Karl Rove and The Attorney General Firings in the W. Administration

With all the other stuff going on in the news, people may have lost track of the release of the transcripts of testimony and e-mails that showed that Karl Rove was very much behind the political firing of Attorneys General during the George W. Bush administration under Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Several papers covered it but the Washington Post probably is the best source as a sort of "home town" paper. Here are several stories, all from Aug. 12, 2009:

Testimony Puts Rove at Center of Firings, by Stephen Ohlemacher:

Transcripts of closed-door congressional testimony indicate that Rove played a central role in the ouster of David Iglesias, who was one of nine federal prosecutors fired in a series of politically tinged dismissals in 2006.

Harriet Miers, then White House counsel, said in testimony June 15 to House Judiciary Committee investigators that Rove was "very agitated" over Iglesias "and wanted something done about it."

The committee released more than 5,400 pages of White House and Republican National Committee e-mails, along with transcripts of closed-door testimony by Miers and Rove. Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said the documents reveal that White House political officials were deeply involved in the firing of Iglesias and the other U.S. attorneys.

The documents show that staffers in Rove's office were actively seeking to have Iglesias removed after Republican figures in New Mexico complained that he was not pursuing voter fraud cases they wanted. In 2005, Rove aide Scott Jennings sent an e-mail to another Rove aide saying, "I would really like to move forward with getting rid of NM US ATTY."

Former Attorney General Makes the Mistake of Talking
by columnist Al Kamen, catching up with Alberto Gonzales, who seems to be writing a book!
Analysis: In Attorney Probe, One Burning Question, by Matt Apuzzo, an A.P. writer who has some pretty trenchant observations:

In keeping the controversy alive, Democrats have muddied the discussion: Did political adviser Karl Rove fire a prosecutor so his friend could get the job? Did the White House cut a deal with a senator and agree to fire a prosecutor in exchange for putting a judge on the bench? Did political operatives second-guess decisions about what cases prosecutors were filing?

Those are the questions House Judiciary Committee Democrats focused on this week after releasing thousands of pages of e-mails and transcripts of their interviews with Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.

But politics in the Justice Department is nothing new. The real question is whether the Bush administration took it a step further and illegally used prosecutors to go after political enemies.

The Justice Department has a unique pedigree. It is a governmental descendent of the mythological Lady Justice, who carried a sword to fight evil and blindly balanced fairness. But it also has political DNA, inherited from a long line of presidents who used the department to champion civil rights, break up companies and fight communists and terrorists as the White House saw fit.There is built-in tension here before the president picks any of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys. Job seekers in any administration can expect some variation of the questions, "What have you done to help elect the president?" and "Do you have anything in your past that could embarrass the president?"

On paper, a U.S. attorney has wide authority as the senior federal law enforcement official in his district. In reality, he gets his priorities from the attorney general and the White House. If the administration's priorities are terrorists, guns and gangs, the new U.S. attorney may shut down investigations into environmental crimes, corruption or computer fraud.

At its heart, that's a political decision. If the president promises to stop violent crime but a U.S. attorney is instead getting tough on polluters, the White House is going to notice.

In the run-up to the 2006 firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, the head of the state's Republican Party e-mailed the White House, complaining that Iglesias was soft on voter fraud. He asked that Iglesias be replaced so the state could "make some real progress in cleaning up a state notorious for crooked elections."

The Bush administration took the complaint to heart. In a June 2005 e-mail, White House adviser Scott Jennings said the New Mexico congressional delegation was also frustrated over the lack of voter fraud cases. He urged that Iglesias be fired.

"Iglesias has done nothing. We are getting killed out there," Jennings wrote to Rove's deputy.

Comments like this are what the controversy is really about. The firing only matters if it offers insight into whether the White House wanted Iglesias to take out its political opponents. Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy is investigating that question, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., says he gave her all the documents the panel collected.

The relationship between U.S. attorneys and Washington is not a simple matter.

He points out that the matter is not black and white and that both the Republicans and the Democrats are being disingenuous and hiding the ball in this discussion. Both the President and Congress routinely ask offices to investigate in their own interests. Read the whole article.

And for real political junkies, here is the link to the actual documents posted by the House Judiciary Committee.

Typography for Lawyers

Click on the link for this post, or in this sentence to visit http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/. Many thanks to Meg Martin, who posted to RIPS-SIS blog about this fascinating website. The blog is maintained by a civil litigation attorney in Los Angeles, Matthew Butterick, who also has an art degree. He noticed that many legal documents suffer from poor "typography," or the visual component the written word. (Butterick thoughtfully defines it for his readers and offers some illustrations that take us beyond mere fonts). The site is set up as a series of increasingly sophisticated lessons in typography for users of Word and WordPerfect, designed for lawyers. Yay!

Typography is always important because presentation is always important. Just like a gesture can punctuate a point in court, good typography can reinforce the meaning of your text. Good typography helps your reader move beyond your words and into your meaning. Conversely, bad typography can mislead your reader and undermine your meaning.

You don’t need aesthetic judgment to be a good typographer. (It won’t hurt, but you don’t need it.) You just need to be able to identify what your text is trying to accomplish and figure out how to reinforce that message with typography.

Butterick does a nice job illustrating his points, and taking his reader along step by step to show why you should buy into his assertions. He keeps it light, and makes it entertaining. He uses the illustration of the famous butterfly ballot (above) to show an example of poor typography and help the reader think about the results it can have. The rest of the website includes detailed information on improving the look of documents, from simple to more complex. He also includes a nice, brief bibliography on legal writing (all Bryan Garner books -- Whatta fan!) And Butterick finishes up with very helpful, detailed notes on actual court rules on the requirements for fonts. What a very different, and interesting website!

Follow up on Justice in Cambodia

Last week I blogged a story in GQ about the war crimes trials that recently got underway in Cambodia, thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended. The GQ article goes into some of the reasons it took so long to bring the perpetrators to justice. In an article in Sunday's Boston Globe, Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that

There is good reason to believe the tribunal will fail in its aims. Held 30 years after the fall of the regime, the trial focuses on only five leaders ... leaving thousands of former Khmer Rouge officials living undisturbed in Cambodian society. And though it may reveal important information about the country's past, virtually no one in Cambodia will have access to its findings. ... [T]he troubles faced by the Khmer Rouge tribunal offer a chastening example of why Nuremberg-style tribunals - despite their successes elsewhere - may be wrong for many of the developing countries that most need to find a way to grapple with their pasts.

Kurlantzick believes that for developing countries, it might be more effective to create "small-scale, village-level reconciliation programs, which work within the country's social structures rather than creating an expensive Western-style process." Such programs could "work quickly, before evidence is lost, memories fade, and the suspects grow too old to stand trial." He cites the example of Rwanda, which has a government-sponsored program called gacaca, "essentially a series of village-level community courts in which former victims can confront alleged petetrators of the 1994 genocide." The accused testify and then the community court may sentence them to punishment, typically "restitution on a local level." Kurlantzick admits that the gacaca system is not perfect. There have been cases of violent retribution against the guilty, but overall the system has helped Rwanda to move past its troubled history and build one of the strongest economies in Africa. Kurlantzick believes that such a locally-based system would be more effective in Cambodia than the Nuremberg-style tribunal now under way.

Just for Reference Purposes: AALL & West

Here are Statements referred to in previous post and explanations about Price Index, etc., for folks who might not already know about these things.

AALL Statement:

From: Kate Hagan
To: law-lib@ucdavis.edu
Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2009 12:35:10 PM
Subject: [LAW-LIB:59662] AALL Sponsorship Policy

There was a recent posting on this listserv concerning the AALL sponsorship policy, so I thought it appropriate to provide you with accurate information on this issue.

This year, the Executive Board, at the recommendation of its Executive Committee, did not accept any sponsorship dollars from West. This was in compliance with the Association’s sponsorship policy that was adopted by the board at its April 2008 meeting and communicated to the membership on April 17, 2008. http://www.aallnet.org/press/announce-20080417.asp

The policy is as follows:

The Association reserves the right to refuse any offer of sponsorship at its absolute discretion or to negotiate with the sponsor concerning any aspect of a proposed sponsorship. The Association has the right to refuse sponsorships provided by business entities that do not contribute information to the Price Index for Legal Publications and/or comply with the Guide to Fair Business Practices for Legal Publishers.

The entire sponsorship policy is on AALLNET at:

http://www.aallnet.org/about/policy_sponsorship.asp

AALL did ask West to participate in the Price Index this year, but they declined to do so. Therefore, we did not accept any sponsorship from them for the 2009 Annual Meeting. This policy does not prohibit West from exhibiting at the Annual Meeting or from advertising in our publications.


Kate Hagan
Executive Director
American Association of Law Libraries
Suite 3300

105 W. Adams Street
Chicago, IL 60603
312-205-8016
312-205-8017 (fax)
khagan@aall.org

The Anne Ellis, Thomson-Reuters West quote:

We’ve noticed some chatter on West’s participation at AALL this year, and wanted to weigh in to help clarify some points of the discussion. It’s true that AALL is not accepting sponsorship dollars from West for 2008-2009 because West does not participate in the Price Index for Legal Publications. It has been West’s position for many years that the retail pricing model laid out by the Price Index for Legal Publications does not accurately reflect the prices our customers typically pay. Our retail prices are easily and clearly available on the West Web site. However, we work closely with our customers to give them the information and flexibility they require to best plan their budgets and collections, and so we approach pricing on an account-by-account basis – which, by the way, is not uncommon in the industry. Our view is that whether an index is produced by a private publisher or trade association, more often it serves to confuse than clarify.


We were disappointed that we weren’t allowed to contribute sponsorship funds to AALL this year. We have worked closely with AALL through this policy change, and remain committed to the programs and issues that we have supported in the past – notably, professional development, diversity and scholarship. While we know we’re on opposite sides of this issue, there is still much that we have in common – especially in advancing librarianship, and supporting your success. I know I speak on behalf of West leadership and my Librarian Relations colleagues when I say that we hope to continue this important work together.


Please feel free to contact me personally at (651) 687-5019 if you have any question about this.


Anne Ellis

Anne Ellis
Senior Director, Librarian Relations

Thomson Reuters

Phone: 651 687-5019

anne.ellis@thomsonreuters.com
thomsonreuters.com

And the Price Index, which caused all this foo-for-all: AALL for many years maintained a list of prices, year by year, organized by type of legal materials. The idea was to track the price increases over the years, not by publisher, but by type of materials. This way, I could write for my dean, that serials overall had increased X% in price over the last five years, while statutes had increased Y%, and digests had increased Z%, which explained why the library needed this budget increase. It was a very useful tool, and took a good deal of effort to maintain, but was very much worth the effort. However, some years ago, West Publishing began to argue that the prices put into the Price Index for their (very large proportion) of the items listed did not fairly reflect what customers paid. After a good deal of wrangling and arguing between AALL and West, West stopped entirely supplying any price information. Other publishers continue to supply price information. Despite Anne Ellis' statement that price information is available on the West web pages, it is not there in the way that the price index needs it. I went to http://west.thomson.com/products/books-cds/default.aspx and noodled around. I will agree that prices appear when you search a title. But you cannot get prices for updates, which is what the Price Index is about. It's not about buying a replacement set of the statutes, it's about how much it costs to buy the supplementation for the statutes that year. I think Anne knows this, so it's a little
disingenuous of her to write her e-mail the way she did. I will leave it to the reader to decide for themselves any more about the tone of the e-mails from AALL or from Thomson-West.

AALL and Thomson-West

Well, by now, James Duggan, the immediate past president of AALL has made his official statement on Law-lib listserve. And Anne Ellis of Thomson-West has made a reply on the ALL-SIS list-serve. As I understand it, the membership of AALL is split in their sentiments over the leadership's response to West. Some members, among them many firm librarians, think that AALL has cut off its own nose to spite its face. They don't see how West's refusal to supply price information for the AALL price index is a problem. And they especially think it was stupid to forgo the sponsorship money from Thomson West in a year when the money is tight (is there ever a year when it's not tight?!).

I can see how the issue may look different from the firm perspective. I believe that firm libraries have been given firm pricing on materials that allows them to plan ahead in ways that academics have not been given for decades. I was stunned many years ago to hear from a private library colleague that they were given the pricing for looseleaf updates for the entire year at the start of the year. Academic libraries were NEVER given this information, and often got BIG surprises as the year went along, when the publisher decided to juice up their bottom line. The publishers long assumed that the academics had some bottomless purse to draw on. And to tell the truth, it must have looked that way, from the outside. They did not see what kinds of scrambles were being made into the endowment income lines, or cuts happened in the supplies line, or trips or trainings were skipped in order to cover these sudden expenses. Or sometimes, the library just ran into the red, and the dean had to scramble in the same way and find the money in some line..., or the university had to do the same scramble because the law school ran into the red....

But suddenly, there is a lot less give in the university system than ever before. We have always had a duty to protect the interests of our patrons. And I, for one, think we have been very remiss as a professional organization, in this area. Where the ABA can at least point to efforts at improving justice and protecting the public from bad lawyers and judges, what has the AALL done about bad publishers and vendors who take advantage of the public? There has been a huge change in the publishing landscape -- where the companies publishing and archiving U.S. federal and state law are suddenly:

1) owned by non-U.S. multi-national corporations;

2) oligopolies -- that is, a very few companies that control the market in such a way that they manage the pricing and supply in the same way that a monopoly can do. For certain types of legal materials there is, in fact, a monopoly;

3) not over-seen in any meaningful way by any government agency. They gather publicly owned and government produced documents (constitutions, statutes, judicial opinions, regulations and other administrative documents, Presidential papers, ordinances, etc.), and publish them, reselling them to the very legislatures, judges, and other government offices that produced the original documents. Granted, the publishers often add a good deal of value, in the form of indexes, headnotes, searchable databases, with excellent search engines. However, in many cases, they also produce the "official" version for state statutes, and the online version as well, meaning that there is no "state-owned" version that is not paid for through one of these big publishers and/or vendors.

When the first sale of West to the Thomson Company happened, AALL told the Justice Department that this would be the better outcome, because there was fear at the time that some corporate raider like Carl Icahn might swoop in and buy West, strip it of its assets, and spin it apart. The fear was that the major publisher and vendor of American law would be torn apart for its immediately useable assets (like Westlaw) and the less attractive parts (like print) would be tossed away, trashing the interlocking system that produces so much of our legal literature.

The Justice Department's Antitrust Division worked out a careful agreement, requiring West's titles to be parceled out among to avoid having both encyclopedias, for instance, in the hands of one owner (at least I supposed this was the plan). As it turned out, both CJS and Am-Jur ARE held by the same publisher/vendor (West!), and are becoming more and more the same thing, slowly melting together. I am pleased to hear that the Justice Department seems open to re-examining the mergers and acquisitions that have resulted in such a very few, very large legal publishers and vendors.

In the meantime, there have been only one or two voices in the wilderness for the interests of consumers. Ken Svengalis has been a mighty worker on behalf of consumers of legal literature. And AALL's CRIV folks have been doing great work. Now AALL has appointed Marian Parker from Wake Forest as the new Vendor Liaison. These are good and important steps. But I believe the board's strong stand on West's participation in the Price Index is another important step in protecting consumer interests. It is all too easy to take the money that makes it easy to run our association. But that betrays our responsibility to all consumers of legal information. As the professionals who know the legal information landscape, it is our ethical responsiblity to stand between irresponsible publishers and the consumers, to press unethical publishers to behave better. Who will do it if not us?

Again, I say, Bravo to AALL, and that they are HEROES!

Bravo, AALL & James Duggan!

If you went to AALL, did you notice that Thomson-West was not listed as a sponsor at all? Did you also hear the rumor that it was because the AALL leadership finally faced West down about supplying price information for the Price Index? Click on the title for this post to visit the Law Librarian Blog (part of the Law Prof Blogs Network) to read the post by Joe Hodnicki about this story, dated August 5. As a long time griper about this problem, I want to publicly applaud AALL's board and outgoing (out-gone?) President James Duggan for their courage in confronting Thomson-West, and (I suppose) refusing their money. Bravo! That is heroism, and the kind of leadership we need, and that our patrons need from us!

Justice in Cambodia

There is a powerful and haunting article written by Michael Paterniti in the current issue of GQ. Paterniti describes visiting Cambodia in 2002 and then again more recently as the Special Tribunal for Cambodia was being convened. The first defendant to stand trial is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran the notorious S-21 torture center at a former school from 1975 to 1979, the years that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. It is now a museum, which Paterniti visited. Only a few individuals survived their incarceration in S-21, described in graphic detail in the article. Paterniti interviewed several survivors and describes in moving terms their attempts to come to terms with why they lived when so many others died.

Paterniti also discusses why it has taken so long for the perpetrators of these crimes to be brought to justice--nearly thirty years. Four other defendants will stand trial next year, but Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in 1998 and escaped trial. The defendants are in their 70s, and have thus far escaped accountability for their crimes. As Paterniti puts it, "When was someone going to pay?" He offers a variety of reasons for the failure to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable:

Everyone had a theory, real or half-baked, about why it had been nearly impossible to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. For some, American guilt rode high on the list. ...[T]he Americans were loathe to reexamine the sordid details of their eight-year secret bombing of the country ... and were unwilling to accept their role in the destabilization of society that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. For others, the prime minister, Hun Sen, didn't want his own Khmer Rouge resume dredged up. ...And then the international community didn't seem to have much desire for it, either; being resource-poor and of no geopolitical advantage, Cambodia had nothing to offer. Meanwhile, the money that was earmarked for eventual trials, money that poured in through various NGOs and foreign governments, created a lucrative cottage industry for certain corrupt local officials who were motivated to drag out the process as long as possible.

And yet as time sludged forward, an agreement was finally forged in 2003 between the Cambodian government and the U.N. to inaugurate the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed During the Period of Democratic Kampuchea, or the ECCC. A formal indictment followed in 2007, charging Duch with crimes against humanity as well as war crimes. In addition, the top Khmer Rouge leaders who remained alive were arrested and imprisoned ... But up until Duch took the stand in March of this year to begin the first trial, there were still those who doubted such a day would ever come--and others, mostly those born after 1979, who didn't understand why there should be a trial for these mythical old men at all. Why did it matter? Or: Was it better left forgotten?

Paterniti's article makes it clear why it matters.

Nicholson Baker on Kindle

I would have been astonished if Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold and long-time library critic, had been a fan of Amazon's Kindle reader. Thus, his somewhat nasty article in the August 3 issue of The New Yorker reviewing the Kindle 2 e-book reader contained few surprises. Entitled "A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?", Baker's piece dissects the Kindle and presents a catalog of its shortcomings, starting with its name, which is "cute and sinister at the same time." It strikes me the same way, as a matter of fact--whenever I hear the word "Kindle," I see libraries going up in flames in my mind's eye. Nicholson also dislikes the Kindle's screen, which he characterizes as being of a "greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray." Even the typeface is criticized by Baker, who says that "[d]ark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle." The typeface, Monotype Caecilia, was "grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words." Baker is unhappy with the currently limited catalog of titles available on Kindle, but acknowledges, however, that the number of books offered over Kindle will grow as time goes on. Baker doesn't discuss the recent controversy about 1984's removal from Kindle. He seems particularly bothered by Kindle's poor display of graphics. "Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don't fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don't work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you've bought, you have to quote by location range ..." There are problems with the display fading when the device is used outdoors. And he is outraged by the fact that when

[Y]ou buy a Kindle book[,] [y]ou buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. ... [Y]ou can't read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. ... Kindle books aren't transferrable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

I have no personal experience with the Kindle, but if Baker's observations about the quality of the display and of the graphics are correct, the design needs to be tweaked if the Kindle is going to gain widespread acceptance.

New Life for Old Books

Cambridge University Press has announced a new digital initiative, according to an article in today's Inside Higher Ed. In a partnership with the Cambridge University Library, the Press, which has been operating since 1584, will scan and reprint original copies. The project, dubbed "Books of Enduring Scholarly Value," calls initially for scanning 475 volumes from the Cambridge University Library's rare book collection, and then for scanning an additional 1,000 books by the end of 2009. The books will be sold on demand for $15 to $25 per volume. The article reviews similar projects to digitize and sell on demand books from the University of Michigan and Cornell University library collections. Participants were asked whether the on-demand print programs would reduce the value of the physical library because potential users would no longer have to travel to use materials. They were unanimous in the opinion that accessibility was the most important consideration in digitizing their collections.

True Grit

This article by Jonah Lehrer in today's Boston Globe really rang true for me. It discusses recent research by psychologists into the phenomenon of grit. "[T]he researchers are quick to point out that grit isn't simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it's about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It's always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going." Unlike IQ, grit is difficult to measure, but researcher Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania has devised a survey to measure it. Here is the link to the survey. "The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score."

As someone who has spent most of her professional life in academia, I find this study to be fascinating. We have all worked with students who came in with mediocre LSAT scores and GPAs who ended up at the top of their law school classes, as well as with students who had strong predictors of success but didn't excel at law school. To me, the difference between the two groups of students sometimes boils down to a singlemindedness about becoming a lawyer. Some students become discouraged and disengage if they don't do well on their first-semester exams. Others, who have equally disappointing results, seek out their advisers, avail themselves of academic support, apply themselves, and do better in each consecutive semester. It is hard to predict into which group a particular student will fall, but the students in the latter group tend to be those for whom law school is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Another trait that I have seen as important for success in law school and in life is resilience, but that isn't mentioned in the Globe article. The question of resilience following trauma was the subject of an excellent 2006 article in the New York Times Magazine.