Divine Right of Kings: Scruggs, Spitzer, Dann, et al.

In this week's THE NEW YORKER, there is a unusually objective - maybe even sympathetic - profile of Dickie Scruggs by Peter J. Boyer.  What might stop us cold when we start reading it is that it could be a profile of just about any other fallen reformist game-changer lawyer.  Erase some of the details and Boyer's deconstruction of the rise and collapse of good intentions could be the career of Eliot Spitzer or Marc Dann.

All three were maverick types who struggled to find where they fit.  Scruggs, for example, after excelling in Ole Miss Law School had two traditional law-firm jobs.  Somehow he got it that he was different and had the courage to set up his own shop. Spitzer and Dann are equally oddball.

Then there's the passion about approaching the law differently.  Scruggs, as do numerous plaintiff attorneys [think Motley Rice's Fidelma Fitzpatrick who applied public nuisance theory to product liability], pushed against the normal boundaries and procedures of litigation.  Defense attorneys rail against that but their advisors and critics tell them they better be thinking lots more out of the box.  Spitzer found creative ways to arm-twist and in the process cleaned up some of the cesspool of the financial sector.

The Scruggs kind, like moths to the flame, find causes.  Many more conventional lawyers are satisfied to earn a good living or, with the lawyer glut, any living. In his backyard were the workers at Ingalls shipyard sickened by inhaling asbestos fibers.  Spitzer, before he got derailed, was focused on reforming malpractice insurance in New York.  Those rates for MDs were so high that too many were fleeing the state or that profession.  Dann punched around financial firms that were screwing regular joes.  Sure, folks with causes can be annoying and attract enemies.  But all at their populist prime were, well, heroes.

Then, the implosion.  At the time, we were "shocked."  But now we might wonder: Could that have been predicted?  Do successful populists bestow on their professional selves the divine right of kings?  Bending the rules crosses the line into a mashup of arrogance, greed, and entitlement.  Everyone is servant to the king so everyone's fair share of anything and everything doesn't count any more.  Scruggs went down over money.  Spitzer over strange sex.  Dann over, what we know so far, not paying attention to what he should have been while he was chasing after real and imaginary [former lead paint companies] villains.

Can we as a society save what's noble and good in these populist lawyers and prevent them from doing all those tragic things that the kings do in Shakespeare's plays, be it King Lear or Richard II?

That's something we got to consider as we observe NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo taking on heroic status, presidential candidate Barack Obama learning to lead, and Bill Clinton bumping into limitations.