Picking at a 19-year-old scab, Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wants an apology from Anita Hill, the woman who testified against her husband during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. On Oct. 9, Ms. Thomas called Hill's office at Brandeis University, saying: Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day. Ms. Thomas's voice mail revives a controversy that conservatives and liberals dispute to this day. Before the infamous confirmation hearing, Hill was an aide to Mr. Thomas and accused him of making profane sexual comments, such as discussing his penis size and the placement of a pubic hair on his soft drink. Mr. Thomas denied the allegations, calling attacks by Democrats a "high-tech lynching." When Hill received the voice mail, she notified Brandeis University police.
Read the Atlantic piece, here.
In thinking about my presentation next week for the ACLEA annual meeting about “How Technology is Changing the Practice of Law … and CLE,” I suddenly remembered that I had once written a magazine article on this very topic. Way back in 1995, I wrote, Empowered or Enslaved: Technology’s Effect on the Legal Profession (PDF), the cover story for the December 2005/January 2006 issue of the magazine Law Office Computing. On one hand, the article reads like a time capsule. For example, one lawyer I interviewed as an Internet success story was Greg Siskind, who went on to write the popular book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Marketing on the Internet. At the time I wrote the article, his practice was little more than a year old and already proving a success. But some of what lawyers said then about the downside of technology is no less true today. Consider this quote from Philip Dubois, a sole practitioner in Colorado: Technology is a double-edged sword. One result is that we have great new tools with which to do our jobs. But at the same time, the pace of our work — and therefore of our lives — has increased with each new tool. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing in the law. It’s wonderful in science, in engineering, in education and in the media. But law is supposed to be a deliberative practice. When we get to the point where we as lawyers are constantly trying to keep up with the pace, we lose that deliberative part of the law. Wise and prescient words from Dubois.
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