Although there is no charge to attend, space is limited. Reservations may be made by calling Valerie Higgs at (312) 726-8775.
A discussion of "Three Recent U.S. Supreme Court Decisions Affecting Patent Law" will take place at 12 noon Thursday, Dec. 5, in the ISBA Chicago Regional Office during an open meeting of the Intellectual Property Section. Beverages will be provided. Call Valerie Higgs at (312) 726-8775, for reservations.
Section council member Eugene F. Friedman (left) of Chicago, who also is secretary of the Business Advice and Financial Planning Section Council, will review J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Festo Corp v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki, and Holmes Group v. Vornado Air Circulation System.
Society of Scots to honor Thompson; kilts optional
Black tie and Highland attire will be in vogue Saturday, Nov. 23, in Chicago when the Illinois Saint Andrew Society honors former Illinois governor James R. Thompson with a Distinguished Citizen Award.
The society's 157th anniversary dinner will begin with 5 p.m. receptions in the Grand Ballroom on Navy Pier. Special guests include Eric Milligan, the lord provost of Edinburgh, Scotland.
After the dinner and program, attendees will enjoy Scottish country dancing with a Celtic rock band and performances by Cas Dannsa, the Thistle and Heather School of Dance, the Midlothian Metropolitan Pipe Band, Donnybrook and Mother Grove.
For more information or to make reservations, call (708) 447-5092.
Other honorees
Chicago attorney Michael B. Hyman, a member of the ISBA Assembly and past chair of the Bench and Bar Section Council, has been honored as Outstanding Subcommittee Chair by the American Bar Association Section of Litigation.
A partner in Much, Shelist, Freed, Denenberg, Ament & Rubenstein, Hyman is co-chair of the section's Consumer and Personal Rights Litigation Committee and is co-editor-in-chief of "Tips from the Trenches" on the section web site.
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The Black Women Lawyers Association of Greater Chicago inducted three members of the bench and bar to its Book of Legends during a reception on Oct. 24. They are attorney Anna R. Lanford and retired judges Odas Nicholson and Willie M. Whiting.
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Chicago attorney Jeffery M. Leving was honored Oct. 15 by the Southern Poverty Law Center for assisting in production of the Teaching Tolerance education video, "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks."
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Assistant Cook County public defender William P. Wolf has been elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Meltzer harnesses Internet to ease immigration
By Stephen Anderson
Four years ago, Chicago attorney Robert C. Meltzer saw in the Internet an opportunity to move the practice of international and immigration law into a new dimension.
Then a newsletter co-editor of the ISBA International and Immigration Law Section Council, which he had chaired in 1990-91, Meltzer thought he had the insight to improve visa and immigration processing and "to lay the groundwork for the way that law will be practiced and delivered for the next 50 years."
So he started planning an automated system that would expedite visa and immigration processing for domestic corporations that hire foreign nationals for employment in the United States.
Meltzer left his partnership in a Chicago law firm to launch VisaNow.com and begin to streamline an inefficient application process that he says "hadn't been updated since the advent of the telephone."
Immigration work is a 95 percent non-legal, document-focused procedure that requires instant multi-party access to information, an ideal challenge for a medium such as the Internet.
"Instead of clients and their legal providers having to play telephone tag and constantly send documents back and forth for review, virtually all work can be done online," Meltzer pointed out.
Apparently it was an idea whose time had come. VisaNow.com crossed into profitability in June 2001. The merger of business disciplines and patented technology has now served more than 500 companies and countless individuals.
Meltzer recently obtained the first patent for providing "Network Based Legal Service Systems," and is introducing VisaPrep, a private label version of the system for the immigration bar.
"The introduction of VisaPrep is a milestone in the practice of immigration law," he said. For the first time, attorneys and their staffs will be able to use the power of the web to effect a faster, better and less expensive legal process."
A 1985 graduate of the Northern Illinois University College of Law, Meltzer had studied in Austria, France and Switzerland and worked in the legal division of the United Nations World Health Organization.
After a stint with Katz, Randall & Weinberg in Chicago, he became a partner and co-chair of the expanded international law practice at Arnstein & Lehr in 1993. He joined Grotefeld & Denenberg in 1999.
Director of Legislative Affairs
Veto session is scheduled for the week before and after Thanksgiving. Until then, the following is a summary of legislative action.
Public records. House Bill 4938 was vetoed by Gov. Ryan and may be acted on in the veto session. It does three things. (1) Amends the State Records Act to include "digitized electronic material" and "databases" in definition of "record" and exempts "blank forms" from the definition of "record." (2) Makes changes regarding inspection and copying of certain records covered by the State Records Act. (3) Makes it a Class 4 felony to knowingly and without authority alter, destroy, deface, remove, or conceal any public record. The legislation also adds similar language to Section 3 of the State Records Act, which is penalized under current law as a Class B misdemeanor.
The Governor's amendatory veto simply makes it a Class 4 felony under either Act for the same illegal acts so that the penalties are the same.
Freedom of Information Act. Public Act 92-645 amends the Freedom of Information Act to change the exemption from inspection and copying requirements from "computer graphic systems" to "computer geographic systems." Effective July 11, 2002.
Tort immunity. Public Act 92-810 amends the Local Governmental and Governmental Employees Tort Immunity Act to require indemnification of employees for reasonable attorney fees incurred in defending claims against them. It also increases the amount of coverage from $500,000 to $1 million for sheriffs, deputies, and police officers. Effective Aug. 21, 2002.
School legal drug policy. Public Act 92-663 requires a school board to adopt and implement a policy that prohibits any disciplinary action that is based totally or in part on the refusal of a student's parent or guardian to administer or consent to the administration of psychotropic or psychostimulant medication to the student.
The policy must require that at least once every two years the in-service training of certified school personnel and administrators include training on the current best practices regarding these issues. Effective Jan. 1, 2003.
Prayer and the pledge. Public Act 92-612 requires the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited each school day by pupils in secondary educational institutions supported or maintained in whole or in part by public funds. Effective July 3, 2002.
Public Act 92-832 authorizes students in the public schools to voluntarily engage in individually initiated, non-disruptive prayer that is not sponsored, promoted, or endorsed in any manner by the school or any school employee. Effective Jan. 1, 2003.
National Guard changes. Public Act 92-716 changes the Act's short title to the Illinois National Guard Employment Rights Act. It provides for re-employment rights of members of the Illinois National Guard who are on State active duty, including the right of a National Guard member to re-employment in the position that he or she left with the same increases in status, seniority, and wages that were earned during the member's period of State active duty by persons in similar positions. Effective July 24, 2002.
National Guard changes. Senate Bill 1583 amends the Service Men's Employment Tenure Act to grant members of the Illinois National Guard all of the benefits under the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act of 1940. Governor Ryan amendatorily vetoed SB 1583 to make it compatible with federal law.
Editor
Will gets fair shake
We'll spare the suspense and get right to the verdict. So far as can be known, one William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the sonnets and plays attributed to THE William Shakespeare.
In a split decision, a panel of federal judges has ruled that presumptive tryth of Shakespeare's acclaim as author of the canon seems preponderant to the belated claim of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The venue was the Goodman Theater in the circuit of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Judges Milton Shadur and James Zagel prevailed in the two-to-one opinion affirming Shakespeare, but Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow qualified her dissent by finding nothing conclusive in the arguments for either pretender to the mantle of world's greatest litterateur.
Federal prosecutor Sergio Acosta and law professor Thomas Geraghty took de Vere's case to the court, arguing that William, the son of illiterate glover John Shakspere, lacked all opportunity to have acquired the breadth of knowledge and talent to accomplish the greatest feat in English literature.
Geraghty pointed out an icon in the earl's coat of arms: a rampant lion shaking a spear. Get it? Perhaps de Vere took "Shake-Speare" as a nom de plume, rather than reveal his royal self as a lowlife playwright who lampooned powerful people.
The pleadings for William of Stratford were presented by litigator Frank Cicero and former prosecutor Andrea Zopp. Cicero alluded to the rise from poverty of Abraham Lincoln as evidence that a poor upbringing can indeed produce riches of erudition. Moreover, de Vere's dubious claim did not become an issue until 300 years after his death.
Zopp dismissed de Vere with her "shoulda, coulda, woulda" test, and pointed to the overwhelming reality of "three big-ticket items" in the canon. First, William Shakespeare's name is on the works. Second, authorship was attributed to him by the actors who eagerly performed the plays.
Finally, Shakespeare was alive when all of the works were produced (de Vere had died seven years before Shakespeare retired from London to Avon, and before at least nine of the plays were written). If deVere was the author, why the conspiracy of silence after his death?
Court adjourned for a luncheon respite, while the jurists worked individually on their opinions. Judge Shadur opened with the observation that since no witnesses were present to provide direct evidence, speculation was the order of the day. Common sense called for reasonable inferences drawn in the light of experience.
Quoting from Hamlet's admonishment to his players, "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue," Shadur deduced that the author was writing from his own perspective - that of the director and actor that only Shakespeare was.
Moreover, no author of so many great works would have or could have suppressed his identity, which any conspirators certainly would have revealed when he died. Calling his finding a "Scotch verdict," Shadur ruled that de Vere's case had not been proven.
Judge Zagel concurred, referring to the plays and sonnets as the work of a true genius, a quality that none of de Vere's known works ever exhibited. Further, the three-century tardiness of the accusation against Shakespeare defies credibility.
Calling herself the typical judge who, among the lawyers and clients, "is the least familiar with the evidence and the least qualified to decide the case," Judge Lefkow began her dissent with acknowledgment of a presumption that the man from Stratford wrote the Shakespeare canon.
But the plethora of circumstantial evidence is overcome in her view by incongruities. Shakespeare left no written texts or writing samples; he apparently kept no collection of books; and when he died, presumably famous, neither his eminence nor any connection to the plays was recorded.
Lefkow discerned even less of a case for de Vere, an ostensible rogue who was not known to be funny. But to those who are not convinced that Shakespeare was the real deal, she advised looking further and closed with this remarkably provocative verse:
Who could have mastered French, Italian and Greek, Known royal gardens and falcon's beak,
Aped the schemes of the queen's men, And foreseen the duke's next battle plan,
Yet writhed in self doubt and agony, Mapped true love's sweet comedy,
Cast maid, Puck, Mote and simple folk, So keen to note, "What fools these mortals be!:
Whilst ne'er a soul would breathe that he, Was, verily, a she?
The controversy simmers, the fire burns and the cauldron bubbles. Might there have been a Wilma Shakespeare?
Thursday, Nov. 21, 2-4 p.m. Corporate Law Departments and Corporation, Securities and Business Law Section open roundtable discussion on Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Chicago Regional Office.