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August 23, 2005

Box o' Dox

Is there a smoking gun in "Box 30-JGR/Judges (3)"?

Stay tuned.

The three worst temp jobs of my life:

  1. I spent about a month working as a skip tracer for a student loan collection company. Actually, the job itself wasn't so awful - I got to play detective, sort of, trying to find people who owed money on their student loans. But it was right after another company had gone out of business, stiffing me for a couple of thousand dollars, right about the time my son was born, leaving me fighting eviction and power shutoff notices - so the stress was out of this world. Worse, I took the day off after my son was born - and got a solid chewing-out from the temp service. Worst of all was my time with the full time staff - mostly middle-aged women who'd gotten married too early, commuted into downtown Saint Paul from the far redneck exurbs and earned maybe $8.00 an hour. It was the most dismal, depressing time I can imagine.
  2. Working as an essay reader for a company that graded student tests. This, during the depths of the '92 recession, was a "sweatshop for people with degrees", requiring one to read reams of essays written for competency exams. We applied, hamfistedly and perfunctorily, the standards - set up by a corporation run by as moronic a bunch of bucketheads as I've ever met - with all the grace and concern for student learning as a group of East German motor vehicle department lifers.
  3. For six months, I worked for a "litigation support" company - reading reams of corporate documents uncovered through the discovery process for a major lawsuit. In this case, it was a suit by a bunch of power companies against another power company that was trying to build a nuclear power plant, and doing a very bad job of it. The original scope - four reactors at a cost of $1 billion - had decayed into a single reactor for $4 billion.

    Here's the gig; in big lawsuits, lawyers file "Discovery" against their opponents, meaning they're supposed to turn over copies of all relevant documentation for examination. The standard tactic to frustrate this is for the lawyers to send teams of paralegals through the offices and vaults and photocopy every piece of paper in every file in every office in the company, almost literally burying the opposing attorney in paperwork.

    This litigation support firm had to digest seven semi-trailers full of paperwork (as I recall - and I know one regular reader/commenter can probably correct me on that number). 140 tons of photocopies. To do this, they enlisted a team of people to attach file numbers to each page, enter them into a computer system (this was in 1992, when things weren't quite as sophisticated as today) to create a database record of each page, and then...

    ...sit down and read every single page of that 140 tons, and assign codes and comments to help lawyers and paralegals sort the content later on.

So for six months, I sat, eight hours a day, and read "Release for Test" reports for seismically-rated pipe hangers, filed in triplicate in 1972, photocopied in quintuplicate in 1992. I burned through a stack four feet tall of "Release for Test" reports. And when I finished that, I moved on to inspection receipts for cold-leg water feed pipe stock. And after that, to reports documenting the testing of non-critical wiring in the Auxiliary Equipment building.

It was around this time I started drinking eight 16-ounce mugs of office coffee a day. My stomach never settled and my eye developed a tic, and I realized I'd never make it as a lawyer.

So Hugh and Duane's "Box o' Dox" program - where individual bloggers adopt boxes of the dox dump that the Reagan Library unleashed last week - brings back all sorts of memories from the past.

I need coffee.

==============

If you're looking for a smoking gun, the 35 pages of dox in Box 30-JGR/Judges (3), you're pretty much out of luck. The "box" consists of two documents.

First is a paper, "PROMITING THE PRESIDENT'S POLICIES THROUGH LEGAL ADVOCACY: AN ETHICAL IMPERATIVE OF THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY, an address before the Federal Bar Association by Bruce E. Fein, delivered on May 13, 1983 at the Vista Hotel in Washington. Mr. Fein spoke/wrote about the application of canons of ethics to the practice of government law.

A key point:

A government attorney's concept of fair or just public policy may diverge substnatially from that held by the President or the attorney's other superiors in the Executive Branch. Thus EC7-14 seems to endow a government attorney with a right to refust to support a broad spectrum of legitimate..."
And that's it. Because for some reason, only the odd pages of this 12 page speech are included. At any rate, there is no indication as to what Roberts' beliefs are; he doesn't turn up (at least, not in any form I can recognize) in the eighty footnotes appended to the end of the paper (or, shall I say, the half of them that I can see).

The rest of the "box" is a photocopy of an article from the July/August, 1983 edition of The American Lawyer, "Federal District Judges: The Best and Worst". It lists...well, the best and worst federal judges, district by district. Roberts is not mentioned (Harold Green of PATCO and AT&T breakup fame was the "Best", June Greene was the worst judge in the DC circuit).

Browsing the file, however, gives some interesting dirt on the judicial history of the Eighth Circuit, which includes the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the whoel line of states from Minnesota south to Arkansas. Miles Lord is a serious candidate for "worst" due to his streak of populism that prompted him to bend the definition of "class action" beyond recognition:

In a recent sex discrimination action against the University of Minnesota, Lord allowed th class to be defined so broadly that it included even women who never applied to the university faculty because they feared they might be discriminated against.
The box is an interesting read.

Unless you're looking to beat up Judge Roberts, of course.

Posted by Mitch at August 23, 2005 12:02 PM | TrackBack
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