Chief Judge Melvin Shortess: A Pencil Sketch from Life

• Author: Paul R. Baier
• Position: Principal Address at Retirement Proceedings Honoring Chief Judge Melvin A. Shortess

Paul R. Baier, Principal Address at Retirement Proceedings Honoring Chief Judge Melvin A. Shortess, First Circuit Court of Appeal, Baton Rouge (July 27, 2000). Editor's Note: Professor Baier has annotated his speech for publication in the Louisiana Law Review.

George M. Armstrong, Jr., Professor of Law, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University. Scholar in Residence, Louisiana Bar Foundation, 1990-92. Member of the Louisiana Bar.

(In the study of creature one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity; but ascend toward what is immortal and everlasting.) De Vera Religione, quoted and translated in Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. III, Plato and Aristotle viii (LSU Press 1957).

In consideratione creaturarum non est vana et periturea curiositas exercenda; sed gradus ad immortalia et semper manentia faciendus.- ST. AUGUSTINE

I

IF THE COURT PLEASE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

I have never addressed Your Honors from this particular angle and I am uncomfortable with my back even slightly towards the Court. I like eye contact with the target of my remarks. But I shall do my duty as the lectern has been laid out. Rest assured, I am not after your Honors' votes. My aim is to touch Chief Judge Shortess's heart.¹

This has been a hard summer for me. I labor under a surgeon's orders not to engage in my daily regimen of exercise. I wish I could say 300-pound squats and 10K's, the routine of my colleagues Bill Corbett and Wendell Holmes. But the injunction was lifted this week and I had my first run with Chief Judge Shortess on the streets of downtown Baton Rouge, through the corridors of his life as a judge. We ended by running up the State Capitol steps with our arms outstretched in victory. I am sure you know the movie "Rocky." It is one of Judge Shortess's favorites. And then a little finishing cantor through the gardens of the State Capitol grounds. We came to rest on a park bench of solitude near the statue of Huey Long. Whatever doubts I had about belonging to this community were lifted when Judge Shortess spoke to me like a brother, if not like a father to his son. And may I add with glee that my Louisiana pedigree has soared to new heights of late when my precious daughter Erika (I do not mean to slight my other children) acquired a frisky Labrador puppy. Erika is engaged in a pediatrics residency and delivering premature babies at LSU Medical Center in New Orleans with her fianc, Dr. David Rabalais. They will marry in November.

Now it happens that this puppy is the baby of a big Mama Labrador named "Aspen." I don't know if she has any dangerous propensities. She looks gentle enough from the family photo I keep in my office. Aspen, in turn, is owned by Dr. Terrell Joseph, also in residency at LSU Medical Center. Terrell is the son of Baton Rouge's beloved child Cheney C. Joseph, Jr., my good colleague at the Law Center. And so, in a word, I proudly announce that Cheney Joseph and I are related-by dog! Cheney told me to recite my speech entirely in Latin. He advises that Judge Fitzsimmons of this Court enjoys a good Homeric recital in Caesar's native tongue. I thought this a bad idea. I am not Saul Litvinoff. But we reached a compromise, just as I am sure Your Honors have reached a compromise on occasion. What, after all, is the law but a delicate balance of competing enthusiasms.²

Now to my formal remarks.

II

Chief Justice Calogero, Chief Judge Shortess, Members of the Bar, LSU Faculty, Guests, Your Honors of the First Circuit:

Saint Augustine tells us that in the study of creature one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity-"In consideratione creaturarum non est vana et periturea curiositas exercenda"; but ascend toward what is immortal and everlasting-"sed gradus ad immortalia et semper manentia faciendus." It is in this spirit that I offer my homage to Chief Judge Shortess and to Your Honors. I call my remarks "Chief Judge Melvin Shortess-A Pencil Sketch from Life."

Melvin Shortess calls himself "The Bookseller's Son," his shorthand sketch of his youth.³ His parents called him "Sonny" at home. Amazingly, or such is life, so did mine. I am sure Melvin Shortess's parents had the same high hopes for their children, whatever their calling. The key, they knew, is education; they taught us the lesson of hard work.

And if Your Honors please, may I add the teasing comparison that in the cave of his chambers Mr. Justice Holmes called all his law clerks... "Sonny." More on that cave figure in a moment.

As a young man Melvin Shortess walked the stretch of Highland Road from campus to downtown Baton Rouge, where he worked in his family's bookstore on Third Street.

Thence to Chimes Street, closer to what today is remembered only as "The Old Law School," where he was touched with the fire of Joseph Dainow, Robert Pascal, George Pugh, and others. Yet he had the same self-doubt that confronts all of us who enter this door of the law. "[W]hat have you said to show me that I may reach my own spiritual possibilities through such a door as this?"⁴ I quote Holmes's speech "The Profession of the Law."

Yet Holmes believed there is an answer: "If a man has the soul of Sancho Panza, the world to him will be Sancho Panza's world; but if he has the soul of an idealist, he will make-I do not say find-his world ideal."⁵

Melvin Shortess has the soul of an idealist. He has labored hard over the large terrain of causes to make our legal world ideal.

I salute our tender, hard-hearted "Chief" as he reaches the goal.⁶ I bring you the purple and gold laurel of your Alma Matter, LSU. President Jenkins, who is out of State, wants me to say that you have fulfilled our university's noblest aspiration: "To improve the common good of the community through LSU's great teaching Faculty and by the lives and zeal of its alumni." These are his words. And, of course, your teachers at LSU Law School wish you well. "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."⁷ You have put George Pugh's yearning for due process, and in turn your own yearning for due process,⁸ into Louisiana's law.

I know your professors are proud of you. Your success is their great reward. And my happiness, Chief Judge Shortess, is the friendship you have allowed me of late over our few repasts at the Icehouse on Perkins Road and with Mrs. Shortess on Keed Avenue. All of this, and a glorious jog over the terrain of your life in downtown Baton Rouge, without a care in the world over the Blessed Docket-like a cardinal flitting in the boxwoods of the State Capitol grounds. We have shared life lived to its top. Am I wrong to believe that love abideth?

III

Life is a curious amalgam of dispondency and hope.⁹ Our quintessential Chief Judge nearly quit law school.¹⁰ He resolved to resign before his first semester was out, but one of life's contingencies saved him. He was in love with Marna Bass. Miss Marna advises me it was a chemical, not a legal, bond. They later married and had three children, Amy, "Vin"-short for "Melvin"-, John and three grandchildren, Anna, Taylor, and Henry.

Melvin Shortess wants more time to tend to his garden, with its patchwork of purslane and doves nesting. He wants more time to play with his grand-children, more time for who knows what else. "The purpose of work is leisure," said Chief Justice Dixon when he retired. "I want out."¹¹ Meanwhile, Mrs. Shortess is stitching a patch-work quilt made out of, imagine, Chief Judge Shortess's worn out bow-ties! I saw it on an outing to the Shortess home, just as Czanne saw sunlight strike Saint Victoire.

I mentioned to Mrs. Shortess that Your Honors were about to surrender Chief Judge Shortess to his family. She smiled and said-and here I had better quote her exactly: "I don't know what I'll do with him."

LSU co-ed Marna Bass knew Melvin's Shortess's potential better than Melvin himself. Dean Hebert was out of town and so his letter of resignation was refused. In those halcyon days, it was Mac Hebert's Old Law School rule that you had to tender your letter of resignation in person to the Dean. Over the weekend, Mary Bird Perkins saw Melvin in the family bookstore. She hit him hard with her telling comment: "Sonny, I didn't know you were a quitter."

Melvin Shortess is no quitter. His first judgment, mind you, was to reverse himself. Thereafter the logic of hard work made him Chairman of the Moot Court Board and proud recipient of the Bureau of National Affairs Award for the most improved record in the third year.¹² This was a year's subscription to U.S. Law Week. Melvin Shortess has been reading and writing the law reports ever since.

IV

Fifty years ago a staggering continental thinker expounded good government at LSU. I mean Eric Voegelin. His dense book Plato and Aristotle was doubtless being jawed over in the Political Science Department. My dear colleague Robert Pascal, "Gaius of the Old Law School," as I lovingly know him, edited Volume 27 of Eric Voegelin's Collected Works.¹³ It enables you to sit with Melvin Shortess in Voeglin's Jurisprudence class at the Old Law School in the Spring of 1955. I have it on very high authority that the boys wondered whether Voegelin's trademark cigar was-"The entrance to Plato's Cave."¹⁴

It was Voeglin who taught Melvin Shortess Plato's Parable of the Cave,¹⁵ with its prisoners in chains and its mere shadows of justice on the wall. It was Voeglin who taught Melvin Shortess to come up to the light, to abide truth, to seek the reality of justice-these are life's ultimates.

Thence to "go down" again, to face life, to do one's duty for the good of our community and our law.¹⁶

Justinian issued the same guidelines for his judges: "[W]e order all our judges to follow the truth and the paths of law and justice."¹⁷

If I may judge him, and as Your Honors surely know him from the intimacy of the conference room, Melvin Shortess has achieved greatly in the law...