have spent far more wisely.  Pursuing my creative work, exercising more often and more vigorously, doing more to help those in need.

Readers:  Please don’t make the mistakes I have.  Adopt my new philosophy.  You’ll have many more hours in your life to pursue far more rewarding goals than acquiring consumer goods you don’t really need.

 

 

 

1 Comment

Posted in American culture, books, Chicago, class reunions, clothes, clothing, clothing, donations to charity, energy consumption, environment, exercise, family, fashion, fashion industry, fathers, grandchildren, Harvard, health benefits of exercise, joy, law school, legal assistance to the poor, lifestyle choices, Mom, parents, pharmacist, reunion-worthy clothes, San Francisco, San Francisco Chronicle, shopping, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, time, travel, Washington University in St. Louis, women workers, women's clothing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,