Category Archives: law

Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman

Posted on January 28, 2021 | 5 comments

Post #5       

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

•     My brush with patent law

      During my clerkship, I had a memorable encounter with patent law.  I’ll explain.

      First, a brief introduction to patent law–and how patent litigation has been handled by the federal courts. I know this sounds boring, but it’s actually pretty interesting.

      Patent law is a very old doctrine.  In the U.S., patents were first acknowledged in the 1787 Constitution. The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that preserving the rights of authors and inventors was vital if our country was going to succeed.  Article I declares that Congress has the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”  This clause, attributed to James Madison, was adopted unanimously without debate.

      To promote innovation and ensure consistent results throughout the country, Congress went on to give the federal courts the authority to decide any disputes over patents–for example, who was the rightful owner of a patent awarded to a particular invention.  Over the years, Congress has enacted a number of laws enforcing copyrights and trademarks as well as patents. 

      When it comes to patent disputes, federal district judges decide these cases at the trial level.  If one or both sides are unhappy with the district judge’s ruling, they can appeal.  At the time of my clerkship, appeals were heard by the circuit court of appeals that heard appeals from that district.  In our case, that was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

      It was widely known that the judges at both the trial level and the appellate level were woefully lacking in the science background needed to decide these often complicated cases.  They would therefore rely to some extent on the lawyers who presented the arguments on behalf of their clients.  But their rulings were often pretty awful.

      In 1968, I remember hearing that about half of all district court rulings on patent cases were overturned by the courts of appeals, but the truth is that very few of the judges at either level were competent at making these decisions.

      In 1982, Congress changed things.  District judges would continue to decide cases at the trial level, but appeals would be heard by a newly created court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, an appellate court whose judges had a greater knowledge of science and applicable patent law.  But during the years of my clerkship, appeals from Judge Hoffman’s patent rulings were still decided by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

On to my story:          

            At the beginning of my first year as Judge Hoffman’s clerk, the judge distributed his two pending patent cases to my co-clerk, Susan Getzendanner, and me.  Susan was the senior clerk.  She had already served as Hoffman’s clerk for a year.  I was the new and junior clerk.  She and I became good friends, and I learned a great deal about clerking for Hoffman, and clerking in general, from her.  (Thanks, Susan.)

            As the senior clerk (and later the district’s first woman judge), Susan was handed the more difficult case, one that involved a patent for a TV antenna.  I got what I viewed as a still-challenging case, one that involved power tools.

            Susan, who was already the mother of one child, announced at some point during the winter that she was expecting her second child in the spring.  At first, Hoffman was visibly upset.  Would her pregnancy somehow affect his standing in the court statistics?  (You remember the judge’s focus on being first in the district court’s statistics, right?)

            When it turned out that the baby was due in March and that Susan didn’t intend to take time off before the birth (and almost no time afterward), Hoffman relaxed.  After all, in March he would be taking his annual month-long vacation, going off to a luxurious resort, The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida.

            The only problem was the TV-antenna patent case.  Hoffman had heard evidence in a bench trial (a trial held without a jury), and he’d expected Susan to write his decision while he was gone in March.  So even though, as things turned out, Susan continued to work in chambers during most of March, shortly before Hoffman left on vacation he turned the TV-antenna case over to me.

Although I had already immersed myself in the ins and outs of power tools, that case was extracted from my pile of pending cases, and the TV-antenna case replaced it.

            I was dumbstruck when the implications of Hoffman’s decision began to sink in.  I had never even taken high school physics (a decision I still regret), but I was now expected to rule on the status of a patent on a TV antenna!  The absurdity of having judges who have no scientific training decide patent cases suddenly hit me.  I was even more shaken up when I sat down in March, after Hoffman had left for Florida, and began to leaf through the transcript of the bench trial.

            I tried to make sense of what had taken place in the courtroom.  I struggled with the scientific terminology, reading and re-reading passages of the transcript and the briefs presented by both sides.  But I became absolutely livid when I discovered what the judge had done during the course of the trial.  At least twice, the patent lawyers had given him the opportunity to hear a clear and simple explanation of the science that was critical to deciding the case–and Hoffman had both times refused to hear it.  In his haste to move the trial along (always keeping his statistics in mind), he essentially told the lawyers, “No, no, that’s not necessary.  Don’t waste my time.  I understand everything you’re saying.”

            When I read those passages in the transcript, I felt like screaming.  How could he say that, knowing that he was going to dump this case on one of his unsuspecting clerks?

            I struggled on, trying to gain some understanding of the science behind TV antennas.  I reviewed the briefs filed by both sides and looked at the competing antennas that were stored in the evidence room.  I finally threw up my hands and started writing an opinion. 

            I knew that an earlier opinion by a federal judge in Iowa had ruled against the plaintiff who had claimed infringement in a similar case. The Iowa court ruled that the patent was invalid and therefore was not infringed.

            I reviewed the Iowa ruling and decided that I would not be influenced by it.  Instead, I would make my own decision.  A 1936 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (which all lower courts were required to follow) dictated that a patent holder could not assert the validity of a patent that had already been declared invalid in a similar case.  But I decided that, although this case was similar to the Iowa case, it was different enough to rule differently.

            So even though I was uncertain about the science underlying the parties’ claims, I decided to rule in favor of the plaintiff, the holder of the patent, who claimed that its patent had been infringed.  My opinion held that the patent in our case was valid and had been infringed.

            When Hoffman returned from Florida, he wasn’t pleased with the decision I wrote, but he filed it anyway.   As always, he didn’t publish the opinion, but it can be found as a public record:  Civil No. 66-C-567 (N.D. Ill., filed 6/27/1968).

            The decision was appealed by both sides, and the 7th Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part.  422 F.2d 769 (1970).  It affirmed my decision that the patent was both valid and infringed.

            Guess what happened next.  The case ended up going to the U.S. Supreme Court and, believe it or not, became a landmark case in patent law. 

            Both my opinion and the Seventh Circuit’s opinion had relied on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1936.   But the Supreme Court decided to use this case to reverse its own ruling.  This meant that we were able to uphold a patent that another court had not.

            The Supreme Court decision became a landmark ruling. .University of Illinois Foundation v. Blonder-Tongue Laboratories., Inc., 401 U.S. 313 (1971).  Patent attorneys all know this case as “Blonder-Tongue.”

            In my wildest dreams, I never suspected that my painfully wrought opinion in the TV-antenna case would wind up in the Supreme Court and be considered, in any way, by the highest court of the land.

            Go figure!

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Posted in 1960s, Chicago, law, lawyers, patent law

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Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman

Posted on January 11, 2021 | 2 comments

Post #4

During the past week, we’ve all witnessed an alarming and unspeakable violation of the Capitol building.  Although I’ve been shaken by this violation, I’ve decided to proceed with this blog as earlier planned.

This is the fourth in a series of posts recalling what it was like to clerk for Judge Julius J. Hoffman from 1967 to 1969.

Some of Hoffman’s Cases

•     “Joe Shine”

            Hoffman’s first trial after I arrived was a criminal case brought by the feds against a group of defendants that included Joseph Amabile.  (I initially assumed that Amabile’s name was pronounced “Ah-mah-bil-lay,” but I can still hear Judge Hoffman’s bailiff calling out the name as though it rhymed with “Oldsmobile.”)

            Amabile (known as “Joe Shine”) and a couple of his pals were accused of serious wrongdoing arising out of land-development deals in the western suburbs of Chicago.  More precisely, they were accused of conspiracy to violate a federal law because they had interfered with commerce by extortion.  “Extortion” is the relevant word here.  According to testimony at the trial, one defendant had hit some poor guy in the face and threatened to use a baseball bat if he didn’t cooperate.

            At first, I was terrified to sit in the same courtroom with some of these defendants, but they looked pretty subdued, dressed in their expensive suits, seated next to their high-priced lawyers.  Judge Hoffman didn’t seem too worried, but then he had an armed bodyguard accompany him to and from the courthouse every day.

            When the daily newspapers started running stories about the trial, a major issue arose.  The defense lawyers had been opposed to sequestering the jury, but now they began arguing that the published articles were prejudicial to the defendants.  They demanded that the judge ask the jurors every day whether they had read or heard any of the prejudicial publicity.  Hoffman repeatedly admonished the jurors, each time they left the courtroom, not to read any newspapers or listen to any news about the trial on radio or TV.  But he refused to directly question the jurors about the prejudicial publicity.  His rationale was that because the defendants had opposed sequestration of the jury, they couldn’t complain that the jurors might be somehow exposed to news about the trial.

            Back in chambers, he confessed his real concern.  He was worried that, after he had invested several weeks in this trial, even one juror’s admission that she or he had watched a TV news report would force the judge to declare a mistrial.  His persistent refusal to question the jurors later became one of the biggest issues on appeal.

            After a five-week trial, the jury convicted the defendants.  But the appellate court later reversed the convictions.  (U.S. v. Palermo, 410 F.2d 468.)  Why?  Basically because Hoffman had refused to question the jurors about the prejudicial publicity.

            Hoffman had gambled and lost.  If he had directly questioned the jurors every day, they probably would have denied disobeying his order to avoid seeing any prejudicial publicity.  If they had explicitly denied disobeying his order, the convictions would have been upheld. 

            But because the judge didn’t want to risk any other outcome, his five-week trial was a total loss.

•     South Holland

            The judge took great pride in a ruling that he believed demonstrated his fairness to minorities. 

            In 1968, the federal government filed a suit against School District 151 (South Holland and Phoenix, Illinois), alleging discrimination against minority students.  Special prosecutors were brought in from the Justice Department in D.C. to try the case, and Hoffman presided over the trial that summer.  At the end of the trial, he asked the parties to submit Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law.  He then took these documents under advisement.

            He never followed his usual pattern of asking one of his clerks to assist him in reviewing the evidence or deciding how to rule.

            A short time after the end of the trial, the judge announced his decision in favor of the government.  In his written memorandum opinion, he followed the government’s submission virtually word for word.

            The school district’s attorneys complained.  They argued that the judge hadn’t done anything other than rubber-stamp the government’s position.

            On appeal, the 7th Circuit affirmed Hoffman’s decision.  But the dissenting judge agreed with the defendant’s argument, noting that “the District Court…without changing a word,” adopted every one of the government’s Findings and Conclusions, as well as its proposed Orders. 

           The case against the school district was unquestionably meritorious.  Although I wasn’t asked to review anything submitted by either side, I have no doubt that the U.S. Justice Department produced sufficient evidence to prove its case of discrimination against the school district.  And Hoffman was therefore unquestionably right to decide in favor of the Justice Department. 

            But the case didn’t resemble any other major case I encountered during my clerkship.  The judge did not appear to review the evidence or attempt to reach any conclusions other than those offered by the government lawyers.  And he didn’t ask his clerks to do so.  I think he may have decided, as soon as the case was assigned to him, to rule in favor of the government.

             The judge was very pleased with the result.  After announcing his decision, he basked in the glow of the favorable publicity that usually escaped him. 

            One of Chicago’s daily newspapers even wrote an editorial praising him.  He had this editorial enlarged and framed, and after he hung it in his chambers, he proudly pointed it out to visitors. 

            It was clear that, despite the negative publicity he often garnered from other happenings in his courtroom, in his eyes he would now be seen as fair-minded, even “liberal,” thanks to his ruling in favor of minority students in this case. 

•     Inmates of Cook County Jail

            Sometime in 1968, a Chicago lawyer named Stanley A. Bass, who at the time was somehow connected with the ACLU (I don’t recall his exact connection), filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the inmates of Cook County Jail, complaining about conditions at the jail.  The suit described the horrific–indeed shocking–state of living conditions at the jail, alleging that they were in violation of various provisions of the US Constitution.

            This suit was, to my knowledge, the first class-action lawsuit presenting the issues of prison conditions to a federal court. 

             It also became the first prisoner lawsuit in which a federal court ruled that a class action of this nature stated a claim and therefore would not be dismissed.  Inmates of Cook County Jail v. Tierney, No. 68 C 504 (N.D. Ill., Aug. 22, 1968).

            I suspect that when the case was assigned to Judge Hoffman, Stan Bass’s heart sank.  Aware of Hoffman’s conservative bent, he could hardly hope to get any favorable rulings at the district-court level and probably relied on filing an appeal to get anywhere with his case.

            But Stan didn’t count on my being Hoffman’s law clerk.  Fortunately for him, that made a difference.

            The defendant prison officials filed motions to dismiss the case for “failure to state a claim,” making a number of procedural arguments designed to get the case thrown out of court.  A ruling in favor of these officials would have meant the end of the lawsuit.

            But instead of quickly ruling in their favor, I gave a lot of thought to what would be the right thing to do.  It seemed to me that the inmates had stated a perfectly good claim under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  Although I knew that Hoffman wanted to extricate himself from this case, I simply could not bring myself to throw it out.

            So after thoroughly researching the court decisions that interpreted the applicable federal rules, I reached my conclusion:  The court would be wrong to dismiss the inmates’ case.  It was August 1968, and my summer vacation was approaching.  After I prepared a lengthy written opinion, I left it on the judge’s desk on a Friday afternoon just before departing for my two-week vacation.

            I knew by this time that the judge was loathe to reject any opinion written by his law clerks because that meant he would have to substitute another opinion.  To come up with his own opinion would require that he do some research and writing on his part.  But I nevertheless felt sure that he would somehow avoid going forward with the inmates’ claims. 

            I pictured myself returning from vacation and confronting an angry judge who would insist that I throw out my opinion and write a new one stating the exact opposite.

            Imagine my shock when I returned from vacation to find that, while I was out of town, the judge had read my opinion, word for word, from the bench.  I felt dizzy with power, knowing that my efforts had kept alive a case he was eager to throw out, but a case that truly belonged in the courts.

            In the ruling, I wrote, in part:  “Although it might, indeed, be the easier course to dismiss this …complaint…, we cannot flinch from our clear responsibility to protect rights secured by the federal Constitution.”

            I hoped that the ruling would lead to improved conditions for inmates at Cook County Jail, and I believe that it may have. The case was later settled when the defendants assured the court that they were making fundamental changes at the jail.

            Although the judge read the opinion from the bench, he was adamant about denying permission to publish it.  But his remarks from the bench were a public record.  The ACLU wanted to let other lawyers know about the ruling, so it purchased the court reporter’s transcript and distributed copies of it.  These copies made their way around the country and were frequently cited, as an unpublished opinion, in the many prisoners’ cases that followed.

            One of the highlights of my legal career is that I wrote the first ruling upholding prisoners’ rights in a case of this kind.  And that my ruling went on to inspire many cases that followed in its wake. 

            When I later worked as a staff attorney at the National Health and Environmental Law Program, located at UCLA School of Law, I did further research into the issues surrounding prison health care, and I published an article that explored these issues, “The Captive Patient: The Treatment of Health Problems in American Prisons,”  6 Clearinghouse Review 16 (May 1972).

            Postscript:  Stan Bass later became a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.   When he filed an amicus brief on behalf of that organization in a class-action prisoner case (presenting other issues) in the U.S. Supreme Court (Goosby v. Osser, No. 71-6316, 409 U.S. 512 (1973)), Stan cited the ruling in Inmates of Cook County Jail as support.

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Posted in 1960s, class actions, Illinois, law, lawyers, TV news, U.S. federal courts, UCLA

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Hangin’ with Judge Hoffman: Post #3

Posted on December 21, 2020 | 2 comments

 

This post is the third in a series of posts recalling what it was like to work as a law clerk for Judge Julius J. Hoffman.

 •      His treatment of lawyers

                Hoffman tended to treat most lawyers disrespectfully.  During court sessions, he would berate lawyers for their failings, no matter how minor, and he would generally speak to them in a condescending tone.  Seated in the courtroom, where I sometimes had to listen to lawyers’ arguments or witnesses’ testimony, I often found myself cringing when Hoffman demeaned a lawyer who appeared before him.

                There were a few exceptions.  He was generally impressed with lawyers from the biggest, most prominent firms in the city, and he tended to treat them better than less well-connected lawyers. 

                 He also treated government lawyers with some deference, and he was almost courtly to the few women lawyers who appeared before him.  If a lawyer was both a woman and a representative of the U.S. government, Hoffman would treat her like a queen.  A woman friend of mine who worked for a federal agency could never understand why lawyers complained about Hoffman.  She thoroughly enjoyed her appearances in his courtroom.

•     Hell, no, I won’t…publish

                Hoffman almost never published his opinions.  He justified his refusal to publish by saying he didn’t want lawyers to throw his own words back at him in a later case.  Early in his judicial career he had apparently published some opinions, and lawyers did just that.  At that point, he swore off publication. 

                The only decision of mine that Hoffman chose to publish involved an arcane tax issue involving Rosehill Cemetery.  Later, when Hoffman went along with a controversial ruling I wrote in a case involving the inmates of Cook County Jail, he read the ruling from the bench but refused to publish it, despite numerous requests from lawyers that he do so. 

            I guess he thought he had done enough just reading the damned thing from the bench.  He was not about to put it in black and white.  The ACLU ended up buying a copy of the transcript from the court stenographer and making copies of it, so the opinion eventually was widely circulated, but in less-than-official form.  (I’ll have more to say more about this case in Post #4.)

•      His view of habeas corpus petitions

                In the late ’60s, both state and federal prisoners tried (as they still do) to get out of prison by filing habeas corpus petitions.  Some prisoners were fairly skillful jailhouse lawyers who submitted petitions citing legal authority for their claims.  Others sent crudely drafted handwritten pleas with very little to go on.

                Hoffman gave clear instructions to his law clerks that we were never to grant a habeas corpus petition, no matter what sort of claim the prisoner alleged.  He directed us to find something, anything, on which to base a dismissal of the petition.

                I quickly learned a few shortcuts and repeatedly cited the same language, followed by the same precedents, over and over again.  But in a few cases I couldn’t see any way to get around a prisoner’s claim.  The prisoner had made a genuine constitutional argument, and I believed it was necessary to hold a hearing where he could make his case.  But whenever I tried to explain this to the judge, he blew me off.

                “I will never allow a prisoner to be brought to my courtroom for a hearing,” he declared.  “If the Seventh Circuit wants to order me to hold a hearing, I will hold it, but I will never order one myself.  Find some reason to deny the petition!”  So even in those few cases, I had to comply with the judge’s position and come up with some pretext to deny the petitions–hoping, of course, that the prisoners were not too discouraged to file an appeal with the court of appeals.

In the case of one prisoner, I was happy to go along with the judge’s dictates. Jack K. was a perennial petitioner who must have filed one or two handwritten petitions every month. He filed so many that we never took any of them seriously. Prisoners like him eventually led the federal court system to clamp down on all prisoners and impose rules that would prevent abuse of the system by people like Jack.

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Posted in 1960s, Chicago, law, lawyers, respect, U.S. federal courts, women

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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Hooray for Hollywood! Part I

Posted on December 30, 2019 | 1 comment

As a lifelong film buff (OK, since I was about 4), I have great fondness for much that Hollywood (and foreign cinema) has produced.  Each year I try to see a number of new films and re-watch some of the old ones.

During the past year, I never got around to seeing most of the blockbusters that dominated the box office. According to the online publication The Verge, Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box-office hits in 2019.

Thanks to its purchase during the last decade of Marvel Entertainment (2009) and Lucasfilm (2012), Disney films have included franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel hits, in addition to popular animated films like Frozen and Frozen 2.  The result:  Disney films have surpassed many other films at the box office.

But I don’t pay a lot of attention to box-office success.  I’m far more focused on seeing films that have something to say to me. This year my clear favorite was Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

Once Upon a Time, a Quentin Tarantino film, is not only a fabulous depiction of Hollywood in 1969, but it also related to me and my life in a number of ways.

Spoiler alert:  If you haven’t yet seen this film, DO NOT read the ending of this blog post, where I write about the Manson murders.

First, about the film itself:  It’s been called a “buddy picture,” and in many ways it is.  In two stellar performances, Leonardo DiCaprio (playing the fictional Rick Dalton) and Brad Pitt (playing fictional Cliff Booth), are indeed buddies.  Rick is a fading former star of a Western TV series, trying to make a comeback in Hollywood, while Cliff is his longtime stunt double.  By 1969, with Rick’s star on the wane, Cliff spends much of his time driving Rick from place to place.  Both are struggling to survive in a Hollywood that has changed from the one they knew.

Weaving fiction and fact throughout the film, Tarantino uses both humor and violence to depict the end of an era.  In this love letter to 1960s Hollywood (which has earned positive reviews by most top critics on Rotten Tomatoes and garnered numerous awards and nominations), he embeds specifics of popular culture and real places in 1969 LA into the film.

 

The story takes place during two days in February and one day in August of 1969.  Notably, Rick Dalton’s home is right next door to the home of minor film star Sharon Tate (married to director Roman Polanski) in a posh section of western LA, Benedict Canyon.

In this film, Tarantino also skillfully blends in the ugly story of the Charles Manson “family.”

Re-creating in many ways the world that I lived in at about the same time, even if he himself did not, Tarantino provoked a cascade of intensely vivid memories for me.  Here’s why:

 

 

I left Chicago in August 1970 and moved to the Westwood neighborhood on the west side of LA, where I rented a cheerful furnished apartment within walking distance of UCLA.

I had moved my “Reggie Fellowship” from the Appellate and Test Case Division of the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau to a health-law related Legal Services office that was located at UCLA Law School.  Reggies were predominantly young lawyers who opted to work on behalf of the poor rather than toil in a corporate law firm.  (Please see my more detailed description of the Reggie program in an earlier post, “The Summer of ’69,” published on August 7. 2015.)

Westwood and Westwood Village (the commercial area in Westwood, adjacent to UCLA), loom large in my memory.  I met my husband-to-be (I’ll call him Marv) on the UCLA campus in October 1970, six weeks after I arrived.  Before we met, we had both rented separate apartments in the same apartment building located on the fringe of the campus. We soon began dating, and my memory bank is filled with countless memories related to our courtship and marriage that year.

My new location was very close to much of what happens in the Tarantino film only one year earlier.  So when he replicates things from that time, I recall seeing and hearing a lot of what looked like them myself.

Examples:  Street signs, ads painted on bus-stop benches, movie posters, commercials, and music. (Some of these are Tarantino’s own inventions.)

Probably the best example:  Sharon Tate goes to see herself in a film at a movie theater in Westwood Village.  During the year that I lived in Westwood, I saw many films at the movie theaters in Westwood Village.  (Seeing “Love Story” with Marv in one of them in December 1970 was especially memorable, and I plan to write about it in a future blog post.)

Another example:  A scene in the movie is set at the famous LA restaurant called Musso & Frank Grill.  Marv and I were both aware of its fame, and during that year we sought it out and dined there one special night.

One more thing:  The stunning area where Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski lived next door to the fictional Rick Dalton (Benedict Canyon) is in western LA, not far from Westwood and very close to BelAir.  Marv and I not only lived in Westwood, but we also celebrated our wedding luncheon at the charming BelAir Hotel.

Then there’s the Manson family storyline in the movie.  I learned about the Manson murders during a weekend in New York City.  I was spending part of the summer of 1969 at the Reggie training program at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, and I traveled from Philly to NYC one weekend in August

During trips to NYC, I often stayed with a close friend and a law-school classmate (I’ll call her Arlene).  Although Arlene was planning to be out of town that weekend, she invited me to stay in her 86th Street apartment on the East Side of Manhattan without her.  It was a great opportunity to live by myself as a quasi-New Yorker, and I decided to do it.

Returning to her apartment on Saturday evening, I picked up the Sunday New York Times and was shocked by a headline spelling out the startling discovery of the Manson murders.

At that time, I was still living in Chicago, but I had briefly lived in LA when I was 12 and always liked to follow any news arising there.  So I was riveted by the Manson story and read the paper from cover to cover.

When Tarantino decided to weave this story into the rest of his film, he did what he’d done in Inglourious Basterds and changed the real ending to a much different one.

Watching Once Upon a Time, I was terribly nervous as the film approached its ending.  I knew how the real story turned out, and I didn’t know exactly how this film would portray it.  But what a departure from reality Tarantino created!  The shocking ending to the film includes imaginative violence that is so over-the-top that it’s almost humorous.  Overall, the ending is a clever re-imagining of the fate of the Manson family and a much happier resolution of what happened to their victims.

Although the new ending was violent in its own way, creating an exciting piece of filmmaking, I left the theater in a much sunnier frame of mind than I would have if Tarantino had re-created the actual massacre that took place in 1969.

 

In sum, Once Upon a Time is, to my mind, an absorbing and a fascinating film.  For me, it was one of the best films of 2019.

 

I plan to write again about Hollywood films that have been relevant to my own life.  Part II will begin to explore classic films that have done just that.

 

 

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Posted in 1960s, 1969 movies, August, BelAir, Brad Pitt, California, Chicago, films, Hollywood, law, lawyers, legal assistance to the poor, Leonardo DiCaprio, lifestyle choices, Los Angeles, LA, memories, movie stars, movies, music, New York City, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino, Reggie program, The New York Times, UCLA, Westwood, Westwood Village

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A Snowy April 1st

Posted on May 15, 2018 | 1 comment

On the morning of April 1st, The New York Times reported that the city had woken up to an April snowstorm, “with about 5 inches of snow expected to produce slushy streets and a tough morning commute.”  The storm followed a string of storms that had hit the East Coast in March with heavy snows and damaging winds.

This New York story about snow on April 1st reminded me of another April 1st snowstorm:  The one in Chicago that changed my life.

In the spring of 1970, I was already questioning whether I wanted to spend another year in Chicago.  My work at the Appellate and Test Case Division of the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau had its good points.  I was co-counsel with a lawyer at the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU (who happily became a lifelong friend) in a case challenging the restrictive Illinois abortion law, a law that made any abortion nearly impossible for all but the most affluent women in Illinois.  Our case was moving forward and had already secured a TRO allowing a teenage rape victim an emergency abortion.  A great legal victory!

But the rest of my life was at a standstill.  I was dating some of the men I’d met, but I hadn’t encountered anyone I wanted to pair up with.  In fact, I’d recently dumped a persistent suitor I found much too boring.  Relying on old friendships led to occasional lunches with both men and women I’d known in school, but the women were happily married and had limited time for a single woman friend.  I tried striking up friendships with other women as well as men, but so far that hadn’t expanded my social life very much.

I also haunted the Art Institute of Chicago, attending evening lectures and lunchtime events.  The art was exhilarating, but good times there were few.  When I turned up for an event one Sunday afternoon and left a few hours later, planning to take a bus home, I was surprised to see almost no one else on Michigan Avenue, leaving me feeling isolated and (in today’s parlance) somewhat creeped-out.  (In 1970 Chicago hadn’t yet embarked on the kind of Sunday shopping that would bring people downtown on a Sunday afternoon.)  Similarly, I bought tickets for a piano series at Symphony Hall, and a series of opera tickets, but again I many times felt alone among a group of strangers.

I still had lots of family in the area.  But being surrounded by family wasn’t exactly what I was looking for just then.

So although I was feeling somewhat wobbly about staying in Chicago, the question of where to settle instead loomed large.  When I’d left law school three years earlier and assumed a two-year clerkship with a federal judge in Chicago, I’d intended to head for Washington DC when my clerkship ended.  But in the interim Tricky Dick Nixon had lied his way into the White House, and I couldn’t abide the idea of moving there while he was in charge.

My thoughts then turned to California.  I’d briefly lived in Los Angeles during 8th grade (a story for another day) and very much wanted to stay, but my mother’s desire to return to Chicago after my father’s death won out.  Now I remembered how much I loved living in sunny California.  A February trip to Mexico had reinforced my thinking that I could happily live out my days in a warm-weather climate instead of slogging away in Chicago, winter after Chicago winter.

So I began making tentative efforts to seek out work in either LA or San Francisco, cities where I already had some good friends.

What happened on April 1st sealed the deal.  I’d made my way to work that morning despite the heavy snow that had fallen, and I took my usual ride home on a bus going down Michigan Avenue to where I lived just north of Oak Street.  The bus lumbered along, making its way through the snow-covered city, its major arteries by that time cleared by the city’s snow plows.  When the bus driver pulled up at the stop just across Lake Shore Drive from my apartment building, he opened the bus’s door, and I unsuspectingly descended the stairs to emerge outside.

Then, it happened.  I put a foot out the door, and it sank into a drift of snow as high as my knee.  I was wearing the miniskirts I favored back then, and my foot and leg were now stuck in the snow.  The bus abruptly closed its door, and I was left, stranded in a snowbank, forced to pull myself out of it and attempt to cross busy Lake Shore Drive.

On April 1st.

Then and there I resolved to leave Chicago.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  I made up my mind to leave the snow-ridden city and head for warmer climes.

And I did.  After a May trip to the sunny West Coast, where I interviewed for jobs in both Los Angeles and San Francisco (with kind friends hosting me in both cities), I wound up accepting a job offer at a poverty-law support center at UCLA law school and renting a furnished apartment just across Gayley Avenue from the campus.

The rest is (my personal) history.  I immediately loved my new home and my new job.  Welcomed by friends, both old and new (including my brand-new colleagues at UCLA), I was happy to have left Chicago and its dreary winters behind.  And six weeks after arriving in LA, I met the wonderful guy I married a few months later.

What happened next?  I’ll save that for still another day.  But here’s the take-away:  a snowstorm on April 1st changed my life.  Maybe it can change yours, too.

 

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Posted in Art Institute of Chicago, California, Chicago, family, law, lawyers, legal assistance to the poor, Los Angeles, LA, Mexico, New York City, Nixon administration, politics, president, San Francisco, snow, snowstorms, taking buses, the White House, UCLA, Washington DC, weather, West Coast, winter weather

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Who the Heck Knows?

Posted on April 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

I have a new catch phrase:  “Who the heck knows?”

I started using it last fall, and ever since then I’ve found that it applies to almost everything that might arise in the future.

I don’t claim originality, but here’s how I came up with it:

At a class reunion in October, I was asked to be part of a panel of law school classmates who had veered off the usual lawyer-track and now worked in a totally different area.

Specifically, I was asked to address a simple question:  Why did I leave my work as a lawyer/law professor and decide to focus primarily on writing?

First, I explained that I’d always loved writing, continued to write even while I worked as a lawyer, and left my law-related jobs when they no longer seemed meaningful.  I added that my move to San Francisco led to launching my blog and publishing my first two novels.

I concluded:

“If I stay healthy and my brain keeps functioning, I want to continue to write, with an increasing focus on memoirs….  I’ll keep putting a lot of this kind of stuff on my blog.  And maybe it will turn into a book or books someday.

“Who the heck knows?”

 

After I said all that, I realized that my final sentence was the perfect way to respond to almost any question about the future.

Here’s why it seems to me to apply to almost everything:

None of us knows what the next day will bring.  Still, we think about it.

In “Men Explain Things to Me,” the author Rebecca Solnit notes “that we don’t know what will happen next, and the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”  She finds uncertainty hopeful, while viewing despair as “a form of certainty,” certainty that that “the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.”

Let’s cast certainty aside and agree, with Solnit, that uncertainty is hopeful.  Let’s go on to question what might happen in the uncertain future.

For example:

We wonder whether the midterm elections will change anything.

We wonder whether our kids will choose to follow our career choices or do something totally different.

We wonder whether our family history of a deadly disease will lead to having it ourselves.

We wonder whether to plan a trip to Peru.

We wonder whether we’re saving enough money for retirement.

We wonder how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in an upcoming case.

We wonder what our hair will look like ten years from now.

We wonder what the weather will be like next week.

And we wonder what the current occupant of the White House will say or do regarding just about anything.

 

You may have an answer in mind, one that’s based on reason or knowledge or probability.   But if you’re uncertain…in almost every case, the best response is:  Who the heck knows?

If you’re stating this response to others, I suggest using “heck” instead of a word that might offend anyone.  It also lends a less serious tone to all of the unknowns out there, some of which are undoubtedly scary.

If you prefer to use a more serious tone, you can of course phrase things differently.

But I think I’ll stick with “Who the heck knows?”

Warning:  If you spend any time with me, you’ll probably hear me say it, again and again.

But then, who the heck knows?

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Posted in blog, books, brain, class reunions, disease, getting older, hair, language, law, lawyers, memoirs, novels, politics, Rebecca Solnit, retirement, San Francisco, travel, U.S. Supreme Court, uncertainty, weather, writing

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The Battle of the Sexes: One more take on it

Posted on November 20, 2017 | 2 comments

When Billie Jean King met Bobby Riggs on a tennis court at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973, I was miles away in San Diego.  I’d just finished teaching a class of law school students about Poverty Law, and I was blissfully pregnant with my first child.

I was watching the clock, assessing the time it would take me to drive from the law school on the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego to our recently-rented apartment in seaside La Jolla.  Waiting at home for me was my handsome and super-smart husband (I’ll call him Marv), finished for the day with teaching math students at UCSD, the University of California at San Diego.

We were both Professors Alexander that year, and I took delight in answering our phone and hearing a student ask to speak to “Professor Alexander.”  My somewhat amused response:  “Which one?”

Marv had snacks and drinks ready for the two of us to munch on and imbibe during the televised tennis match.  The drinks included nothing alcoholic for me.  Not because the medical profession had pronounced that alcohol was detrimental for growing fetuses.  As I recall, that came later.  I avoided alcoholic drinks simply because I had no desire to drink them during my pregnancy.

Was it instinct or just dumb luck?  When we later that year saw the film “Cinderella Liberty,” in which an often-drunk woman’s pregnancy ends in tragedy, my choice to avoid alcohol was clearly vindicated.

I drove home from USD with as much speed as I could safely muster, arriving in time to watch the much-hyped tennis match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.”  In the 2017 film that tells the story of the match, Emma Stone captures the Billie Jean King role perfectly.  She portrays with aplomb not only King’s triumph over Riggs in that tennis match but also her initial uncertainty over her decision to compete against him and her continuing struggle to ensure that women’s tennis be given equal status with men’s.

As one of the estimated 50 million viewers who watched King on ABC television that night, I can’t imagine any other Hollywood star assuming the role with greater success.  Emma Stone embodies Billie Jean King to perfection, and I hope her performance garners the attention of countless moviegoers, including many too young to remember  the match that took place in 1973.

Steve Carell carries off his role as Bobby Riggs in the film equally well, depicting the outrageous antics of the 55-year-old Riggs, who initiated the concept of the “Battle of the Sexes.”  But the focus here has to be on Billie Jean, the Wonder-Woman-like heroine of her day.  By accepting Riggs’s challenge, and then defeating him, she became the mid-twentieth-century symbol of women’s strength and perseverance, advancing the cause of women in sports (and in American culture at large) as much as she advanced her own.  Watching the battle on TV with my adored husband, my hoped-for child growing inside me, I was ecstatic when Billie Jean defeated Riggs before 90 million viewers worldwide.

As my pregnancy advanced, I was frequently asked by complete strangers, “Do you want a boy or a girl?”  I took pleasure in answering “a girl” just to see the reaction on the faces of the nosey parkers who clearly expected another response.

I was in fact hoping I would give birth to a healthy child of either sex, but I knew that I would treasure having a daughter.  When my beautiful daughter was born about seven months after the Battle of the Sexes, and when her equally beautiful sister arrived three years later, Marv and I were both on top of the world.

Maybe watching Billie Jean King in September of 1973 sealed our fate.  We really wanted her to win that battle.

Did the endorphins circulating inside me as we watched Billie Jean triumph produce a feeling of euphoria?  Euphoria that later led us to produce two Wonder-Woman-like heroines of our own?

Maybe.

Tennis, anyone?

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Posted in alcoholic drinks, American culture, American history, Battle of the Sexes film, Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, California, daughters, endorphins, euphoria, fair pay, films, gender equality, gender-equity, La Jolla, law, legal assistance to the poor, mathematicians, movie stars, movies, pregnancy, San Diego, teaching, television, tennis, UCSD, University of San Diego, Wonder Woman

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The Last Straw(s)

Posted on August 29, 2017 | 1 comment

A crusade against plastic drinking straws?  Huh?

At first glance, it may strike you as frivolous.  But it’s not.  In fact, it’s pretty darned serious.

In California, the city of Berkeley may kick off such a crusade.   In June, the city council directed its staff to research what would be California’s first city ordinance prohibiting the use of plastic drinking straws in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops.

Berkeley is responding to efforts by nonprofit groups like the Surfrider Foundation that want to eliminate a significant source of pollution in our oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water. According to the conservation group Save the Bay, the annual cleanup days held on California beaches have found that plastic straws and stirrers are the sixth most common kind of litter.  If they’re on our beaches, they’re flowing into the San Francisco Bay, into the Pacific Ocean, and ultimately into oceans all over the world.

As City Councilwoman Sophie Hahn, a co-author of the proposal to study the ban, has noted, “They are not biodegradable, and there are alternatives.”

I’ve been told that plastic straws aren’t recyclable, either.  So whenever I find myself using a plastic straw to slurp my drink, I conscientiously separate my waste:  my can of Coke Zero goes into the recycling bin; my plastic straw goes into the landfill bin.  This is nuts.  Banning plastic straws in favor of paper ones is the answer.

Realistically, it may be a tough fight to ban plastic straws because business interests (like the Monster Straw Co. in Laguna Beach) want to keep making and selling them.  And business owners claim that they’re more cost-effective, leading customers to prefer them.  As Monster’s founder and owner, Natalie Buketov, told the SF Chronicle, “right now the public wants cheap plastic straws.”

Berkeley could vote on a ban by early 2018.

On the restaurant front, some chefs would like to see the end of plastic straws.  Spearheading a growing movement to steer eateries away from serving straws is Marcel Vigneron, owner-chef of Wolf Restaurant on Melrose Avenue in L.A.  Vigneron, who’s appeared on TV’s “Top Chef” and “Iron Chef,” is also an enthusiastic surfer, and he’s seen the impact of straw-pollution on the beaches and marine wildlife.  He likes the moniker “Straws Suck” to promote his effort to move away from straws, especially the play on words:  “You actually use straws to suck, and they suck because they pollute the oceans,” he told CBS in July.

Vigneron added that if a customer wants a straw, his restaurant has them.  But servers ask customers whether they want a straw instead of automatically putting them into customers’ drinks.  He notes that every day, 500 million straws are used in the U.S., and they could “fill up 127 school buses.”  He wants to change all that.

Drinking straws have a long history.  Their origins were apparently actual straw, or other straw-like grasses and plants.  The first paper straw, made from paper coated with paraffin wax, was patented in 1888 by Marvin Stone, who didn’t like the flavor of a rye grass straw added to his mint julep.  The “bendy” paper straw was patented in 1937.  But the plastic straw took off, along with many other plastic innovations, in the 1960s, and nowadays they’re difficult to avoid.

Campaigns like Surfrider’s have taken off because of mounting concern with plastic pollution.  Surfrider, which has also campaigned against other threats to our oceans, like plastic bags and cigarette butts, supports the “Straws Suck” effort, and according to author David Suzuki, Bacardi has joined with Surfrider in the movement to ban plastic straws.

Our neighbors to the north have already leaped ahead of California.  The town of Tofino in British Columbia claims that it mounted the very first “Straws Suck” campaign in 2016.  By Earth Day in April that year, almost every local business had banned plastic straws.  A fascinating story describing this effort appeared in the Vancouver Sun on April 22, 2016.

All of us in the U.S., indeed the world, need to pay attention to what plastic is doing to our environment.  “At the current rate, we are really headed toward a plastic planet,” according to the author of a study reported in the journal Science Advances, reported by AP in July.  Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, noted that there’s enough discarded plastic to bury Manhattan under more than 2 miles of trash.

Geyer used the plastics industry’s own data to find that the amount of plastics made and thrown out is accelerating.  In 2015, the world created more than twice as much as it made in 1998.

The plastics industry has fought back, relying on the standard of cost-effectiveness.  It claims that alternatives to plastic, like glass, paper, or aluminum, would require more energy to produce.  But even if that’s true, the energy difference in the case of items like drinking straws would probably be minimal.  If we substitute paper straws for plastic ones, the cost difference would likely be negligible, while the difference for our environment—eliminating all those plastic straws floating around in our waterways–could be significant.

Aside from city bans and eco-conscious restaurateurs, we need to challenge entities like Starbucks.  The mega-coffee-company and coffeehouse-chain prominently offers, even flaunts, brightly-colored plastic straws for customers sipping its cold drinks.  What’s worse:  they happily sell them to others!  Just check out the Starbucks straws for sale on Amazon.com.  Knowing what we know about plastic pollution, I think Starbucks’s choice to further pollute our environment by selling its plastic straws on the Internet is unforgivable.

At the end of the day, isn’t this really the last straw?

 

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Posted in Associated Press, California, dining, drinking straws, environment, health, law, opinion pieces, plastic pollution, politics, restaurants, science

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