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sdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfA Transatlantic Conversation Meador-Sokol Letters

1967-2012 ghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghj Ronald Sokol klzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklz xcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcv bnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbn mqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmq wertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwe rtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwerty uiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuio pasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopas dfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfg hjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjk lzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbn 1

On a gray November day in 2003 I walked calmly up the many steps that lead to the “Palace of Justice” which adjoins the magnificent 13th century church of Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite. Entering the vast building and passing through many long corridors I came to my destination, the ornate gilded First Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeals which judges international cases. On the walls hung heavy tapestries by Gobelins and high above me on the ceiling was a fresco bearing the title of “Justice enlightened by Truth pursuing Crime and protecting Innocence.”

As required of French lawyers when coming before a judge I wore my black silk robe. I had grown accustomed to the floppy silk robe with its kimono sleeves; I had now been a member of the French bar for nearly thirty years. Neither the robe nor the courts caused me any alarm, and my anticipation of the judges enlightening justice and finding truth had been tempered by experience.

As the argument was in chambers I sat at one end of a long table. Three judges sat at the opposite end. I began to speak hoping to convince them that a decision rendered in favor of a Lebanese husband by a foreign religious tribunal was lacerated with fraud and should not be enforced in France. I knew nothing of Lebanon at that time, but a decade later I found myself traveling regularly to Beirut from my office in the south of France to seize real property in the Lebanese countryside in payment of my client’s claims.

As I look back at those cases and others–seizing a Boeing 747 at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, negotiating the sale of a mansion in Saint Tropez owned by a client about to go to jail for fraud, resolving a dispute between James Brown and a concert manager so that the show could begin at once as ten thousand people were waiting impatiently for it to start–I often think of T.S. Elliot’s remark that a man is a different person in each decade of his life.1 Surely I had changed.

1 “For a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade of his life, as he sees it with different eyes….” T.S; Elliot speaking in 1940 at the 1st Annual Yeats Lecture published in On Poetry and Poets, (London, Faber & Faber, 1957), p. 257.

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More than a half-century has passed since that 3rd day of June in 1962 when the University of Virginia conferred upon me a diploma. Two days later I stood with my roommate on the platform of the train station. As we said goodbye after three years of study together, he to return to his home in Alabama and I to mine in Wisconsin, we looked at each other and said in amazement, “We’re lawyers now.”

During those three intense years we had without fully realizing it acquired a new identity. He left to serve as an officer in the Judge Advocate General’s corps, then practiced as a trial lawyer with a firm in Atlanta, which he left to become a founding partner in a leading Atlanta litigation firm.2

For a few years my path was conventional, but then I took what Robert Frost called “the road less traveled by” and, as Frost said, “that has made all the difference.” Today I am a member of the bar in France and England. I belong to the Inner Temple, as does one of our sons named after Dan Meador.

After teaching at Virginia and arguing cases for several years before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit I left for France, then for Japan, then back to Paris. In 1970 I left Paris for Aix- en-Provence where In 1973 I hung out a shingle and started my own firm. Forty-two years later in my 76th year I continue to practice in the courts throughout France. Who could have predicted such an outcome? Euripides ended his play Medea with lines that often come to mind:

And the end men looked for cometh not, And the path is there where no man thought, So hath it fallen here.

As I try to discern the path’s beginning I go back to September, 1959. It was then I entered the University of Virginia Law School.

2Drew, Eckl &Farnham Ronald Sokol

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I had turned twenty and was not certain I wanted to study law. I had finished my third year at Duke University and had one more year to go to get a degree, but I wanted a change of scene. So I walked across the campus built in Gothic style by the tobacco fortune of James B. Duke— built in imitation of the medieval colleges of Oxford University, where some 40 years later two of our four sons would get degrees. It took just a few minutes to get from my dormitory to the law school building. I walked in and asked to see the dean. There were no formalities and no wait.

At that time Duke Law School was known primarily for having been the place where Richard Nixon had studied law. Dean Laty received me cordially. “I am interested in studying law,” I said not quite truthfully; “and am thinking about applying to Duke and Virginia.” Dean Laty looked me over and said; “Go to Virginia and see what they offer, then come back and see me.” It turned out to be excellent advice.

Both my interest in law and in Virginia may well be attributable to my tennis. As a teenager I had played at the River Tennis Club on the outskirts of Milwaukee. The club had a single indoor court with a cork surface built on their estate in the 1930’s by a wealthy Milwaukee family. When World War II ended the family split off some of the land and converted the building into a small tennis club run by an English woman whose glory was to have won the junior Wimbledon in some prehistoric past. She was an excellent teacher.

I have no idea how I got into this exclusive club; I only recall her coming to our house to interview both me and my parents when I was about 14 years old. The restricted membership of about sixty families was made up of leading Milwaukee doctors; lawyers and businessmen. They were all at least 20 years older than I. Because of my ready availability I was sought after as a fourth in doubles play.

After tennis we showered and before venturing out into the snow and ice of a Wisconsin winter we sat around in worn leather chairs in front of a stone fireplace with a fire roaring while we

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drank beer supplied by the family whose fortune had built the club. By the time I was eighteen I had won the club’s singles and mixed doubles titles. It was the high point of my tennis career. It was in the post tennis beer talk that a taste for law was possibly born. I asked my tennis partner, a prominent lawyer, what he liked about the law. It was, he said, the range and variety of problems he was called upon to resolve and the cross between the abstract and the concrete. His observation must have touched a nerve.

Another tennis partner possessed a rambling estate which bordered the club and where I often strayed, as it was enlivened by his daughters who invited me to their debutante parties. He had attended Virginia in the 1930’s and spoke well of it. And so I followed Dean Laty’s advice. I took the train to Charlottesville. I must have arrived sometime in June, 1959. I was greeted by Emerson Spies then in charge of admissions. He spoke to me briefly and then escorted me to the office of Hardy Dillard who four years later would become dean of the Law School.

Hardy Cross Dillard sat behind a large desk reading the sports page of the local paper. He did not look up when we entered the room but beckoned me to take a seat. Emerson Spies soon left, and for a while Dillard and I sat in absolute silence. I, a nervous twenty year old not knowing what to expect, Dillard perusing at ease his newspaper.

After what seemed to me an eternity, Dillard let the paper drop slowly to his desk and looked up. He gazed at me with a quizzical not unfriendly smile then began to speak in a rich, gravelly voice, “Rizzuto,” he muttered. A pause, then he added, “Wagner, Ruth, Dimaggio.” Another pause, “Fernandez, Rodriguez.” A long pause.

“Curious, isn’t it?” he said, addressing me as an equal and seeming to reflect aloud, “You can trace the waves of immigrants as they came to our shores by the baseball players–first Germans, then Italians, then the Puerto Ricans.” I sat in front of a man who read the sports pages in a way I had never imagined. I did not return to see Dean Laty.

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Dillard died in 1982. One of Meador’s most valuable services was to preserve Dillard’s writings and speeches. In 1995 he collected and published them together with a biographical sketch.3 Dillard was no doubt the greatest speaker met in my lifetime. He had the voice of John Gielgud, the timing of a great actor, a knack for choosing the perfect word and to those immense gifts were added humor and charm. As Meador wrote in his biographical sketch, “He had the knack of using apt analogies and concrete examples to illuminate difficult points, enlivened with colorful idioms and touches of humor. His wide reading equipped him with an array of anecdotes and quotations which he used effectively at every turn.”4

In his “Tips on Lectures and Discussions” Dillard suggested that the primary purpose of a lecture is not to supply information. “… [T]he purpose of a lecture is to set thought in motion, to stimulate the creative and critical faculties.”5 It was exactly what Dillard had done with me in his unorthodox interview.

Meador too was a great speaker. Like Dillard he had what Lord Birkett called a “command of language.”6 If he did not have the “dramatic flair and oratorical flourishes” that characterized Dillard7 his speech, like his writing, was marked by its clarity, and, like Dillard, he knew how to set thought in motion.

I was admitted without a university degree in the fall of 1959. Soon I was instructed in the linguistic ritual that prevailed. It was always “Mr. Jefferson”. We lived in his “academical village.” Clark Hall, where I was destined to spend the next seven years of my life, was known simply as “The Law School.” I entered as the youngest member of the Class of 1962. I spent the next seven years at Clark Hall, first as a law student, then as a post graduate student, then as a director of an appellate legal aid clinic and lecturer in appellate practice.

3 Meador, D.J., Hardy Cross Dillard: Writings and Speeches (Charlottesville, Law School Foundation, 1995).

4 Id. At 20. 5 Id. At 161. 6 Lord Birkett, Six Great Advocates (Penguin, 1961), p. 108. 7Meador, supra n. 3 at 20. Ronald Sokol

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During those first three years I was initiated by Hardy Dillard, Dan Meador, Emerson Spies, Ken Redden, Mortimer Caplin, Charles Horsky and others not only into the complexity, intricacies, and subtleties of the law but to the critical roles that law plays or fails to play in any society.

In 1957, just two years before my arrival, Dillard hired Meador who had for the previous two years been practicing law with a firm in Birmingham, Alabama. Born in Selma, Alabama in 1926 Meador had done his undergraduate work at Auburn University and then studied law at the University of Alabama. At that stage all of his education had taken place in the Deep South in an impoverished and racially segregated state. I know nothing of what Meador must have been like in those years when all of his life experience was limited to Alabama. He must have been a brilliant student. From Alabama Law School he was admitted to Harvard. Finishing there with an LLM he won a clerkship on the Supreme Court. From 1954 to 1955 he clerked for Justice Hugo Black. Those two or three years in Cambridge and then in Washington with Justice Black in the inner sanctum of the Supreme Court left as deep an imprint on Meador as Meador and Dillard did on me.

My first encounter with him was in a class in civil procedure, not a subject one would think of intrinsic interest The course covers the technical rules of civil lawsuits,. Yet Meador brought to the classroom not only knowledge of the rules but their rationale, their historical background, and the legislative compromises. He taught the history, philosophy and politics that underlay the rules.

He possessed the gift of all great lawyers for breaking down complex problems into their simplest components. He spoke with a rich southern accent, an Alabama drawl, but with great clarity and precision. He obviously loved what he was doing, and he often erupted in infectious, high-pitched laughter at some comic aspect of the law.

He read history as a subject of inherent interest but also as guide to current action and understanding. In a speech on “God, Law and Sir Edward Coke in the Late Twentieth Century”8

8 Meador, Daniel, J. God, Law and Sir Edward Coke in the Late Twentieth Century, Am address at the Fall Convocation, University of Virginia, September 30, 1988. Ronald Sokol

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he evoked the conflict between Coke and James the First. The King wanted to take over a pending case and decide it himself. “Flirting with treason,” Meador said, “Coke went on to make what was then a revolutionary pronouncement. He asserted that the King himself was under law.”

The King was “Not under man, but under God and law.” Meador went on to point out that the English settlers brought to the colonies Coke’s Institutes and the King James Version of the Bible. This dualism of God and Law shows up in American architecture. For in the center of every colonial town was a courthouse and a church.

In my second year I took Meador’s class in “federal courts,” in my third year his seminar in constitutional litigation (and again a second time when I did postgraduate work for an LLM). The high point of my time as a law student came during my third year when the Supreme Court appointed Meador as counsel to an indigent prisoner. I helped him prepare his brief and oral argument and accompanied him to Washington when he appeared before the Court and argued the case, which of course he won.

It was my first experience at that august institution which during the past two years I had studied with care. I later went to the Court, as some people go to the opera, as often as I could. The high points were Meador’s argument in the habeas corpus case of Jones v. Cunningham9 and later Abe Fortas’ argument in the right to counsel case of Gideon v. Wainwright.10

During my third year I often stopped by his office to discuss Supreme Court cases with him. He was always available and happy to talk. During that year I asked him if I could stay on after getting my law degree and do graduate work under his supervision with a view to obtaining an LLM. I wanted to study in more depth the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the meaning of equality. He agreed, and so I remained a law student for a fourth academic year.

9369 U.S. 809 (1962) and 371 U.S. 236 (1963). 10372 U.S. 335 (1963). Ronald Sokol

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I had a thesis to write but no required classes to attend. I profited from this freedom by taking a course in symbolic logic in the philosophy department taught by a Frenchman who kept insisting that I and four graduate philosophy students who suffered with me understood the hieroglyphics he chalked with lightning speed on to a blackboard. We vigorously protested our incomprehension but to no avail. “You veelunderstanteet,” he told us. We didn’t, but he gave us all passing grades.

Meanwhile I worked on my thesis, later published as The Puzzle of Equality.11 During that year I took for a second time Charles Horsky’s seminar in civil rights. He was a partner in the Washington firm of Covington and Burling. He came to Charlottesville on weekends to teach the seminar. Horsky had argued major civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court including Korematsu v. United States,12 the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Horsky too was a superb teacher and added to my understanding of what makes a great lawyer.

It was 1963, and I now had two law degrees, an LLB, later converted by the university to a JD, and an LLM. I studied my limitations. I knew I did not have the stuff of a trial lawyer. Quick thinking and charisma before a jury were not attributes that I possessed, but I thought I might be a good appellate advocate. I liked to ruminate about problems, turn them over in my mind, think of analogies and examples, and I could speak. In any event, that was what I wanted to do.

There was an obstacle. In the 1960’s there were no lawyers anywhere in the United States whose practice was limited to appellate litigation. No law firm would hire a law school graduate who only wanted to argue appeals. My specialty did not then exist. I went home to Wisconsin in the summer of 1963 wondering what to do.

One warm day in July of that same summer I was sitting in the library of my parent’s house overlooking Lake Michigan where as a child I had caught lake perch off the jetty just down the

11 The Michie Company, 1967. 12323 U.S. 214 (1944). Ronald Sokol

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ravine behind our house, when I got an unexpected phone call from my law school roommate. He said he was at the Law School, as he had just entered the Judge Advocate General Corp as a First Lieutenant. He was in fact in Dan Meador’s office and Meador wanted to speak to me.

The Law School, Meador told me, had just received a grant. Meador wanted to set up a clinic at the law school. The federal appeals court for the 4th Circuit was receiving a large number of petitions brought by prisoners who could not afford a lawyer. These cases were referred to as in forma pauperis cases. The prisoners were paupers. Some of those petitions, the judges thought, appeared to present significant legal issues. The court wanted to sift out those petitions that raised such issues and refer them the Law School.

Meador’s plan was to hire a young lawyer. The Court would designate him as counsel to argue the prisoner’s case. He–there were almost no women lawyers at that time13—would teach a seminar in appellate litigation. Meador had discussed this with the Chief Judge of the federal appeals court who favored the plan.

The person hired would be the director of the clinic. He would use the cases as material in a seminar for third year law students. They would study the trial transcripts, help the director draft the briefs, and go to court with the director when he argued the case. They would follow the appellate process from its beginning to its end with live cases.14

Meador asked me if I would agree to be the director of this new program. It did not take me long to accept a position where I could specialize in arguing appeals. Over the next three years I appeared as counsel before the five judges of the federal appeals court for the 4th Circuit.15 As I recall, I argued about six cases a year. I became versed in habeas corpus, which was the procedural means by which most of the cases reached the federal court.

13 In the Virginia Law School Class of 1962 there were 148 students, only two were women. There was one African American. 14In Forma Pauperis Appeals: The University of Virginia Experiment With A Neglected Asset, 18 Journal of Legal Education 96 (1965). 15Judges Clement Haynsworth, Simon Sobeloff, Spencer Bell, Albert Bryan, and Herbert Borman. Ronald Sokol

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In 1967 I put what I had learned into a handbook on habeas corpus.16 It had been almost 100 years since the last book on the subject was published.17 Profiting from that vacuum my handbook became an instant best seller. It was cited by state and federal courts throughout the United States.

Some years later when I was living in France and still quite young I met a federal judge on holiday with his wife. Upon learning that I had written the habeas corpus handbook he turned to his wife and pointing to me said to her in a hushed, reverential tone, “Honey, this is the man who wrote the Bible.” “Really?” she retorted, as she briefly scrutinized me, “He doesn’t look that old.”

I did a second edition in 1968.18 Yet after three years arguing prisoners’ appeals and having established a national reputation in post-conviction cases I chose to leave Virginia. I was 26 years old. Dean Dillard tempted me with an offer of an assistant professorship. All five judges of the court sent me extremely kind letters, which I treasure to this day as evidence of my youth “to myself now grown fabulous”:

A man now, gone with time so long, My youth to myself grown fabulous As an old land’s memories…..19

They also flattered me in a judicial opinion.20 Before leaving the Law School I put together a collection of my appellate briefs together with an essay setting forth what I thought I had learned about appellate practice21. The Chief Judge of the Court kindly agreed to write a preface. Then I left for Paris.

I had become acquainted with Paris a few years earlier. Every September my father flew there to attend La Semaine du Cuir, then the world’s main tradeshow for the leather industry. It

16A Handbook of Federal Habeas Corpus (Michie Company, 1965) . 17 The previous book published on habeas corpus was Church’s, A Treatise of the Writ of Habeas Corpus in 1886. 18Federal Habeas Corpus (The Michie Company , 1968). 19 Edwin Muir, “Day and Night”. 20United States v. Shoaf, 341 F2d 832 ‘(4th Cir. 1964). 21 Language and Litigation: A Portrait of the Appellate Brief, Foreword by Chief Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr. Michie Company, 1967). Ronald Sokol

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lasted a full week and was a major event not only for my father but for France as well. General de Gaulle opened the tradeshow. The leather industry had not yet moved to China, and Milwaukee was a center for tanneries, one of which, General Split Corporation, was owned by my father. He later privately printed a memoir telling the tale of how he acquired the company.22

When my father was suffering acutely from the high tax rates of the 1970’s I suggested that he give some of the company’s non-voting shares to the Law School so he could benefit from a tax deduction. He did so, and when in 1980 I negotiated the sale of the family’s interest in the company, the shares given to the Law School became liquid and were used to create the Sokol Colloquium on Private International Law.

When my father invited me to accompany him on his annual Paris trip I eagerly accepted. While he spent his day at the tradeshow, I explored the museums, parks, and cafés. At the end of the day my father would take a taxi back to the hotel and take a short nap. We would then go out to test the famed cuisine.

It was the era of A.J. Liebling23 and Waverly Root.24 France was emerging from the trauma of war and the occupation. There was optimism in the air. Times were getting better. It was what the French now call the “Glorious Thirty Years” which began about when I arrived.

When I returned to Paris in early 1966 I spoke almost no French. My foreign language was Spanish. I had spent the summer of my 17th year studying at the University of Mexico; That had been my first trip outside the United States. But I was motivated and determined to learn French. I enrolled in the Alliance Française. While I navigated through the five degrees of the Alliance Française program, discovering to my surprise that I had a modest talent as a linguist, I survived off royalties from my legal publications.

22 Sokol, Gustave, The Private Life of General Split (privately printed 1971). 23 Liebling, A.J., Between Meals, Modern Library, 1995, originally published in 1959. 24 Root, Waverley, The Food of France, Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Ronald Sokol

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As I absorbed the French language I felt myself begin to change. The changes caused me to consider how our language determines how we think and feel. Later I found this thought captured by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”25 For to understand a language, said Wittgenstein, is to understand a world.26 I decided to learn a language more foreign than French or Spanish, a non-European language. What was then called “Mainland China” was closed to Americans. I had no desire to go to Moscow, Helsinki or Budapest, each of which offered a non-European language. I had a contact in Japan. I left Paris for Tokyo.

I arrived in June, 1967 and immediately enrolled in a Japanese language school situated beneath Tokyo Tower in the heart of the city. It was one on one with a Japanese teacher three hours a day. The teachers changed every hour. It was exhausting, but I learned Japanese. I returned to Paris in December, 1968 no longer alone but with a wife who upon our arrival took up the study of French at the Alliance Française and cuisine at the Cordon Bleu. In November 1970 we moved south to Aix-en-Provence where we have lived ever since.

The letters between Dan Meador and myself begin in 1967 while I was struggling to learn Japanese. It began a correspondence that lasted for the next 45 years until Meador’s death. We exchanged letters once or twice a year, sometimes more often. Meador died in February, 2013 not long after his last letter to me in December, 2012 in which he talked of his plans for the coming summer.

His career within the law was a brilliant one27. After spending a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in England in 1965 while I was still at the Law School, Meador returned to the United State in 1966 to accept the post of Dean of the Alabama Law School, no doubt out of a sense of obligation to his native state—for he knew that the task would be challenging. He remained there for four

25 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Anscombe transl. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1963), p. 8e, n° 19. 26 “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life,” Id. At 225. 27Among his many honors were the Raven Award and the Thomas Jefferson Award from the University, the Justice Award from the American Judicature Society. The Distinguished Service Award from the National Center for State Courts, the Samuel E. Gates Litigation Award from the American College of Trial Lawyers, the William B. Spong Award from the Virginia Bar, and the AAAL Kathleen Lewis Award for Appellate Justice.

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difficult years.28 He accomplished much but towards the end of his tenure he was blocked from what he strove to accomplish. He resigned and in 1970 returned to Virginia to become the James Monroe Professor of Law. His time in England later came to fruition in a long study of English appellate practice and its pertinence in an American context.29

In 1977 he was approached by Attorney-General Griffin Bell for government service. Griffin Bell, Meador later wrote, “brought to the office a belief that the Department had an affirmative obligation to improve the justice system.”30 To further that goal Bell created the Office for Improvement in the Administration of Justice and asked Meador to head that office as Assistant Attorney-General.

It was at that time in 1977 that Meador lost the sight in his one good eye, having previously lost the other from a detached retina. Now totally blind he tendered his resignation. Bell refused to accept it reportedly having said, “I want you for your brains not your sight.”

When we were together at the Law School Meador had not yet lost his sight. It was years later when he and his wife visited our home in France that I met him once again after many long years of correspondence this time without vision.

While Assistant Attorney-General Meador played a critical role in the creation of the new Federal Circuit court in Washington which decides patent cases from all over the country. In his remarks on the 25th anniversary of the Federal Court he stressed its historical significance in that “it modified the regional design of the intermediate appellate tier. Unlike the other 12 courts of appeals, this court’s jurisdiction is not bounded geographically.31 His experience in the Justice Department later led to reflections about the nature of the Attorney Generalship.

28 Meador, Daniel J. The Transformative Years of the University of Alabama Law School 1966-1970 (New South Books, 2012). 29Meador, English Appellate Judges from an American Perspective, 66 Georgetown Law Journal 1349 (1978). 30Meador, Daniel J. Griffin Bell at the Intersection of Law and Politics: The Department of Justice 1977-1979, 24 Journal of Law and Politics 529 (2008), p. 537. 31Remarks of Daniel J. Meador In the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (April 2, 2007). The Chief Judge, Paul Michel, now retired, was a former student of my appellate practice seminar. Ronald Sokol

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When Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush’s Attorney General, resigned in 2007 under severe criticism Meador mused on the tension that can exist between the Attorney-General’s role in enforcing federal law, giving legal advice to the president and executive department heads and his membership in the president’s cabinet.32 “He [the Attorney General] can properly be expected to support the administration’s policies insofar as they are lawful.”33 Meador gave two examples of attorney generals who had stature in the law and were respected by the bench and bar nationally. “Legal advice by such a lawyer,” he wrote,“ is more likely to carry weight in the White House and with the public … This office is not the place for rewarding political supporters.”34

Returning to Virginia he authored two widely used books, one on appellate courts35 and one on American courts36 both translated into foreign languages. He published an essay on “Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta,”37 articles on the Supreme Court,38books on appellate advocacy and constitutional litigation,39 and on the federal courts.40

Perhaps all great teachers have wide ranging interests. It was certainly the case with Meador. He wrote on the books that influenced Justice Black,41 and on Lucius Q.C. Lamar, a 19th century lawyer from Georgia. Lamar, Meador wrote, “was virtually the only pre-war Southern leader whose career spanned the chasm of the Civil War and who returned to post-war leadership …[H]e is the only American to have served in both houses of Congress, the President’s cabinet,

32 Meador, Daniel J., Thinking about the Attorney Generalship [Cite needed] 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35Meador and Bernstein, Appellate Courts in the United States (West Publishing, 1994). 36Meador, American Courts (West Publishing, 1991). 37Meador, Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta : Dualism of Power and Liberty (University Press of Virginia, 1966). 38 Meador, Daniel J. Restructuring the Supreme Court: Regularizing Appointments, Providing More Frequent Rotation, Avoiding Physical and Mental Impairment, 25 Journal of Law & Politics 459 (2009); Reining in the Superlegislature: A Response to Professors Carrington and Cramton, 94 Cornell L. Rev.657 (2009): Regularizing Supreme Court Appointments – Curing Several Ills (Cite needed). 39 Meador, Preludes to Gideon: Notes on Appellate Advocacy, Habeas Corpus, and Constitutional Litigation (Michie Company, 1967). 40The United States Courts of Appeals : Re-examing Structure and Process After a Century of Growth, Report of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements (1989). Meador was Chairman of the Committee; Meador, Afterword to Special Issue on the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeal, 15 Journal of Law & Politics 567 (1999). 41Meador, Daniel J. Justice Black and His Books (University Press of Virginia, 1974). Ronald Sokol

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and the Supreme Court.”42 Meador may well have felt some identification with Lamar. They were both products of the Deep South who surmounted its vices while preserving its virtues. He published two essays on Lamar plus a speech on Lamar to the Supreme Court Historical Society.43

Meador was sought after as a speaker, and his speeches, whether on Sir Edward Coke,44 on Thomas Jefferson, 45 or on Woodrow Wilson whom he felt was the Law School’s most distinguished graduate.46 The year before his death he presented a portrait of Wilson to hang in the Law School. He thought Wilson’s accomplishments were underestimated. He had accomplished “an impressive string of reformist measures: reduction of tariffs for the first time in decades, establishment of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Child Labor Law, the eight hour day for railroad workers, a workman’s compensation act for federal employees, and income and inheritance tax laws.”47

Meador saw “the Wilson presidency take on the air of a Greek tragedy” as Wilson struggled in vain to get the country to ratify the League of Nations. Like Cassandra, who foretold the future but was condemned by the gods to have her prophecies ignored, Wilson prophesied that “without a concerted effort through the League of Nations to preserve the peace, there would be another war within a generation, one more terrible than the last.”48

42Meador, Lamar to Posterity : A Centennial Memoir, 63 Mississippi Law Journal 107 (1993).

43 Meador, Daniel J. supra n. 42; Lamar and the Law at the University of Mississippi, 34 Miss. L.J. 227 (1963); Lamar to the Court: Last Step to National Reunion, (Supreme Court Historical Society, Yearbook, 1986 27).

44God, Law, and Sir Edward Coke in the Late Twentieth Century (Address by Daniel J. Meador, Fall Convocation, University of Virginia, September 30, 1988). 45Remarks in the Monticello Cemetery at the Grave of Thomas Jefferson on Thomas Jefferson’s 263rd Birthday (April 13, 2006). 46Remarks of Professor Daniel J. Meador On Presentation to the Law School of a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, Caplin Pavilion (March 27, 2012). 47 Id. At p. 5. 48 Ibid. Ronald Sokol

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Meador was always intrigued by Germany. He once told me that he saw similarities between Germany and the Confederacy of his native South as defeated nations. He spent a semester in East Germany studying the courts when Germany was still a divided nation.49 He visited the “Wolf’s Lair” which for thee and a half years was Adolph Hitler’s secret headquarters, “from which [Hitler] could oversee the invasion of the Soviet Union only thirty miles away.”50

It was in that bunker, “a cross between a cloister and a concentration camp” that Count von Stauffenberg “one of numerous senior German army officers, most from families of ancient lineage… had become convinced that Hitler was dragging Germany down to ruin and that the only way to prevent disaster was to remove him by assassination.”51 In 2007 Meador published an account of his visit to the Wolf’s Lair. Meador was then 81 years old. His riveting account of the assassination attempt by Count von Stauffenberg shows Meador’s talent at its best for marshaling facts with the utmost clarity and precision.

Late in life he began to write fiction feeling apparently a need for a more emotional outlet. He attacked the craft of fiction with the same discipline and energy that marked all of his efforts. Two of his novels were published; his third and last novel was privately printed.52 He sent me copies of each, and we exchanged notes on the craft of writing. We shared a keen interest in justice, litigation, courts and legal systems. We sought understanding. The letters that follow reflect those interests.

Ronald P. Sokol Aix-en Provence August 4, 2015

49Meador, Daniel J. Impressions of Law in East Germany: Legal Education and Legal Systems in the German Democratic Republic (University of Virginia, 1987). 50Meador, The Wolf’s Lair and Tannenberg Sixty Years After, 115 Sewanee Review 633 (2007). 51 Ibid., 636. 52His Father’s House (Pelican, 1994), Unforgotten (Pelican, 1998), Remberton (iUniverse, Inc. 2007). Ronald Sokol