Judge William J. Bauer of the U.S. Court of Appeals is president of the Scottish Law Society. District Court Judge Suzanne B. Conlon is vice president, Alexander D. Kerr Jr. is secretary, and Wayne Rethford is treasurer.For membership information, call Kerr at (312) 876-3800, or Laural Kostuck at the Illinois St. Andrew Society, (708) 447-5092, ext. 357.
The Park Hyatt Hotel in Chicago is the site of the next meeting of the ISBA Board of Governors, at 9 a.m. Friday, Jan. 31. Future meeting dates are Friday, April 4, at the Par-a-Dice Hotel, East Peoria, and Friday, May 16, at the ISBA Chicago Regional Office.
The 127th Annual Meeting, at which Terrence J. Lavin of Chicago succeeds Loren S. Golden of Elgin as president, will take place June 19 to 22 at The Abbey on Lake Geneva.
Lore of sea inspired lawyer to write 'Sagas'
A review by ISBA Bar News editor Stephen Anderson of "Short Sea Sagas" by Chicago attorney Harold T. Berc. Athena Press 2002, 192 pages.
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"And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover," England's poet laureate John Masefield wrote in "Sea Fever," the immortal verse that begins, "I must go down to the seas again..."
The fellow rover he described may as well have been Harold Berc, a former naval officer who apparently shares Masefield's yearning for the "grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking."
Berc's fascinating work, "Short Sea Sagas," is just what its title implies - 20 chapters of legends about ships that plied the rolling seas, including some that misfortunately also plumbed its briny depths.
A compendium compiled by a poet, the easy-to-read work is thoroughly documented, meticulously footnoted, and tied together neatly as a bowline with a glossary and index.
"Short Sea Sagas" begins with a chapter, "Safely at Anchor," that relates the irony of a ship destroyed by a tidal wave that swept through a safe harbor. The book ends with the author losing his ship to a Japanese torpedo during the invasion of the Philippines in November 1944.
Other chapters are devoted to the fates of ships filled with gold and silver treasures, the "black mysteries relating to ships passing into oblivion without a trace," and still others found intact without any sign of a crew aboard.
Included are such finite details as the dimensions of Noah's Ark, the first vessel "assigned to the creator's missions," as calculated by Sir Isaac Newton (515 feet long, 86 wide, 18,231 tons). Another, the Egyptian ship Zam Zam held a mosque that could accommodate 600 souls.
A floating brokerage office aboard the luxury liner Berengaria was besieged midway between London and New York in October 1929, when passengers tried to place sell orders as the market crashed. Many had embarked wealthy but disembarked after losing fortunes.
We learn of related trades like "crimping," the drugging and selling of able-bodied men for indenture as crew members. And of wreckers along rugged shorelines who misplaced signal lights and plundered the ships that ran aground, killing the survivors and leaving no evidence.
Berc tells of messages from sinking ships that were scrawled on paper and corked in bottles, or scratched on bits of wreckage. He chronicles mutinies, the dedication of lighthouse keepers and tugboat captains, the adventurers who have rowed across oceans in small boats, the entrepreneurs who still scour the depths for salvageable wrecks.
In the soulful chapter, "O Captain, My Captain," the reality of captains who courageously went down with their ships is explored. Others survived but died in later tragedies, or committed suicide in despair over losses of crafts and crews.
There is the incredible coincidence of two books by Morgan Robertson: "Futility," about construction of a ship called Titan, and the sequel, "Wreck of the Titan." Robertson described the loss of a liner in a collision with an iceberg. The book was published 14 years before the Titanic sank in eerily similar circumstances.
Did you know that more than 1,500 Union troops died after the Civil War ended when the ship they were on sank in the Mississippi River? The Sultan, designed for 376 passengers, carried 2,000 freed prisoners, bound for home from Confederate camps, until its boilers burst.
As the author points out after that chapter, "There is no end to dates of sea disasters. There never is a last one but only the latest one. Although each event has its own distinctive characteristics, the agony is universal."
On page after page, Berc's prose takes the reader through centuries of life and death on the bounding main. "Short Sea Sagas" is both a vicarious joy for the landlubber and a trove of detail for the marine historian.
Author secured war memorial funding
Harold T. Berc, a 1937 graduate of the DePaul University College of Law, took time out from his 65 years of practicing law to serve in the Navy during World War II and return to Chicago with a Bronze Star for combat duty in the Pacific.
Starting as an ensign gunnery mount director on the battleship Washington, he was assigned in 1943 to the newly commissioned anti-aircraft cruiser Reno, becoming a "plank owner," a lieutenant and fighter direction officer.
The Reno was damaged by one of the first Japanese kamikaze planes, then repaired only to take a torpedo on Nov. 3, 1944, while in a task force supporting the invasion of the Philippines.
On March 2, 1945, while serving in the Naval Officer's Tactical Radar School in Florida, Berc learned that he had been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for "courageous and inspiring leadership, in the face of continuous attacks by enemy aircraft ... in keeping with the highest traditions" of the Navy.
His service to the Navy did not end with his discharge. Berc became active in the AMVETS and was elected national commander in 1959. On his watch, the organization dedicated a carillon on the deck of the rusting hulk of the Arizona in Pearl Harbor and planned to have the names of its victims inscribed on a memorial wall.
When Congress failed to appropriate funds, Berc determined that the Veteran's Administration owed the equivalent of a $250 burial fee for each of the 1,102 men entombed below decks. He thus convinced President Eisenhower to support allocation of more than $250,000 toward completion of the project.
In 1997, Berc received the AMVET Silver Helmet Americanism Award in Alexandria, Va., for "steadfast commitment to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by America's servicemen and women."
A member of the ISBA Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Section Council for several years, Berc was honored as a Senior Counsellor in 1987. He served on Chicago Bar Association committees on International Law, Aviation Law, Civil Practice, Civil Rights, and Probate and Trust Law.
Also a former journalist with the International News Service and Universal Service, Berc has served on the board of directors of the Chicago Press Veterans Association for several years.
Director of Legislative Affairs
The 93rd General Assembly started its two-year legislative cycle the first week in January with the conventional wisdom that their efforts this spring will be overshadowed by fiscal concerns.
The Lou Lang show. Of the first 68 House bills that were pre-filed, Rep. Lou Lang (D-Skokie) filed 38 of them. Some of those bills include the following:
Insurance fines. House Bill 48 requires that fines imposed for violation of the insurance laws of this State may not be reduced by administrative action to less than 85% of the civil penalty or fine initially imposed.
Sunshine-in-litigation. House Bill 25 creates a "sunshine-in-litigation" section of the Code of Civil Procedure. It prohibits a court from entering an order or judgment that will conceal a "public hazard" and from concealing information that may be useful to members of the public in protecting themselves from injury that may result from a public hazard. It also voids any portion of an agreement or contract that intends or has the effect of concealing public hazard information or may be useful to members of the public in protecting themselves that may result from the public hazard.
Standing to contest an order, a judgment, an agreement or a contract that violates this new section is granted to any substantially affected person, including but not limited to representatives of the news media. It creates an in-camera procedure for a party to show good cause to object to the disclosure of information that it regards as irrelevant to the public hazard, including trade secrets.
Child support and employers. House Bill 15 provides that before employing a person as an employee, an employer must ask the person whether he or she currently owes a duty to pay child support. If an employer pays wages in cash to an employee who at the time of payment owes a duty to pay child support and if that payment of wages in cash enables the employee to evade his or her duty to pay child support, then the employer commits a business offense punishable by a fine equal to three times the amount of support owed by the employee plus the costs of collecting that support. After collection of the fine, the clerk of the court shall pay the amount of the fine to the custodial parent or other legal guardian of the child for whom the employee owed the support for the benefit of the child.
Child support enforcement. House Bill 16 does the following: (1) Itemizes when a transfer made by a child support obligor is fraudulent as to an obligee if the obligor made the transfer with the intent to defraud the obligee or without receiving equivalent value for the transfer. In an action for relief from such a fraudulent transfer, the state's attorney may obtain avoidance of the transfer or other relief. (2) A person who willfully defaults on an order for child support may be subject to summary criminal contempt proceedings.
(3) Each State agency must withhold, suspend, or restrict the use of any license or certificate issued by that agency to a person found guilty of criminal contempt. (4) Authorizes the Department of Public Aid, in addition to others, to receive location information for child support establishment and enforcement purposes from employers, labor unions, telephone companies, and utility companies.
Elder abuse. House Bill 51 amends the Probate Act to prohibit anyone convicted of financially exploiting, abusing, or neglecting an elderly person from receiving any benefits as a result of the elderly person's death.
Editor
Activism vs. avarice
Legal pedants are a-twitter over a Dec. 20 decision by the Ohio Supreme Court that directed allocation of two-thirds of a $30 million punitive damage award to cancer research.
"Grotesque," University of Chicago Law Professor Richard Epstein told a New York Times reporter. He said such a taking could make one's jaw hang down to mid-chest. He agreed with a trial lawyer who termed the ruling "judicial activism at its height." (Dardinger v. Anthem, 97 Ohio St. 3d, No. 2002-Ohio-7113)
And so it may be, but not necessarily in the sense that "activism" is an expletive that needs to be deleted. May we direct your attention, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to Webster's definition - Activism: taking positive, direct action to achieve a social or political end.
Couldn't that label have been applied as well, by both friends and foes, to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Roe v. Wade in 1973? Didn't those opinions take direct action to achieve social ends at moments in history when resolution of the issues was justifiable and justiciable?
In the Ohio case, a close 4-3 decision, the court upheld punitive damages against an insurance company that it found had bureaucratically denied coverage for treatment of a young woman who was dying of brain cancer. The court also upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million.
Granted that the court's charitable directive of $20 million to a hospital at Ohio State University may have been a legal stretch, but its motives were laudable in citing "a philosophical void between reasons we award punitive damages and how the damages are distributed."
Granted, too, that dissenting Chief Justice Thomas Moyer's quarrel with the ruling for lack of "precise standards or guidelines" is well-taken. By what parameters might Ohio's lower courts be permitted to determine distribution of future punitives?
Yet the nose of this camel under that tent provides at least a glimpse of potential sources of funding for one charity that is dearer to the legal profession access to justice for the more or less indigent.
It is fair to say, however, that such largesse should not be gifted by an authority of last resort. Fortunate plaintiffs could be sternly encouraged, not ordered, to share arbitrary punitives with legal service agencies that represent the unfortunates.
So could their contingently rewarded barristers, and many, many do so with magnanimity. But again, there are no recognized standards or guidelines for that caliber of benevolence.
Imagine the good that would be done by any law-related foundation with just one percent of that $30 million punitive in Ohio: $200,000 from the plaintiff and $100,000 from legal counsel. And they'd still have $29,700,000 to divvy and distribute meaningfully.
That would entail activism, too, but voluntarily. As Aristotle observed some 23 centuries ago, "Political society exists for the sake of noble actions."
Bucking a Buckeye trend
Disagree with vigor, if you will, the super-legal creativity of the Ohio court's decision, but please defend with equal vim the independence of jurists who are audacious enough to question conventional precedent.
Judicial independence is of great concern in the Buckeye State, where really big money has become a significant influence in the election of judges. In 1998, one group spent $4 million there on television ads that attacked a sitting Supreme Court justice.
Millions were spent last year by candidates in two Ohio Supreme Court elections, but hey, the two candidates in one downstate Illinois campaign in November accumulated more than a million bucks for ads and doodads.
Judicial campaign financing has become a new game in which special interest groups focus on electing their own judges, said former federal judge Abner Mikva during a 2001 forum at the Union League Club of Chicago.
What's at risk here is confidence in the integrity of a system that is supposed to be based on the law and the evidence. The need to raise money for an election campaign puts a judicial candidate in the same bag with all the other politicians. Justice may be blind, but the voters aren't.