Connecticut Bar Journal: a Retrospective
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 241 |
79 CBJ 241. CONNECTICUT BAR JOURNAL: A RETROSPECTIVE
Vol. 79, No. 4
December 2005
My own Journal journey began in 1958! I was a 31-year old lawyer who had been admitted to practice in Connecticut the previous year. Prior to my graduation from Yale Law School, I had published articles in the Yale Law Review and the Virginia Law Review, and so I decided to test the waters of the Journal.
I lived in Ansonia while I was attending law school. My first job as a young associate after graduation was at a small law firm in Ansonia where I worked closely with the senior partner, Herman Silberberg, who encouraged my writing ambitions.
I worked with Herman in the briefing and oral argument of a case before the Connecticut Supreme Court within a year of my admission to the Connecticut Bar. It was a medical malpractice case against St. Mary's Hospital in Waterbury,1 where liability on the part of the hospital was clear and convincing. Its primary defense, which was successful at trial, was the principle of "charitable immunity," a surviving dinosaur of Connecticut's common law. I briefed and argued the case for its abandonment, but only Justice P. B. O'Sullivan, in dissent, agreed with me.2
I converted my brief into an article which the Journal's then Editor-in-Chief (Benedict Holden, a wise and prescient man) accepted for publication, and it was published under the title of "Questionable Status of Charitable Immunity" in 1959.3 The General Assembly saw the wisdom of repealing this common-law relic by statute within a year or two of the article's publication,4 proving to me that the Journal was read, respected and could make a difference, leading in that instance to a revision of the law.
Early in my history of being published in the Journal, the Editor-in-Chief, with whom I worked particularly well, was Victor Gordon. How I wish he were still with us, joining us as a member of this distinguished panel. Victor Gordon exemplified that perfect amalgam that a law-journal editor should be: committed, intellectually curious, an exemplar of good writing, courageous, independent and a model of professional integrity. I can still hear that wonderfully gravelly voice of his during our many telephone conversations. And the man had guts. How many editors of state bar journals in the `sixties would have devoted...
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