On April 30, Bill Glahn, invoking his “48 years” of practice, provided the following advice: “attack the argument, not the lawyer.” Glahn then attacked the lawyer, me, and not the substance of my critique of Judge Anderson’s standing decision. Glahn believes lawyers should not criticize judges.
Judges, like other powerful government actors, can do remarkable damage to normal people. They require close supervision through vigorous public commentary. Glahn’s position to the contrary is repressive, inconsistent with our traditions and best interests, and should be rejected.
Consider that Justice Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court came to New Hampshire and criticized his own court. He told the story of the Korematsu decision, where judges ignored evidence and upheld the forced internment of Japanese Americans. Judges entrenched slavery as national law in Dred Scott. Judges curbed the civil rights of freedmen after the Civil War, including in Plessy. Judges endorsed the forced sterilization of a vulnerable woman one judge called an “imbecile” in Buck v. Bell, providing fuel for the eugenics programs in Nazi Germany. Judges oversaw the mass extermination of Eastern European Jews in Nazi Germany, an extermination my family of American Jews escaped. Judges left a child beaten to the point of permanent brain injury by his father with no remedy against the state agency that sat by and did nothing to protect him in Deshaney.
As a lawyer with specialized knowledge, I cannot and will not accept Glahn’s demands for silence on this record.
MICHAEL S. LEWIS
Concord