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Welcome Message from the President
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The Battle Begins
On Sunday, August 5, 1973, nearly 100 column inches of the Detroit Free Press were devoted to a story headlined, “State Justice Defends His Moonlighting.”
The word ‘moonlighting’ is a colloquial expression which refers to the activity of working at a second job at night, after regular daytime employment. The word connotes compensated employment, taken to enhance the moonlighter’s income. We would not say that a man who serves as an unpaid boy scout leader or choirmaster on his spare time is moonlighting. People moonlight to make money.
And so the headline that Sunday morning accused me of starting a private, nonprofit law school to make money. Plain and simple. Remer Tyson, the Free Press politics writer assigned to the story, bolstered the accusation with five bullet points.
First, he accused me of spending 30 hours a week as president and acting dean of the law school while serving on the supreme court. The implication of course, being that the time I spent on law school affairs somehow detracted from my obligation to the court. Now there are 168 hours in a week. If 56 hours are spent sleeping, we still have 112 waking hours in a week. Take away 40 hours of full time employment, and there are still 72 hours each week to do other things. If I had been spending 30 hours a week teaching inner city children to read, I doubt that Remer Tyson would have criticized me for it. I doubt that anyone would have complained that I was somehow short changing the people who elected me to the supreme court.
In fact, for several years I taught in the Political Science department of the University of Detroit, while I served on the supreme court of Michigan. Many other judges have taught while serving on the bench, including the revered Thomas Cooley. And were paid for it. Those activities could, perhaps be accurately described as ‘moonlighting’, but it would be hard for the newspaper to put a negative spin on part time teaching.
I was not being compensated for my work on behalf of Cooley Law School. The school’s board of directors had approved a discretionary expense account for me. Tyson made no mention of approval by the board. He just said I was “drawing a $10,000 law school expense account to use as he sees fit, in addition to his $42,000 supreme court salary”. Obviously, he intended to infer that my expense account was compensation to me, even though he knew that all of the expense items were paid to third party vendors and that I never received a penny of it.
Tyson made no mention of the fact that my work on the supreme court was completely up to date, or that I regularly wrote more opinions than most of the other justices. He made no mention of the fact that no one had ever accused me of shirking or neglecting my duties on the court.
Tyson’s second and third bullet points accused me of putting my wife, my children, and a former administrative assistant on the Cooley payroll, as though there were something wrong with doing that.
Indeed the very idea that I would go to the trouble of starting a law school just to provide my wife and children with part time jobs is utterly ludicrous. Tyson never suggested that any member of my family received anything other than fair compensation for work performed. Nor did he impugn the value of the services performed by my former assistant, Bob Krinock.
His fourth point tried to make something sinister of the fact that Cooley had sent invitations to its Founders Banquet to all the lawyers in Michigan, as though a $100 dinner ticket amounted to a bribe or gave the appearance of bribery. He made no similar accusation against United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who was an Honorary Co-Chairman of the event or the 11 other judges who were on the committee. He didn’t mention that I was not on the dinner committee.
His final bullet point attempted to impugn the decision of the board of law examiners to recognize Cooley. In support of this charge he quoted “Deans and professors at established law schools,” saying that they had raised “questions about violation of judicial ethics and conflicts of interest.”
I was, of course, disappointed and dismayed to say the least. I had spent many hours talking to Remer Tyson. I was completely candid and open with him. While his article accurately described Cooley as a non-profit institution, the entire thrust of the article suggested that it was created as a money making enterprise, and I was the proprietor.
To further stir the pot, the article stated that the legislature approved a little known section in the educational appropriations bill providing for diploma reimbursement to non public law schools in the amount of $1,200 for each graduate. The obvious purpose of inserting this tidbit of news in the story was to suggest that I had somehow influenced the legislature to give money to Cooley.
All in all, the article was damning and accusatory. It would be followed by an editorial two days later, urging me to resign from the court, and calling Cooley “his privately owned law school.” The drum beat had begun. The unattributed statement that I had been accused of a conflict of interest would surface many more times in the following weeks.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004