President's Message

Send in the Augerers or
What Illinois NELA Means to Me!

by L. Steven Platt
Illinois NELA President

Welcome to the Illinois NELA website. We hope that this website will be a regular destination of choice not only for our members but also for the public at large. We on the Board of Illinois NELA are dedicated to the mission of giving our members the best value they can ever find in a lawyers' organization, while at the same time looking out for our members' interests on judicial nominations and legislation.

That being said, I would like to use the space given me here to tell you a little something about NELA Illinois and about our national parent organization.

Paul Tobias, the founder of NELA, has often said that the talents and assets of all NELA members combined, means that we now have the world's largest plaintiffs' employment law firm in the country. He's right. Being a NELA member means being able to call a colleague at any time, at any place, for any reason to ask for assistance on a moment's notice. And the assistance we get is rapid and first rate.

For less immediate problems there is the NELA Illinois list-serve where we bounce questions off each other and generally get several good answers to the more vexing of our problems in less than an hour. And then there are our monthly brown bag seminars and occasional lengthier seminars to update NELA members on recent twists in the law. Plus we have all kinds of useful materials on our website including a comprehensive set of jury instructions, sample complaints, discovery and all kinds of forms from state, federal and local agencies. But, our organization is more than that.

NELA has also been active on behalf of its members in the Illinois State Legislature where we have attempted to broaden state law civil rights protections, and to get the state to waive its 11th Amendment Immunity to the civil rights statutes. A waiver of this immunity means that state and quasi-state employees can once again pursue federal civil rights claims in federal court. Our work in helping each other and our public policy work have made NELA an important resource for employment lawyers in Illinois. But our reach doesn't stop at Illinois' doorstep.

A while back, Illinois NELA member Alena Bolin came up to me and asked me to write a column for an upcoming issue of the Illinois NELA newsletter. My immediate reaction was great! I'd love to! (I have this unfortunate habit of not knowing how to say "no" to people, especially when the request involves NELA.) "What do you want me to write about," I asked? She looked at me rather quizzically and after a brief, awkward silence, said, "Well—why don't you write something you know about first-hand. Why don't you tell us what NELA has meant to you from both the local and national perspectives?" I thought for a moment. Yes, I suppose it would be better for me to write on a subject I know something about, so I replied, "Okay. I'll write you a column about 'What NELA Means to Me.'"

I was thinking of an annual essay contest when we were kids promoted by a Dr. Sidney DeLove, the head of a local bank. Each year he sponsored the same contest asking grammar school children to write an essay about, "What America Means to Me." My sister won second place in the contest and got to read her essay over the PA system at our school. Even if you didn't win, you could write Dr. DeLove and he'd send you American Flags and a large patriotic poster, "suitable for framing." Of course, that was during the Cold War, when some people didn't want to have anything to do with the American flag, while others waived the flag incessantly.

Anyway, as I was thinking about whether NELA membership has changed my life, I couldn't help thinking about Dr. DeLove, about the American flag, about patriotism and about what it means to be an American. We were in the midst of a presidential election that year. It was early in 2000. At the time, the campaign was still in its early stages. However, despite it being early in the year, both major parties had already decided on their presidential nominees. The issue had then become not so much a question of who would be nominated, but rather, whether the candidates would run "flat out" as John Kennedy did in 1960, or whether they would pace themselves as was Nixon's practice? We eventually found out—Bush and Gore decided that they only needed to campaign in one state: the state of Florida.

After the election, we learned something very important. Despite candidate Bush's inability to name the new leader of Pakistan during a TV show in Boston, and his subsequent muddling of the identities of the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the President of India, President Bush is a fast study and he is an effective administrator. He is very good at carrying out his agenda. He figured out foreign policy enough to be able to successfully enlist Pakistan's assistance with Afghanistan and subsequently to enlist the assistance of a coalition of "the willing" in the war against Iraq.

I guess I never really understood why the pundits complained about candidate Bush's mental lapses on foreign policy. After all, history tells us that President Teddy Roosevelt didn't know where "Manila" was before he authorized this country to march head first into an armed conflict in the Philippines.

But that's not really the issue. NELA lawyers don't generally practice international law. So, what has President's Bush's election meant to us as employment lawyers? This is something that NELA members ought to be thinking about and this is where NELA, both nationally and locally, have been out front, making noise and making a difference.

Judges selected by Presidents Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush (the father) populate the Supreme Court and the Appellate Courts, and the Supreme Court is presided over by a Chief Justice appointed by President Nixon. People need to understand what this means.

There have been a host of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, with two of the four dissenters being Justices that Clinton appointed. In the next few years, President Bush will certainly shape the course of future Supreme Court decisions, which in turn will shape our legal destiny and the destiny of our clients for decades to come. Even now, civil rights cases and employment cases of all types are harder to bring because of decisions like Hicks, Gilmer, and Hazen Paper. What kind of judges has President George W. Bush nominated? NELA has been out front opposing all of those whose opinions are on the more radical extremes. We along with a coalition of groups have given Independently minded and Democratic Senators the guts to stand and oppose the more radical nominations. Who are some of these nominees?

The president has nominated Charles Pickering of Mississippi to be on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Critics note that Pickering has been critical of the Voting Rights Act. They also point to a law review article he wrote suggesting ways to amend the state's law banning interracial marriages so that it would pass constitutional muster. He has nominated people like Priscilla Owen who voted to give Enron property tax breaks after receiving campaign contributions from them. She did the same in a case against a law firm where the plaintiff was suing the law firm for giving her bad legal advice. Judge Owen ruled in favor of the law firm after getting a sizeable campaign contribution from the defendant in the case.

The president has nominated Carolyn Kuhl for the Ninth Circuit. She is considered to be the president's most conservative nominee. She has been called anti-consumer, anti-labor, anti-abortion and anti-environment. When she was with the Justice Department under President Reagan, she argued in favor of keeping Bob Jones University's tax exempt status. She also argued forcefully for the abolition of Roe v. Wade.

The president has nominated Terrence Boyle for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Boyle is a former aide to Senator Jesse Helms. He holds a Doctor of Law degree from Bob Jones University. Other nominees have similar flaws. And now, with an opening just coming up in Seventh Circuit, we here in Illinois are going to get a close up look at the kind of person the Administration believes should sit on the federal Appellate Courts. NELA has been out front fighting against those who are among the most radical, sometimes with great effectiveness in coalition with other concerned groups. NELA will continue this fight as long as it takes to moderate the Administration's nominees, if ever, and we will take the fight to every circuit if we have to.

So I guess, that is what NELA means to me. It has brought the important realities to bear and it has taught me how to successfully represent my clients in an otherwise hostile judicial environment.

Had there been no NELA during the 1990's, none of us might still be practicing employment law in this jurisdiction. Instead, NELA lawyers have set the standard. We win. Not always, but more often than not. We have shown the judiciary and the defense bar that there are plaintiffs' employment lawyers in town who know what they are doing and who are capable of making their clients pay big verdicts and large attorneys' fee awards. Our successful law practices have, in turn, made it easier for everyone else who practices in this area. As a group we are now more likely to succeed instead of being stereotyped as the people who always bring meritless cases into federal court. Now, the opposite stereotype often applies.

As our ancestors learned in ancient times, it is sometimes wise to heed signs of impending doom. Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, the "peace" candidate of the 1968 election, reminds us that President Nixon had a bad time with pigeons at his first inaugural parade in 1969. Having had that experience, he vowed things would be different in 1973.

He ordered the General Services Administration to cover all premises, tree branches, and telephone lines along the presidential parade route, with a substance called "Roost No More." The thinking was that the pigeons would see the substance and fly somewhere else or they would get stuck to it, leaving the parade route untouched.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way they were planned. Discovering the mysterious substance, the pigeons started eating it and instead of flying away or getting stuck, they literally started dropping out of the sky dead or in convulsions. This left those involved in the parade with the added task of having to dodge the stricken birds as they fell from the sky.

In ancient days, they would have sent for the Auguerers and killed the Emperor on the spot. Perhaps we would have been better off as a nation had we heeded this supernatural sign at the beginning of Nixon's second presidential term.

Perhaps it is also best for us to heed the warning signs now before us. It is time for those who have not yet joined Illinois NELA and national NELA, to sign up and join us in our struggle to keep the legal system fair and prevent it from being hijacked by the special interests. We owe at least as much to our clients, to ourselves and to our fellow attorneys. So, if you are already a member of Illinois and national NELA, great! Enjoy this website. Be sure to join us in our broader fights. If not, please contact us and allow us to show you how Illinois NELA can be meaningful to you.

Steve Platt can be contacted by e-mail at president@nela-illinois.org.