AN UNREASONABLE MAN? In a Legal Timesprofile from 2004, Paul Clement is described this way:
"He can make the unreasonable sound reasonable."
That, in a nutshell, seems to be the job description for an AG in the Bush era.
--Ann Friedman
Posted by Ann Friedman on August 27, 2007 12:54 PM|Permalink|
COMMENTS (3)
Can't believe I'm saying this about anyone serving under this President, but your use of this quote isn't fair.
Clement's a great advocate - the quote's either an adversary disappointed to have lost to him, or maybe someone enthusing a little flippantly about Clement's skill. Nobody at my heavily Democratic firm who's worked with Clement (or on the other side of a case from him) questions his integrity.
There's room to disagree with the positions he's taken and will take, but I doubt you'll find him knowingly false or simply derelict like AG AG.
"During Clement's third year at Harvard Law School in 1991-1992, he was involved in the biggest scandal in the nearly 120-year history of the Harvard Law Review. Clement was Supreme Court editor that year when the Revue, the law review's annual parody issue, which is published out of the same offices, mocked a law review article by Mary Jo Frug, a feminist legal scholar and the wife of Harvard Law professor Gerald Frug. She had been murdered one year before by a knife-wielding assailant, and the law review had published an unedited and unfinished draft of her "A Postmodern Feminist Manifesto" as a tribute. The tone of the Revue parody of Frug's article, as well as its distribution on the exact anniversary of Frug's murder, outraged campus liberals, including Harvard's best-known professor of constitutional law, Laurence Tribe, who hyperbolically compared the law review editors to Holocaust deniers for suggesting "that the hatred of women is a hoax perpetuated by paranoid feminists." Tribe added, "The law review might well have danced on Mary Jo's grave for what they did."
Although Clement was not one of the two students who admitted to writing the parody, he was one of eight law review editors who signed a letter of apology for publishing it, for being "involved to varying degrees with the production of the Revue," and for not taking "greater steps to prevent the publication of the offending material."
TAPPED, the Prospect's award-winning group blog, is a link-intensive collection of musings, ramblings, opinions and other assorted writing on the political developments of the day. See a list of our contributors.
Feeds: 
symbol identifies content for paid subscribers only.
COMMENTS (3)
Can't believe I'm saying this about anyone serving under this President, but your use of this quote isn't fair.
Clement's a great advocate - the quote's either an adversary disappointed to have lost to him, or maybe someone enthusing a little flippantly about Clement's skill. Nobody at my heavily Democratic firm who's worked with Clement (or on the other side of a case from him) questions his integrity.
There's room to disagree with the positions he's taken and will take, but I doubt you'll find him knowingly false or simply derelict like AG AG.
Posted by: TedL | August 27, 2007 1:04 PM
from a more recent Legal Affairs article: http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=898
"During Clement's third year at Harvard Law School in 1991-1992, he was involved in the biggest scandal in the nearly 120-year history of the Harvard Law Review. Clement was Supreme Court editor that year when the Revue, the law review's annual parody issue, which is published out of the same offices, mocked a law review article by Mary Jo Frug, a feminist legal scholar and the wife of Harvard Law professor Gerald Frug. She had been murdered one year before by a knife-wielding assailant, and the law review had published an unedited and unfinished draft of her "A Postmodern Feminist Manifesto" as a tribute. The tone of the Revue parody of Frug's article, as well as its distribution on the exact anniversary of Frug's murder, outraged campus liberals, including Harvard's best-known professor of constitutional law, Laurence Tribe, who hyperbolically compared the law review editors to Holocaust deniers for suggesting "that the hatred of women is a hoax perpetuated by paranoid feminists." Tribe added, "The law review might well have danced on Mary Jo's grave for what they did."
Although Clement was not one of the two students who admitted to writing the parody, he was one of eight law review editors who signed a letter of apology for publishing it, for being "involved to varying degrees with the production of the Revue," and for not taking "greater steps to prevent the publication of the offending material."
Posted by: Passing Shot | August 27, 2007 1:14 PM
How about Ramsey Clark? He has plenty of experience defending war criminals.
Posted by: saddam hussein | August 27, 2007 2:42 PM