Tucked in the final three paragraphs of a front-page news analysis in today's New York Times comes the news that "David Boies, a leading trial lawyer, represents Andrew S. Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer. W. Neil Eggleston, a prominent Washington lawyer, represents Enron's outside directors. And Robert S. Bennett, the Washington lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones matter, is now Enron's lead Washington lawyer." A photo cutline, but not the text of the Times article, adds the information that Mr. Eggleston was "lawyer for former labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman" and that Mr. Boies "represented Al Gore."
The headline atop the article is "A Familiar Capital Script," and the article's point seems to be that the Enron inquiry "presents elements reminiscent of earlier Washington scandals."
But what's striking to at least one reader is the extent to which this is not a familiar capital script but an unfamiliar one. Mr. Eggleston is not just "a prominent Washington lawyer," as the Times put it, but a former White House associate counsel in the Clinton administration who also represented the neighbor who helped sink Linda Chavez's nomination as labor secretary. He also worked for the Democrats on the Iran-Contra investigation and represented one of the women who accused then-Senator Packwood of an unauthorized kiss. In other words, he is strongly identified as a Democrat, and to see him representing directors of Enron, which is identified with the Bush administration and the Republican Party, is an interesting reversal. Similarly, Mr. Boies not only is "a leading trial lawyer," as the Times puts it, but was a key figure in the fight against Mr. Bush in the Florida election recounts. The Clinton administration Justice Department also hired Mr. Boies to litigate the antitrust case against Microsoft. To see him representing a former Enron official is not a familiar script but somewhat unexpected.
Wrongful Births: A dispatch from France in today's New York Times reports on a controversy over "wrongful birth" lawsuits in France. The article makes it sound as if France is the only place such controversy exists. But as Overlawyered.com and the Bergen Record noted months ago (see http://overlawyered.com/archives/01/aug3.html#0822a), lawyers in the U.S. have also been aiming to carve out a legal right for disabled people not to have been born.
Large Bottles: The lengthy obituary in today's New York Times of Moe Foner reports, "his father was a seltzer man who lugged large bottles up to tenement apartments." It seems unlikely that Abraham Foner's seltzer bottles were any larger than anyone else's seltzer bottles. The refillable glass seltzer bottles came in a standard size. There was plenty of lugging involved if the bottles were full and they were in trays that held a bunch of them. But the Times article makes it sound like Abraham Foner was delivering seltzer in Nebuchadnezzar-sized bottles.