Book Reviews
| Publication year | 2019 |
| Pages | 51 |
Stories of Harvey B. Otterman, Jr. edited by Adrian A. Otterman (2019)
Reviewed by Daniel Richardson, Esq.
Perpetuation of Memory
This Association shall be called “Vermont Bar Association.” Its purposes are . . . to cherish a collegial spirit among its members, and to perpetuate their memory.
Article I of the Constitution of the Vermont Bar Association
There are some legal careers that are formed by a single case. No matter what Ken Starr does with his life, he will always be defined, for better or worse, by his role as special counsel. Johnnie Cochran will forever be linked to OJ and the glove. To Kill a Mockingbird makes much out of Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson but leaves us little else of his legal career.
But such fame and singular fortune is the exception to the rule. For the rest of us, our legal careers are composed of a series of trials and trenches, hard fought battles, momentary victories, and sudden reversals. The peaks and valleys of our careers often appear, in retrospect, as less sharp than we imagine. Instead of a range, we glance backward to see that we have only traversed rolling hills.
As noble or as powerful as we like to see ourselves, the truth is that the practice of law is an on-going task that demands our day-to-day attention.[1]
Nevertheless, even in our work-a-day careers, we accumulate substance. We do score victories that move the dial on the law, or we become so invested in our case that when we lose we become guardians of what could have been. This explains a lot of who we are. Victories are revisited like Vikings around a campfire raising the stakes of the tale until we are Beowulf and the opposition, a clever opponent of Grendel-like strength and cunning.
These stories are often the only hallmarks that survive as public attention turns away. If we are lucky and if we practice long enough, we live to see the tide return and revisit these losses or defend our victories. A few years before his death, Bob Gens-burg testified on school funding before the legislature. Press coverage noted that the testimony served to warn the legislature of the Brigham case and its constitutional limits. But it was also defense of the underlying reasoning of Brigham, which had changed the landscape of school funding 18 years prior, and which remained Gens-burg’s crowning achievement.[2]
Over the last ten years, we have been fortunate in Vermont to witness the fruition of a generation of legal scholarship. With the twin volumes of Vermont legal history from Paul Gillies, they deep research of Judge Mello dedicated to reviving Moses Robinson’s central role in early Vermont jurisprudence, Judge Martin’s book deconstructing the Orville Gibson murder trial, and James Dunn’s comprehensive analysis of the Jane Wheel saga, we have not wanted for critical analysis and historic records of Vermont legal history and work. At the same time, this boon in scholarship has been missing another critical tradition, the preservation of good stories about the daily practice of law, what I will call the attorney anecdote memoir. The two greatest examples of this genre in Vermont are Peter Langrock’s two volumes of Addison County Justice and Beyond the Courthouse and Deane Davis’ two volumes...
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