Word: legality
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...sits upright with his gold-framed reading glasses halfway down his nose, a pen and document in hand, while his paralegal, only a few feet away, performs a circus act involving two cell phones, a briefcase and an importunate reporter. Boies' pen makes sharply slanting scratches on a critical legal brief--just one stone in a brutal, driving hail of critical briefs--that must be filed immediately on behalf of Vice President Al Gore. Boies' celebrated Lands' End suit remains neatly buttoned; he wears his omnipresent black running shoes, one crossed over the other. He's not in a quiet...
...began in his campaign. Of course, it may be that his party will not forgive him, four years from now, for having snatched defeat from the jaws of peace and prosperity. But it may also be that having won everything except the only thing that counted--the long, last legal battle--Gore has also won another shot...
Lawyers are, in a way, the fathers of spin. They call it "vigorous representation of my client." The central distinction of spin--between knowingly lying and ignorantly or disingenuously misleading--is a positive ethical obligation of the legal profession. Lawyers are forbidden to do the former and required to do the latter as best they can. This includes what's known as "arguing in the alternative"--the practice, infuriating to lay people, of saying, "My client never stole the money, Your Honor, and anyway, he gave it all to charity...
...given case and are not restricted in what they say on behalf of today's client by what they may have said on behalf of yesterday's. In recent years, these necessary lawyerly hypocrisies have leached out of the courtroom as lawyers have taken on broader roles and big legal cases have become multifront battlefields. The most important battlefield is often the courthouse steps...
Those who have been listening for even a year knew that this was characteristic Boies. During the long Microsoft epic, months before he won the devastating verdict against the company last April, they had heard him discuss the company's monopoly. "This is not about creative legal arguments," he said at one point. "It's not about creative economic arguments. It is about common sense. It is about facts, and it is about what the real world demonstrates." No matter how well you know Boies, these words, the phrasing, the syntax, give no clue to the setting where...