The Illinois Supreme Court matters

 

                                                                                                                                         October 2022 

I have a unique perspective on the Illinois Supreme Court and on the pending elections for the Court’s justices. 

After graduating from law school in 1977, I served as a judicial clerk for two years for Justice Thomas (T.J.) Moran of the 2nd District. Moran was a life-long Republican in an era when Illinois Republicans weren’t gonzo. People from both parties respected the likes of Ty Fahner, Jim Edgar, Jim Thompson, Richard Ogilvie and Chuck Percy. They’ve been superseded by the likes of GOP gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey and two of the candidates running for the Illinois Supreme Court. 

The Court’s seven justices are typically divided by political party; three Democrats from Cook County’s 1st District, the remaining four from the rest of the state, with four or three being Republican. 

The election matters because the Court majority is in the balance. A court of four Republican justices is likely to mean a well-financed attack against reproductive rights in Illinois, the one safe haven in the Midwest for women’s choice since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. The state’s highest court is responsible for interpreting Illinois’ laws and regulations and overseeing all of Illinois’ courts. Right now, the state supreme courts and state legislatures often surface as ground zero on hot button issues. 

The two hotly contested races that are in play are in the 2nd and 3rd districts; both adjacent to Cook County. Ironically, as formative as the Court seats are this election cycle, the races are positioned at the very bottom of voter ballots, tucked away with the long-worded referenda. [Note: Those voting in Chicago or in Cook County's suburbs can work these races but not vote in them.]

The 2nd District, to the north, pits Republican Mark Curran, who lost to Dick Durbin for the U.S. Senate two years ago, against Democrat Elizabeth Rochford, a Lake County judge. 

Rochford               Curran

The 3rd District, covering the southwest suburbs, pits Republican Michael Burke against Democrat Mary O’Brien, an appellate judge. Burke currently sits on the Supreme Court, having been appointed to the seat to replace then retiring Bob Thomas, who was a placekicker for the Bears a decade before his 20-year stint on the Court. 

During my clerkship, a commonsensical case came before the Court. The issue was whether the city of

 Chicago could bill rent-a-car companies for the parking tickets the drivers get. It made a big difference for both the city and the rent-a car companies like Hertz and Avis, the big two in those days. Most drivers of rental cars ignore parking tickets. Is the city going to chase them down when many don’t live anywhere near Chicago? The city loses all that revenue. On the other hand, the rent-a-car companies aren’t the ones parking illegally. On the third hand, it's easier for the rent-a car companies to incorporate a parking ticket fee into the contracts with customers. In legal terms, the argument was over something called vicarious liability. 

Let’s just say the playing field for oral arguments was not quite level. Representing Hertz was Don Reuben, considered then to be the heaviest weight among Chicago lawyers, or as his son was quoted as saying: "He knew all the social movers and shakers in the city, and represented a fair number of them. That always, therefore, put him at the center of what was happening in the city." 

The Court typically hears oral arguments in Springfield except for twice a year when the Court goes on the road, once to Northwestern University and once to the University of Chicago, where I went to law school. Phil Neal, a partner at Friedman & Koven and former dean of the law school where the arguments were held, represented Avis. He had home court advantage. Representing Chicago was a young assistant corporation counsel, playing the role of deer in headlights. He crossed the road and made it to the other side barely. 

After oral arguments, the justices meet in chambers and arrive at a preliminary vote for which way the decision will go. The closed door vote was unanimous, 7-0 for the rent-a-car companies. Justice Moran was chosen to write the opinion, which is typically issued a few months later. Justice Moran didn’t like to write and gave his judicial clerks inordinate latitude to frame the language of decisions. 

As I researched the case, I discovered opinions from the supreme courts of Ohio, Missouri and Iowa that involved similar city ordinances and those courts allowed the city to impose vicarious liability on rent-a-car companies, which of course owned the stable of cars but didn’t park them illegally. None of the lawyers in the case on either side mentioned any of the cases, or as Justice Moran wrote in the published opinion: “Our own research reveals four cases from other jurisdictions” that were right on point. 

The Court opinion was unanimous, 7-0 in favor of the city. The entire Court had reversed itself. Not bad for a Republican judge who cared about justice and for a 26-year-old pisher. 

Fast forward to today and election campaigns. I was at an unrelated fundraiser, where I discovered that the case made a mark on the practice of law in the state. Nothing to do with parking tickets or vicarious liability. It turns out that the case exposed the practice of rent-a-car companies providing cars as "gifts" to judges and “numerous elected and appointed officials in the city of Chicago.” It further resulted in the dissolution of Friedman and Koven, one of the firms in the case. The Illinois Supreme Court disbarred one of the attorneys. 

The Court disbarment opinion reads: “While some may view ‘clout’ as an acceptable means of doing business, we will not condone or tolerate this type of activity.” 

The Illinois Supreme Court matters. Choose wisely, my friends.

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French from Dummy

                                                                                                       Oct. 2, 2022

[Written originally as my first email dispatch home in 2006 as my family was embarking on a year in France. As with Paris and French generally, nothing much has changed in almost 20 years and won't for another 20, give or take 100.]

[Read the companion story, Rosh Hashana in the Bois de Boulogne]

I’m refining my expectations for learning French. I am no longer hoping to understand conversations, participate in them, or engage in the lively art except in controlled settings. My brain doesn’t have that gear. I concede. It is my declaration of incompetence. 

My goals are now to: (1) understand headlines, (2) get the general drift of stories on tv or in print, (3) smile intermittently in movies with subtitles, (4) have a subtle but real advantage in English crossword puzzles, (5) try not to annoy by dropping in French words or phrases just for effect, and (6) teach you the rudiments of French. 

Just because I can't seem to learn French, that doesn't mean you shouldn't. After all, I am a professor and well-schooled in the art of teaching things I hardly know. I don’t expect you to trust me on faith. So to establish my credentials, let me offer four clues from recent crossword puzzles. If you know the answers, you do not need my lessons. If you don’t, I’m your instructor. I answered all four correctly. 

1. A three-letter word for summer in Tours 

2. A four-letter word for Tours to be 

3. A four-letter word for needle case 

4. A three-letter word for friend of Pierre 

(The answers are at the bottom of this email.) 

OK, let’s get started. First, let me disabuse you of something you might have read in The New Yorker. David Sedaris’ piece in the Sept. 18 issue is plein de hooey (full of hooey). In it, out of frustration with French, he stakes out the position that all you need to know is “d’accord.” (The "d" is silent, as you should be.) He’s pulling your jambe. Saying “d’accord” will accomplish little more than smiling and putting your neck on bobblehead pilot. 

Let’s build your confidence. We’ll go with the many, many, many cognates that will get you most of the way there for thousands of everyday words. They will not get you all the way there because your pronunciation will give you away and subject you to derision. Again, silence is d'or. [Yes, that's why D'or Fashion is the ultimate boutique shopping experience for women.] See how well you're doing already.

There is a school of French language instruction that cautions against faux amis; that is, false friends.  They are terms that aren’t what they appear to be and exist mostly to trip up we Americans, who may confidently show off by saying, “chambre musique” only to discover through prolonged laughter that  you’re actually saying you like the music of the bedroom. Think of it as a conversation starter, and you’ve just opened with a funny. 

The more optimistic reality is that French and English are joined at the hip of cognate, not far, though, from the ship of fools.

As in life, there are far fewer faux amis than there are good buddies, words with which you feel comfortable and can count on. One trick is to angle the pronunciation about 5 degrees away from what you’re accustomed to and roll your r’s. 

Try these. I’m offering just a few choice selections, courtesy of the letter P: 

Perfect ... parfait 

Paper ... papier 

Paradise ... paradis 

Pardon ... pardon    

Page ... page 

Pay ... paie 

Pants ... pantaloon 

Party ... parti 

Pastry ... patisserie  

Paint ... peindre 

Plant ... plante 

Now how hard is that? This will work very, very often….in print. If people are actually using any of these words in conversation, it’s hopeless, at least for me, because the words brush together in an unrecognizable palette like you’re looking at an impressionist painting from an inch away. 

One final puzzler for now before I leave you with the crossword puzzle answers below.

Any American fool knows what the French word for "yes" is. It took this American fool weeks to know that the answer spelled out is "oui."

I attribute my ignorance to being Jewish and assumed The French spelled "oy" that way. Faux ami of the highest order.

Then there's always learning from Phoebe Buffay.

------------

1. ete 

2. etre 

3. etui 

4. ami

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Rosh Hashana in the Bois de Boulogne

                                                                                                                                        Oct. 2, 2022

The Jewish high holidays are with us, as are the mid-term U.S. election campaigns. 

In five weeks, immediately after the elections, my wife Margie and I head off first to Israel and the West Bank, then to Paris, where we lived for a year nearly 20 years ago.     

The convergence of events prompted me to look back over something I wrote back then. I called it Rosh Hashana in the Bois de Boulogne.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              2006 

[read the companion story, French from Dummy]

We were warned. At best, the French collaborate and cave. At worst, they are hardcore anti-semites, waiting for a Jean-Marie le Pen demagogue to bring out their true colors. France does not count its minorities. If it did, it would discover that 8-10 percent or more of its own are Muslims, many with seething contempt for Jews and Americans. And we are both. So we were told. 

Less than a year ago, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Moroccan Jew was lured out of Paris, tortured and killed by embittered gang youth in a Paris banlieu. It took Ha’aretz, the daily newspaper in Israel, to break the story, all the more reason to distrust the French and France. We would withhold judgment, as we’re instructed to do in the Al Het, as we rap at our chests on the holidays: “For the wrong that we have done before you in the closing of the heart.” After all, this was the France that my mom sought out after the war, as she emerged from living as a Catholic in Poland. Until she could get papers, she lived in Lyon and married my dad in Marseille. 

We arrived in Paris a month before Rosh Hashana, enough time to sense what we were in for in our sabbatical year in Paris, away from Evanston, JRC and our friends. Our kids began school at the Ecole Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel, which we were told opened in 1954, with the primary post-war mission to instill international understanding. We moved into an apartment only a few blocks away from Roland Garros, site of the French Open for more than 75 years, and which unknown to us was used during World War II as a prison for French political dissidents. We noticed a plaque on the elementary school next to our apartment. As we loosely translated the French, it reads: “To the memory of the students of this school deported between 1942 and 1944 because they were Jewish, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism with the complicity of the Vichy government. They were exterminated in the death camps. 100 children had lived in the 16th arrondissement.” It was dedicated on May 17, 2003 – “Never let us forget them,” it concluded. We cannot help but cringe each time police sirens sound. They sound often and the piercing sound is the Gestapo siren that is hardwired to our nerve endings. Of all things not to do away with. 

One of our first family outings was to the Marais, the old Jewish quarter that welcomed us with a showy intermarriage of Orthodox Jewish and fashionable gay, with an aromatic wafting of Sephardic falafel and hummus to spice up our walk. The kids had the best falafel of their young lives, and I put on tefillin at the behest of a Lubavitcher who told us he got a mitzvah out of my impromptu indulgence. I hadn’t lain tefillin in 30+ years, and I could tell he was kvelling. “It is good,” I could hear a Sholom Aleichem character say. We dipped into a synagogue on rue Pavee that was designed by Hector Guimard, the art nouveau architect, who designed many of the Paris metro station entrances we pass through every day. 

We wondered what we’d do for the holidays. Margie made two more pilgrimages to the Marais, for matzah meal and yahrzeit candles and what my mom used to call “tomm,” the holiday mood. We emailed friends back home to wish them a shana tova and plead for a mystical serving of kishke to appear with friends for Shabbat dinner. We discovered that Edith, an older upstairs neighbor who’d befriended us, was Jewish. We invited her to join us for Shabbat dinner on erev Rosh Hashana, though Margie was fighting a nasty cold. As it turned out, Edith developed a cold too and sent her regrets by card under the door. We brought her chicken soup. She brought us roses as thanks. We lit candles, sang the Kiddush from the Mahzor we’d remembered to pack, did the motze with finely-kneaded challah we’d bought at our neighborhood patisserie, and ate to the background music of Mandy Patinkin’s Mamaloshen and Fiddler on the Roof. There was something almost enchanted in the flavor of Margie’s matzah ball soup. Both helpings. We went to bed not knowing if Margie would feel up to going to shul in the morning or not. 

We each woke up humming. 

“May the Lord protect and defend you. May the Lord preserve you from pain. Favor them, Oh Lord, with happiness and peace. Oh, hear our Sabbath prayer. A-a-a-a-amen. 

Dovening to Fiddler on the Roof. 

We read about Alfred Dreyfus, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the French army when he was convicted falsely in 1894 of passing military secrets to the Germans. He spent 12 years on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America before he was pardoned and released. The affair was memorialized as the icon of French anti-semitism. 

Other melodies followed: 

L’dor vador. “L’dor, vador, l’dor vador, l’dor vador nageed godlecha. Oole, nayzach, ni-zachim, oole, nayzach, ni-zachim, kiddushah nakdeesh.” 

Avinu Malkenu. “Avinu malkenu, avinu malkenu, avinu malkenu, honenu va’anenu ki eyn banu ma-asim.” 

And of course, Sim Shalom, sung always with the stealth “sim” emanating from the congregation in between the cantor’s chanting of the words “sim” and “shalom.” “Sim [sim], sim [sim], sim shalom, sim shalom tova oovrachah.” 

We knew we would have Rosh Hashana with us wherever we were. We opted for nature. Margie and I pulled out two bikes, Sylvie strapped on roller blades and Noah carried out his scooter. We drifted gently into the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’ grand park that is three times as large as Central Park and larger than Lincoln Park and Grant Park combined. We wandered, and ended up at a lake, where we ferried onto an island for lunch at a chalet overlooking the water. As quiet as the Amidah. 

Le Chalet des Iles

We didn’t have our holiday service, but we had its calm, in which we saw, heard and were enveloped by all of you. 

L’shana tova, rabbi, cantor and friends.

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