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Tomasz Tadeusz Koncewicz, MY MOTIVATION
I have been called all things from “enfant terrible of the Polish judicial system” for pushing judges out of their comfort zone of legal text and into the business of embracing challenge of context and doing justice, to “leading legal dissident of the Eastern Europe” for defending rule of law, checks and balances against the no - holds - barred politics of the Polish populist government, to ultimately a “traitor of the Polish cause.” These are all nice and catchy, yet empty, etique es.
One of the cases I have been pleading, has dealt with the restitution of literary estate of the Yiddish writer Na ali Hertz Kon (on the case h p://forward.com/ news/180733/na ali-herts-kons-works-wrenched-out-of- polands-c/ and h p://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/ poland-returns-yiddish-writer-s-works-con scated-by- communists-to-daughters-1.507553). The case has taught me the important lessons of perseverance and never giving up (see h p://www.taubephilanthropies.org/ les/ assets/pdf/2017/Gazeta_Spring16.pdf). Etique es aside, the strange twists and ups and downs of this case capture in a perfect way me as a lawyer and a human being. The case pushed me to re ect on what is important in my work as a lawyer and an academic and in the end helped me to formulate my own personal “5 NEVERS” I aspire to live by. First, never allow the limitations of others to become your own limitations... Continued on page 8
Demonstrators at FDA Building
Lewis Grossman, THE DAY THAT CHANGED THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE TO AIDS
(excerpted from book manuscript)
The Parklawn Building, a massive, bland edi ce erected in the late 1960s, looms over a neighborhood of nondescript o ce buildings and auto repair shops in Rockville, Maryland, about four miles outside the Washington, D.C. Beltway. Until recently, the building contained the headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as other Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) o ces. It is an unlikely se ing for a mass protest. For a thousand boisterous AIDS activists who stormed it on October 12, 1988, however, the Parklawn Building was the Bastille. Their demonstration sparked a profound transformation in the government’s approach to regulating treatments for serious illnesses.
The “Seize Control of FDA” protesters—many of them bused in by the recently formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)—demanded that the agency speed the availability of drugs for Acquired Immune De ciency Syndrome (AIDS). Since it had emerged in the United States in 1981, AIDS had spread with particular virulence among gay and bisexual men. They dominated the crowd surrounding the Parklawn Building, although many women joined the protest, too. For an entire workday, the demonstrators loudly condemned the federal government’s inaction in the face of AIDS. They denounced the apathy of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush (the 1988 Republican presidential nominee). Their primary target, however, was the FDA itself... Continued on page 9
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