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Why (as in yaverbaum)
dealt with the right to counsel for indigent criminal defendants, Gideon v. Wainwright. Unfortunately for him, and for this story, Fortas was forced to resign in 1970 due to a scandal involving payments from a client, Lewis Wolfson, who had been accused of securities violations.)
Before the argument, I sent a request to the bench, through the bai- liff, for a moment of silence for King. The request was turned down—to me, inexplicably. At the end, it was announced that Simon and I had written the best of the sixteen briefs in the competition and that I had won the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize as the best speaker. (I’m sure that the vote was close, and I believe that I might have won because I was the only advocate who did not use all of his assigned time; in what was probably a first in the annals of the law, I had ended my presentation and Q&A by summing up, asking the Court whether there were any more questions, and, hearing none, sitting down by the leave of the Court, to my great relief.)
Because of our success as a team, Simon and I then represented Columbia in the National Moot Court Competition, where the issues were whether the Vietnam War was lawful (we said no) and whether, as the threshold question, the controversy itself was “justiciable”—that is, whether the Supreme Court could decide such a question (necessarily, we said yes). (The case, which was named United States of America v. George Ivan Joseph, had ostensibly arisen when the respondent had declined to serve in the war, the U.S. had prosecuted, and the illegality of the war had been made the basis of the defense; it was years later before it finally occurred to me that George Ivan Joseph was G.I. Joe— so much for close reading of text.) We won the Northeast Regional part of the National Competition and made it as far as the national semi- finals, where a conservative Republican judge had exactly no inclination (or ability) even to hear our anti-war argument—and blew us out of the water.
Accordingly, my resume had improved substantially, and, because of it, I believe, I ultimately got my foot in the door and was hired by the then very prestigious law firm, Rosenman Colin Kaye Petschek Freund & Emil, or, less formally, “Rosenman.”
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