Law and Conversation

January 14, 2012

My BigLaw column: Five tips from the bench

Filed under: judiciary,Law,lawyers,Technology — Helen Gunnarsson @ 4:41 pm
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In December 2011 I wrote a column for TechnoLawyer’s BigLaw e-mail newsletter, “Goliath v. David: Five Tips From the Bench for Large Law Firms That Square Off Against Solos and Small Law Firms.” I based it on my experience as an administrative law judge for the Illinois Human Rights Commission for nearly a decade as well as on conversations I’ve had over the years with judges from a number of different tribunals. (It was a lot of fun to write.)

Now, TechnoLawyer is soliciting reader votes for the best BigLaw column of 2011. The winner gets (1) an ego boost and (2) a virtual TechnoLawyer badge to display on his or her blog, toward bragging. (See below for the badge I received in August.) Since I’d love to have both the ego boost and the virtual badge, I’m asking anyone and everyone as well as their spouses, kids, law partners, and friends, to please vote for my column. You just have to sign up for a TechnoLawyer account if you don’t already have one, which doesn’t cost anything, and then click to vote. Here’s the info on how to do it, copied and pasted from TechnoLawyer’s e-mail; MANY THANKS to all for clicking for me.

HELEN W. GUNNARSSON’S BIGLAW COLUMN …

Goliath v. David: Five Tips From the Bench for Large Law
Firms That Square Off Against Solos and Small Law Firms

Vote for This BigLaw Column:
http://www.technolawyer.com/r.asp?L26119&M62987

Read This BigLaw Column:
http://bit.ly/x7Ax6f

TechnoLawyer, incidentally, is well worth signing up for if you’re a lawyer. It provides useful articles for lawyers in all different practice settings, focused, of course, on how to use technology to help you practice law more efficiently. And it’s FREE (at least, the current e-mails are; if you want to read an archived article in the library, you’ll have to pay). I’ve had warm and fuzzy feelings for TechnoLawyer ever since August 2011, when the company picked my cover story for that month’s Illinois Bar Journal, “To Tweet Or Not To Tweet: Twitter For Lawyers,” as BlawgWorld’s Pick Of The Week!

December 26, 2011

Peter Kocan’s “Fresh Fields:” mental illness and the law

Filed under: Europa Challenge,mental health — Helen Gunnarsson @ 5:14 pm
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Challenge ButtonNews from the Mental Health Summit at the University of Chicago as well as the Chicago News Cooperative’s excellent coverage of mental health services cuts in Illinois in the pages of The New York Times coincided with my reading Australian writer Peter Kocan’s autobiographical novel, “Fresh Fields.”

In 1966, as a teenager, Kocan tried and, fortunately, failed, to assassinate Australian labor leader Arthur Calwell. Though he was found to be a borderline schizophrenic and sentenced to life in prison, most of which he spent in a mental hospital, he was pronounced cured and released from custody after ten years. He began writing in prison and is now an acclaimed writer, having received a number of literary awards as well as obtaining advanced degrees.

In “Fresh Fields,” Kocan depicts the descent of a fourteen-year-old loner into insanity. The youth, as the author refers to him throughout, didn’t seem fundamentally abnormal to me (though I’m no mental health expert). Rather, his mental unhinging seems to occur as a gradual result of his extremely limited socialization.

Kocan makes the dysfunctionality of the youth’s family clear in his first few paragraphs. The youth, his mother, and his younger brother are fleeing their home and the abusive Vladimir, who is his mother’s husband or partner and may or may not be the youth’s father. Kocan refers to the youth’s mother only as “the woman,” and she has no more than minimal dialogue and interaction with him. Though the youth is only around 15, his mother apparently doesn’t think it important for him to go to school. She pushes him to get a job and support himself, since she evidently can’t. He gets and loses a series of jobs due to his complete lack of experience and missteps that a more experienced and wiser person would never make. The hard knocks he’s gotten, coupled with the absence of any meaningful human relationship or social interaction, cause him to retreat into himself. He becomes increasingly obsessed and identifies with Diestl, a soldier character in a German movie about the aftermath of World War II who is alone, wounded, and bitter. By the end of the book, it’s clear that he’s going to explode.

“Fresh Fields” is the prequel to Kocan’s two novellas, “The Treatment” and “The Cure,” which I reviewed earlier on The Europa Challenge website. His stories and personal history, together with a number of articles I’ve written for the Illinois Bar Journal on mental health law, make me wonder to what extent isolation causes people to develop mental illness, or dementia. (From there, it’s a short step to wondering whether solitary confinement for misbehaving prisoners is ever a good idea.) If only more positive socialization were the answer for all who suffer; unfortunately, it’s clear that there are many other factors that cause or contribute to mental problems, some (but not all) of which can be alleviated by counseling, some (but not all) of which can be alleviated by drugs, and some (but not all) of which may be alleviated by more socialization.

You can read more about Kocan in Patrick Bryson’s paper, “Lunatics and the Asylum: Representations of ‘The Loner.’” We in the U.S. are not alone in having difficulty in funding and framing our mental health care system; see Inside Story for more about Australia’s mental health care problems. And NPR had a story recently about how to hold violent psychiatric patients accountable without punishing them for being sick.

Though it still carries a stigma, mental illness has touched most people’s lives. I admire Kocan and all those who are bringing their experiences out of the closet.

October 21, 2011

Terror in literature and real life

Filed under: Books and writing,Law — Helen Gunnarsson @ 5:35 pm
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I’m shedding no tears at the death of Muammar Gaddafi, just as I shed none on learning of the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, or any other brutal dictators.

But I’m not dancing in the streets over it, either.

A friend and fellow Illinois lawyer, Lee Goodman, posted thoughtfully today on Gaddafi’s demise, the ensuing celebrations, and the coincidence of today being Simchat Torah, the significance of which another friend explained to me a couple of nights ago. (Lee is president of MentorCLE, which has a presentation of mine, “Persuasive Writing for Lawyers,” that you can watch and, if you’re a lawyer, get 1 hour of MCLE professionalism credit for; if you pay for the credit, I receive a small royalty.)

A famous line from Shakespeare’s play, “Henry VI,” is “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Back when I thought lawyer jokes were funny (that was a LONG time ago), I thought that was hilarious. Since then, I’ve not only become a lawyer but learned the context of that line: it’s what an aspiring tyrant proposes to do to make it easier for him to assume absolute power and despotism, and it isn’t a bit funny. As I was pondering Lee’s post and the events of yesterday, I started thinking about what it must be like to be a resident in a country where such unrest is occurring and how lucky I feel not to be there and, instead, in a country where the rule of law remains strong.

Libya and Iraq seem very far away, not only geographically but culturally, and Romania isn’t that much closer. But periods of terror have certainly happened in western cultures as well, and even in the fairly recent past: Romania straddles west and east, Hitler was dictator of Germany within living memory, and there are those in Spain who still mourn Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who, though ruthless, did bring Spain out of the horrible Spanish Civil War and into peace.

Here are some memorable literary treatments of historical terror:

1) Can’t start this list with any book other than Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” depicting life during the Terror in France in the years after 1789.

2) A number of people retweeted British author Adel Darwish‘s comment earlier today that the fate of Gaddafi’s body reminded him of the scene in “The Iliad” when Priam begs Achilles for the release of Hector’s body as he was dragging it toward the Greeks’ camp. Coincidentally, The Economist has a nice review of four translations of Homer’s epic poem and recommends sticking with Richard Lattimore’s 60-year-old classic work while checking out Alice Oswald’s recent “Memorial” for a reminder of how shocking Homer’s gory descriptions are, even in the third millennium after he composed them. (Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily.) I picked up our household copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, a thoughtful gift from my sister, and was struck by how opening it practically anywhere at random yielded a graphic, blood-soaked description of killing.

3) Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning  “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” provides a snapshot of life in the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo, as bad a ruler as they come.

Finally, Literary Kicks has an interesting post from last year by Claudia Moscovici on life in Ceausescu’s Romania. And Britain’s The Daily Mail has a piece on the demises of several notable tyrants, concluding with The One That Got Away: Josef Stalin, who, unlike his fellow tyrants, was never deposed and died in his bed of natural causes.

This Friday night I’m wishing for an end to terror in Libya and elsewhere, and a return to peace and the rule of law. Since Germany, Spain, Romania, France, Greece, and many other countries who have had awful periods of terror now enjoy peace and democracy, there must be hope.

September 29, 2011

The fascinating history of comic books

Filed under: Books and writing,comics,First Amendment — Helen Gunnarsson @ 12:01 am
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The other day I posted about Banned Books Week here in the US. In the mid-20th century there was a powerful movement against comic books in this country, complete with public burnings. I’ve noticed, though, that comic books don’t usually rate mentions during Banned Books Week. Indeed, though I’ve always loved comics, until just a few years ago, when I happened to be listening to podcasts reviewing David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America,” I had no idea about that interesting and appalling part of US history.

Jeet Heer’s article in Slate, “The Caped Crusader: Frederic Wertham and the campaign against comic books,” reminds me that I’ve been meaning to read Hajdu’s book for some time and ought to move it up on my list. Now that I know that Wertham and his partisans succeeded in whipping even Congress up into a frenzy over comic books, I understand why, when I was a child a couple of decades later, my parents didn’t want me to tell anyone I had my own subscription to MAD magazine. But Heer’s nuanced treatment of Wertham, which I haven’t seen elsewhere, also reminds us that many comics of that period contained story lines and imagery that even those of us who oppose banning books would find shocking and repugnant today.

I mentioned Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” a novelization of the mid-20th century’s comic book age, in my last post. The fictional storyline of Chabon’s novel reminded me strongly of longtime MAD magazine artist Al Jaffee’s real life story, which Mary Lou Weisman tells in collaboration with her subject in “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life.” (What, you don’t remember which cartoons Jaffee drew? He invented the brilliant Fold-Ins back in 1964; NOW do you remember?) You can read more about Jaffee and Weisman’s book, including the entire prologue, complete with some of Jaffee’s wonderful illustrations, on HEEB’s website.

To summarize, here are three reading recommendations for books about the fascinating history of comic books:

1) The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, by David Hajdu

2) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

3) Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, by Mary Lou Weisman

As always, I’d love to hear other recommendations for further reading in the comments.

UPDATED: Neatorama has a great post on the history of comic books. Hat tip: Judex Jones.

September 23, 2011

Mental health and criminal justice: The Treatment and The Cure

Filed under: Books and writing,Europa Challenge,Law,mental health — Helen Gunnarsson @ 8:45 am
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Challenge ButtonI posted a review of Australian writer Peter Kocan’s “The Treatment and The Cure” over on The Europa Challenge Blog this week. Kocan’s work is a worthy addition to the canon of literature dealing with the treatment of mental illness – the criminally insane, in particular. He knows what he’s writing about: he himself was sentenced to life in prison for attempting to assassinate the Australian Labor Party leader in 1966, when he was 19. After spending around ten years in a prison asylum, he was released. Since then, he’s made a career as a writer and has won major literary awards in Australia. Hope you’ll click on over and have a look at my review. Even better, read Kocan’s autobiographical book for yourself. It’s a compelling, and chilling, story.

Treatment of the mentally ill has a long and sordid history. In recent years, some judicial systems have tried addressing offenders with mental illnesses through setting up specialty courts, which I wrote about in the April 2008 issue of the Illinois Bar Journal. Kocan’s narrator doesn’t appear to be mentally ill at all; he describes a system in which, from his point of view, treatment in the form of medication or electroshock sessions is administered more for punishment, or on whim, than for therapy.

Other memorable stories of mental illness include Joanne Greenberg’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” and the movie based on Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nobel laureate John Nash, “A Beautiful Mind.” Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” of course, is a classic novel about a prison mental hospital made into an equally classic movie with a superb performance by Jack Nicholson.

What are you reading this weekend?

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