Not lost lawyers Tom Smith

I came up to Boise yesterday for the Idaho Supreme Court’s annual memorial service for the judges and lawyers who died in past year, one of whom, readers of this blog may recall, was my dad, who was a state court trial judge in Idaho for many years.  Traveling without children, as many parents know, can be a kind of guilty pleasure, and I sat in the airport, cocooned by my iPod, in a kind of baffled bliss of idleness.  The small planes managed to get me to Boise in one piece and this morning I went to the session, one almost wants to say ‘service’, with my mom, my older brother and younger sister, my brother’s daughter and son, and one of my mom’s lifelong friends.  My younger brother, who is federal judge back East, could not attend, as he is in the middle of complex trial.  My dad would undoubtedly disapprove of anybody wasting time memorializing, and so ironically my judicial brethren was the only one doing what my father would have wished.  But I’m still glad I came.

The memorial was done as a session of the court, but included some music and a brief talk by one of the senior members of the bar, and a reception afterwards.  What struck me most was that one had the strong sense that the bar in Idaho really was a professional community, where people knew each other and held each other in a certain regard.  For each lawyer who had died, some note was made of what public services they had performed, and there was no shortage of them.  No lawyer jokes here, but quite the opposite.  One had the sense that lawyers really were part of the cement that held society together, and that one could express that view without irony.  No doubt being a small state, in population, is part of this.  Only twenty some lawyers of the Idaho bar died in 2006, so we are speaking of a smallish group.  It made me feel I understood better what the law must have been like in other parts of the country in decades past, before everything became so big.

It reminds me of a lunch I attended, more years ago than I care to calculate, when Justice Rehnquist came to dine with the clerks of the D.C. Circuit Court.  I sat at his table (we Federalists claimed our territory) and he had quite a bit to say that was interesting.  One thing he said was to discourage us from joining big firms in New York or Washington where we would have to work all the time.  He said he went to Phoenix partly so he would have time to take part in local politics and get involved in his community.  He said that was part of the point of becoming a lawyer, and he noted, slightly wryly, that his legal  career had worked out well.