all of this behind me. But I am no longer chasing the truth; the truth seems to be chasing me. Why did my father want a gun? To protect himself or to commit a crime, Lemaster Carlyle suggested. Neither one is happy news. What was my father involved in? I think of Jack Ziegler in the cemetery. I think of McDermott-Scott, deemed harmless by his local sheriff, but dead nevertheless, the circumstances suspicious. My shoulders sag. Kimmer’s judgeship seems miles and miles distant. I am struck by a sudden urge to rush upstairs to visit Theo Mountain, for I need to be cheered up, but I have to avoid making my onetime mentor my full-time crutch.
I pass a knot of students: Crysta Smallwood arguing heatedly with several other women of color, as they nowadays style themselves. A few words float outward from their confab: dialectical interstices and outsider position and reconstructed other. I long for the days when students argued over the rules of civil procedure or the statute of limitations, back when the nation’s leading law schools thought their job was teaching law.
Nearing my office, I notice Arnold Rosen, one of the faculty’s great liberal hard-liners, gliding toward me in his powered wheelchair. He smiles his thin, superior smile, and I smile back reluctantly, for we are not close. I admire Arnie’s mind and his determination to stick to his principles, but I am not sure that he admires anything in me, especially given that I am the son of the great conservative hero. Arnie came to us from Harvard about a decade ago, Stuart Land’s masterful recruiting coup, and is said to be Lem Carlyle’s only competitor to succeed Dean Lynda when she one day steps down.
A flick of his finger on a control rod slows the chair. His pale eyes are distant and judgmental as he looks up at me. “Good afternoon, Talcott.”
“Hi, Arnie.” My key is in my hand, signaling, I hope, that I do not really feel much like talking just now.
“I don’t think I’ve had the chance to tell you how sorry I am about your father.”
“Thank you,” I mutter, too tired to be annoyed by his hypocrisy. Arnie teaches legal ethics and a variety of commercial law courses and is a prodigious scholar, but saves his real enthusiasm for the three great causes of the contemporary left: abortion, gay rights, and a very strict separation of church and state. A few months ago, my former student Shirley Branch, the first black woman we have ever hired, gave a paper at the semi-weekly faculty lunch arguing that the form of separation we intellectuals today take for granted is too strict, that its application would have harmed, for example, the civil rights movement. Arnie disagreed, suggesting that Shirley’s notion would lead us back to the days of America as a Christian nation. The two of them went at it quite heatedly, until Rob Saltpeter, the moderator, defused the situation with a wry observation: The trouble with America is not that it is a Christian nation but that too often it isn’t.
Rob, like Lem, has style.
“You know, Talcott,” Arnie murmurs, smiling up at me, “one of our colleagues came to talk to me about you the other day.”
“About me? What about me?”
“Well, it was peculiar. He thought you might have violated a rule of ethics. I set him straight, I assure you.”
I sway on my feet. “What rule? What are you talking about?”
“You’re doing some consulting work for a corporation. Something to do with toxic torts, correct?”
“Uh… yes. Yes, I am. So?”
“Well, our colleague asked me if it was proper for you to continue to write in the area when you were getting paid as an advocate to take a particular view.”
“What!”
“You see the problem, I’m sure. Legal scholarship is supposed to be objective. That’s our myth and we cling to it. We have to, or we’re in the wrong business. That’s why the school frowns on professors’ doing too much consulting work.”
“I understand that, but-”
Arnie circles his chair backward an inch or two, waves a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry, Talcott. It’s a common misconception. There is no rule against it-there aren’t really any ethical rules about legal scholarship-and, besides-”
“And, besides, I would never slant my scholarship for the sake of a fee!”
“Well, that’s what I said, too.” Nodding his head. “But our colleague seemed pretty sure. I have the impression we haven’t heard the end of this.”
I make a small sound. Disbelief, maybe, or simply anger. Is this more of the pressure Stuart mentioned?
“Arnie, listen. Who was it that came to you? Who brought this up?”
His hand flaps again. “Ah, Talcott, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
“Attorney-client privilege.” Still smiling, he sails off down the hall.
CHAPTER 20
“Misha, it is so good to see you.” A hug, because I am a man and he is a man. Male judges nowadays are afraid to hug their female clerks, or so my father used to say. But some of his facts he made up. “Come in, come in.”
Wallace Warrenton Wainwright steps to one side, beckoning me to join him in his inner office. The chubby black messenger who walked me in from the clerk’s office has vanished. As the door to the anteroom closes, it is just me and Wallace Wainwright. He is a tall man, at least five inches over six feet, with shoulders more thick than muscular, thinning brown-white hair, and a pale, studied asceticism about his friendly face. He seems too happy to be as smart as he is. He looks less like a judge than a friar-Franciscan, to be sure-and if you sat next to him on an airplane, you would never take Wallace Wainwright for an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But that is how history will record him. Outside this spacious room, computers buzz and bleep, printers zip, law clerks rush about, telephones softly burr-the sounds, as Justice Wainwright would surely describe the tumult, of justice being done. And maybe, from time to time, the Court has done justice, but a good deal less than most people seem to assume, for it has been, for most of its history, a follower, not an agent, of change. We law professors like to speak and write as though the past is otherwise, as though the Justices have lately abandoned a traditional role of protecting the weak against the strong.
We speak and write nonsense.
Like every other social institution, the Court has mainly been the ally of the insiders, a proposition that should come as no surprise, because only the insiders become the Presidents who nominate the Justices, the Senators who confirm them-or the candidates from whom the nominees are chosen in the first place. Liberals point to Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade as though they have identified the Court’s appropriate role in the nation’s governance, whereas all they have really identified is a peculiar epoch in history, during which the Justices set about trying to change America rather than trying to keep it the same. The epoch died, and the Court swiftly faded as an engine of social evolution, which probably would have made the Framers of the Constitution very happy. After all, Madison and Hamilton were insiders too.
Justice Wainwright-Mr. Justice Wainwright, they would have said in the grand old sexist tradition-is very much an insider, for he knows everybody. Everybody, that is, who matters in Washington. Small wonder that he, alone among the Justices, attended my father’s funeral. He attends every wedding in town, so why not every burial? As I look around the room at his grand blue carpet and grander wooden desk, my eyes light upon his ego wall, a montage of photographs of the Justice with everybody from Mkhail Gorbachev to Bob Dylan to the Pope. There is a photograph of a stern Wainwright in Marine dress uniform, and another frame holds his decorations. There is a photograph of a smiling Wainwright with a clutch of babies in his lap: grandchildren, I suppose. The remaining walls are lined with solid wooden bookshelves holding the hundreds of cream-colored volumes of the United States Reports, the official record of the decisions of the Supreme Court, even though, in this digital age, no lawyer under the age of thirty opens the books any more, for everything in the books is also online (or so, unfortunately, young
