XV

My work was to read the records and write the briefs on appeal. Thomas Dewey had been the district attorney and had prosecuted a number of racketeers on evidence gained from wiretapping. A few were convicted, and I was one of a group writing the appellate briefs in an effort to sustain the convictions. The trial lawyers for the defense in criminal cases were mostly histrionic, objecting to practically everything presented by the prosecutor and then seeking to find flaws for appeal. The extravagantly permissive state lower-court judges allowed the de-

fense to try to browbeat often reluctant prosecution witnesses and behave in ways that would be considered unprofessional in federal court. By a tacit agreement between party bosses and the bar associations, the elected judges, including those holding lucrative probate judgeships, were slotted in the lower courts on the basis of patronage, whereas the Court of Appeal, the court of last resort in New York State, though also elected, was allowed to become respectable and even distinguished; it had been Benjamin Cardozo's base and later was Fuld's. The latter was a perfectionist and insisted that we overprepare our briefs, no doubt boring the judges' clerks who had to read them since if a case from New Zealand was in any way apposite, we would be sure to cite it!^[19] The experience gave me a sense of the appeal of Wall Street and other metropolitan law firms whose predominantly corporate clients can afford (and are sometimes constrained by) the most carefully researched advice that hourly billing can buy.