Advanced Topics in Appellate Practice: the Path of Mastery

• Citation: Vol. 35 No. 2
• Publication year: 2022
• Author: Reviewed by Robert M. Shaughnessy*

ADVANCED TOPICS IN APPELLATE PRACTICE: THE PATH OF MASTERY

BY CHARLES A. BIRD

Reviewed by Robert M. Shaughnessy*

When I was a kid, my father was my hero. He was a football coach. He threw himself into his profession with gusto. I rarely saw him between August and November. But I carry precious memories of traveling to games under the Friday-night lights, eating stale popcorn, and watching my dad walk the sidelines with his players. In 1975, he coached Loyola High School to the AAAA championship and his team was recognized as a national champion.

When I was a teenager, my Dad remade himself. At the request of his own father, Dad walked away, left a promising coaching career to take over a small family business, a company that manufactured pipe hangers and bracing for the commercial construction industry. Dad saw the company's potential, but he had little experience with the business or the industry in which it operated. As with his coaching, Dad immersed himself in the business, and the greater industry. He soaked up knowledge from a mentor who was willing to teach. He gathered the tools that would help him guide and grow that business within that industry. Ultimately, he piloted his company through economic uncertainty and into a state of sustained success. By the end of his business career Dad was able to sell the business as a going concern, setting him and my Mom up for a long and comfortable retirement. Things did not go as planned.

Shortly after he retired, Dad was diagnosed with cancer. He died at the end of an eight-year struggle, at the age of 72. In the midst of battling the disease, and after enduring the misery inflicted by rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, he decided to get a tattoo. Across my Dad's shoulder were inked the words "Enjoy the Journey." Dad traveled a path not unlike the path that another hero of mine, Charlie Bird, commends to those of us engaged in the practice of appellate law. The Path of Mastery was Charlie's magnum opus, published posthumously because Charlie also died too soon, having lived just 73 years.

It was my pleasure to get to know Charlie through the San Diego County Bar Association's Appellate Practice Section. Charlie was a lawyer's lawyer, accounted by many as one of the best legal minds in San Diego. He was indeed one of the greatest legal minds I have ever encountered.

Charlie earned his J.D. from the UC Davis School of Law, Martin Luther King Hall, in 1973. He then served as a law clerk to the Hon. Robert Boochever, both at the Alaska Supreme Court, and later at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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In 1974, Charlie entered private...