From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1986 |
| Pages | 1673 |
1986, September, Pg. 1673. From the Wool-Sack
I' m glad you like adverbs---I adore them;
Henry James, Letter to Miss Betham Edwards
Honestly. You would think they were hiring schoolteachers instead of federal judges the way the Senate is carrying on. Consider Daniel A. Manion. The President nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Congress raised a horrible fuss about his qualifications.
Most of us know that federal judges are no different from the rest of us. They went to the same law schools and read the same books. Lawyers who devote their lives to a search for perfection will spend no more time wandering around the federal courts than they would wandering anywhere else. That's because, contrary to the impression of occasional inhabitants of those offices, perfection is not to be found there. But you would never know it watching Congress. Congress thinks a person should be perfect if he or she wants to become a federal judge. Consider the following.
One of the things Congress is fussing about is Mr. Manion's spelling ability. In order to demonstrate what a good lawyer he is, Manion submitted legal briefs to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He hoped thereby to impress the members of that Committee. He succeeded. Senator Biden said his grammer and spelling were so poor he would not have gotten a "C" in elementary school. Some of the words appearing in Manion's briefs were "com-pereble," "rediculous," "resonable" and "comparbility."
The Senators were equally impressed with Manion's skills as a grammarian. Among other things, his writing suggests that Manion does not know what to do with the apostrophe when it gets mixed up with the letter "s." He tended to put it in all sorts of peculiar places where it didn't seem to be appropriate.(fn1)
It is obvious that you would never enter Mr. Manion as your state's representative in the annual Washington spelling bee. But President Reagan was not entering Manion in a spelling bee. He only wanted to enter him in the ranks of the federal judiciary.
It doesn't matter if a federal judge can spell or is comfortable with an apostrophe. What matters is legal experience. That is where Manion shines. When asked to describe his...
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