“WHY DO YOU HURT ME SO?”
By: A. Clifford Edwards, Esquire
THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF TRIAL LAWYERS DEAN’S ADDRESS
APRIL 7, 2017 SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
A Publication of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers
Why Do You Hurt Me So?
Good morning Academy!
The opinions, express or implied, in this Dean’s Address are solely my own; nothing more, nothing less. President Burbidge; soon-to-be President Noël; fellow officers; my sisters and brothers of our special Academy, guests and my Edwards’ family supporting me here today;
Page | 1 Susan – my wife, of such beauty, both of spirit and appearance, my soulmate, as hand-in-hand we experience our lives together; My cherished sons Christopher and John, the proudest achievements of my life; my best friends and only law partners; Their wives, my Daughters-in-law, Kelly and Hollis, who have so enriched and enhanced our Edwards’ family; And, an unexpected bonus that came into my life with her mother Susan over a decade ago when she was just 12, my stepdaughter Alex. Now, we welcome her significant, Patrick Lopach. Then, our little shining family Beacons, – the Edwards’ grandchildren – Ellie Marie, Wright, A.C. and Bella! Now please, you four, sit. Be still! Grandpa’s going to be givin’ a speech. Mother Nature
I posit the title of my Dean’s Address – “Why Do You Hurt Me So?” as a troubled query from our wounded Mother of this beautiful and bountiful planet we each absorb every day of our lives.
Susan and I share an instilled love for Mother Nature from our Montana upbringings. We cherish and revere her more each year as we travel the globe with you, our brothers and sisters of the Academy. Yet, all of us know that over the last couple hundred years we children of Mother Nature have been relentlessly assaulting her air, water and soil. Our assault on Mother has been toxic. It started in earnest with the Industrial Revolution, which was ostensibly to “make a better life for mankind.” Page | 2 But within the last 75 years or so, it finally dawned on mankind that unless we do something to curb this toxic assault and its ugly messes and clean it up some, irreversible harm will be inflicted on both Mother Earth and all humans she sustains. Countries from around the globe began to come together, particularly in the last few years. Treaties, notably in Paris, were signed to curb our combined global emission of toxins into the air and into the water. Actions were taken; progress was being made. But then, like a sudden summer hailstorm …
roaring across the plains of Eastern Montana, a black Tuesday in November hit America – the new 45th President emerged despite failing to even win the majority of the votes of our citizens. Clearly, he set out not to be a Leader to heal, guide, nor inspire the best of our American spirit. From a tower of gold in New York City, with heroic-sized gold block letters proclaiming his name, …
Page | 3 he strutted trite phrases, like “draining swamps,” and oxymoronically, “Making America Great Again.” Apposite to presidential reverence enshrined on Mount Rushmore, “The President” went serial with nocturnal “Twitters of Tweets” bleating out a whine of paranoia; self-invented “conspiracies” of and “against,” well, him. But, these incessant, insipid “Twitter Tweets” masked a lurking, fluid stealth assault – and the target of that assault is our Mother’s Earth. Trump has launched, with direction and chilling effectiveness, war on the environment we children of Mother Planet exist within. This war must be recognized as being right here and right now. We must rise and defeat it. I believe the leadership to conduct and win this war of such grave consequence emanates right out of this very room: The International Academy of Trial Lawyers. Perhaps but the one truth has sprung from the first 77 days of Trumpian rule: He has launched a chilling, rapid fire, specific, directed, targeted assault on Mother’s environment. His handpicked Field Generals to muster this war, are clearly his kindred ilk, shackled with environmentally vapid traits that exclude gravitas, judgment and global vision.
Page | 4 • From Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt. • From Texas, Rick Perry. They rule our EPA and Energy Departments. Perhaps the Supreme Commander’s attitude and philosophy toward Mother Nature was best “articulated,” if you’ll pardon my pun, by EPA Director Pruitt, just four weeks ago on TV, seen and heard “Round the Globe”: “I think measuring human CO2 activity on the climate has tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so NO, I would NOT agree that it’s a primary contributor to the Global Warming we see.” “President” Trump himself?
Billings Gazette, 2 April 2017
Page | 5 “We will rip apart stupid policies on “Climate Change,” he declared March 22nd to the New York Times – “Just last Tuesday the new President issued Executive Order 13783, trashing the “Clean Power Plan,” to limit coal-fired power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions.
13783 also directed Montana’s Ryan Zinke, the new Interior Secretary, to stop factoring climate change into federal projects environmental review! All augmenting the President’s chattering campaign mantra: “Global warming is a hoax.”
Apparently made up in, China? – Perhaps at the same place where the silly ties he peddles are made. Page | 6 This truculent trio of turmoil, with a “swiftness of sword” rarely seen has already eviscerated key funding, regulations and missions of the EPA;
the EPA ironically signed into law in 1970 by – President Richard Milhous Nixon! Nixon embraced the EPA as the nation’s needed vehicle to “Protect Human Health and the Environment.” Can This Frightening and Lightning-Quick Assault Be Parried; Can It Be Stopped?
YES!!! HOW? THE ARMY IS SITTING RIGHT HERE IN THIS ROOM: This Academy is composed of the elite of the elite courtroom lawyers on earth. We have the most potent arsenal of weaponry man has ever devised to defeat Trump’s assault on Mother Nature: The Rule of Law
After all, our Academy was founded 63 years ago on a bedrock principle – “Protect, Preserve and Promote” that Rule of Law. The Roots of the Industrial Revolution
The Revolution sent a tsunami’s flood of toxic shock of filthy pollution all over Europe in the early 19th Century. The stated purpose was “to advance progress toward an easier, better life for mankind,” which, of course, translated: “A very few people got very rich, while the masses toiled at low wages for them, somehow hoping for an improved lot in life for their families and themselves.” Page | 7 The Industrial Revolution hit the Americas in the late 19th Century and then into the 20th encompassed and circled the globe.
Wherever and whenever the revolution expanded, the toxic “progress” was palpable, visible and stunk. Factories belched smoke of arsenic and sulfides into our air, dumping filthy toxic wastes into our waterways. Looking Back: How Did the Real First Americans, the Indians, View Mother Nature?
In the 17th Century Chief “Big Thunder” of the Lenape Delaware Indians spoke words that sound as Clarions today:
“The Great Spirit is in all things, he is in the air we breathe… the Great Spirit is our Father … but the Earth; it is the Earth that is our Mother.” A hundred and fifty years later Chief Seattle articulated similar reverence for Mother Nature: Page | 8 “She does not belong to us – it is we who belong to the Earth.” Crazy Horse, as he valiantly led the Lakota Plains Indians in a losing effort to resist the White Man thundering through their lands and destroying their way of life, was inspired by a traditional Lakota Prayer:
Mitakuye Oyasin “We are all related … in oneness and harmony, all forms of life over the planet … be it people, animals, birds, trees, mountains, rivers or oceans … we are all related.” Montana – Our Past and Present; Inflicting Toxic Ruination on Mother Nature
I start with the Edwards’ family love affair with the vast and beautiful State of Montana that began in 1890, the year after statehood.
Page | 9 My Grandfather, A.C. Edwards, immigrated to the Judith Basin of Central Montana from Scotland, spending the rest of his 87 summers in Montana.
My other three grandparents were immigrants too; from Germany and Ireland. I am grateful that none of the Presidents who served during their immigrations, neither Cleveland, McKinley nor Teddy Roosevelt maintained “Banned Countries Lists.” A.C. was a respected and successful rancher, merchant and banker. He taught his son, and me, that to sustain our needed Montana agricultural economy, we had to sustain and nurture Mother Nature’s resources we use. Grandpa Cunningham was a sodbuster and believed the same thing. Unfortunately, he went broke in two separate countries, the United States Page | 10 and Canada. The depression and the droughts were twin knockout punches to him. My mother and her five siblings, wonderful people and wonderful citizens, were born in Central Montana, but raised in Alberta, and returned to the United States when Pearl Harbor devastated the USA. My maternal uncles, along with my dad, spent four years on the front lines during World War II. My mother was a committed educator. She taught in a Judith Basin country school house, all of grades 1-8, during the war years. The entire Cunningham family had a lifelong love for their other country, Canada, …
which I inherited. You might say I carry out – cross genetics. I embrace a bond with our Academy family members hailing from North of the 49th! The ranch my sons and I own today in the Judith Basin includes a spectacular 360 acres owned by A.C. a hundred years ago.
Page | 11 The views frame the landmark “Square Butte” where A.C. pointed me to illustrate the reverence we must have for Mother Nature. My four grandchildren here in the room today are the fifth consecutive generation in Montana of A.C. Edwards’ Montana legacy. The Echoes from Montana’s Past Ring Out Loudly Today
First: Rough ego check for Trump: He ain’t the first Environmental Destructor for Cash Money the United States or Montana has ever known. Even tougher for Trump, Montana’s revered Cowboy Poet, …
Wally McRae has articulated, in vivid word pictures, what the final environmental truth is for all mankind, including even those who believe they “Trump it All.” “REINCARNATION” “What does it mean? A cowpoke ast his friend. His pal replied, it happens When yer life has reached its end. * * * Reincarnation starts in when Yer planted ‘neath a mound. * * * In a while the grass’ll grow … And a lonely flower’ll be found … Say a hoss should wander by And graze upon this flower … Which once wuz you … * * * Page | 12 And when that hoss’s waste Done passes through … And I come upon that pile Lying on the ground … Which, again, once wuz you … * * * I ponders and I wonders at … This object that I found … And I thinks of Reincarnation, Of life and death, and such ... * * * And come away concludin’ … Slim, you ain’t changed, all that much.”
In the 1880’s, Montana was discovered as the “Treasure State,” and since then billions of dollars of our precious metals have been ripped and stripped and plundered from Montana with utter disregard and abuse of our air, water and soil. But the Rule of Law emerged as Mother Nature’s Montana savior.
Thomas Edison gave the world the miracle of turning on the lights. His mass movement of electricity used copper as the carrier. Copper instantly became more valuable than gold or silver. The largest, richest and purest deposit of copper in the entire world was found under the Rocky Mountain front where Butte, Montana was built in the late 1800’s. Overnight Butte became globally famous as “The Richest Hill on Earth.”
Page | 13 Sudden fame and riches of copper brought to Butte, with a vengeance of a January blizzard’s chill slamming Montana from the north, battalions of soldiers of fortune. They raced to Montana, fueled entirely on greed, having abandoned all scruples, principles of honesty, seeking instant prosperity, stripping cash from fellow pilgrims who had also raced to Butte and into their saloons and their whorehouses.
Like yapping coyotes circling a crippled up old cow elk, these soldiers attacked Montana. Yet, they were mere pikers compared to an Unholy Trinity:
Page | 14 three superior men arrived in Butte, augmenting their utter avarice with keen intelligence, cunning charm, and ruthless pursuit of riches. This Trinity soared above the rest, like the ubiquitous Rocky Mountain Golden Eagle, unleashing down below an abuse of their workers and Mother Nature, devoid of human dignity, conscience or compassion that their Mothers must have taught them. They surrendered it all for treasure unheard of ever before. The Copper Kings
Marcus Daly, …
Page | 15 William A. Clark …
and F. Augustus Heinze …
seized control of Butte, piling up wealth higher than their smelting slag piles. And in the late 1890’s and into the early 1900’s they each raked in Thirty Million Untaxed Dollars a month –$750,000,000 a month in today’s money! Their thousands and thousands of employees, however, labored twelve hour shifts, six days a week, for two or three bucks a day in …
Page | 16 medieval working conditions of danger to body and limb and constant exposure to toxic dust and smoke. The Copper Kings’ open disdain for their fellow human beings was equaled only by their utter eagerness to trash and destroy Mother Nature’s air, water, and soil for satisfaction of their own greed. To smelt marketable ingots of copper for the most “profit” the Kings discovered the cheapest way was to simply build – by denuding the nearby hills of timber…
– piles of wood in the Butte streets, dump the raw ore on top of the heaps, light the match and blanket the valley with a smothering thick toxic smoke of arsenic, sulfides and other noxious chemicals. Page | 17 With the ubiquitous hazards and dangers of work in the mines, coupled with the ever-present day and night toxic smoke invading the very air they had to live in, filling their lungs and that of their families, …
mortuaries became a major growth industry in Butte. Christian services for the expiring maimed, mangled and toxically diseased men, women and children led to burial fields…
Page | 18 that still cradle their cold remains for the balance of all eternity. Those burial acres were owned – yep, you guessed it – by the Three Copper Kings. How did the Copper Kings’ own health hold up living in this ominous environment of toxic hell? Robustly! They didn’t live in Butte.
William Clark’s Fifth Avenue NYC Mansion They built elaborate mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York and other grand cities of North America.
Page | 19 Sure, they returned to Montana for our glorious summers and falls! Just not to Butte; not midst their toxic operation of arsenic and sulfides. The Kings regaled themselves in the glories of Mother Nature, in their inspired …
Kootenai Lodge, Swan Lake, Montana architecturally splendid rustic lodges …
Kootenai Lodge, Swan Lake, Montana nestled on the shores …
Page | 20 Copper Kings Enjoyed Mahogany Cruisers on Swan Lake of the crystal-clear lakes and rivers tucked in the valleys of the spectacular, breathtakingly pristine Swan and Bitterroot Mountains. The most vicious and morally depraved of the Unholy Trinity, William Clark, spread his cruel, sinister and cynical disdain for his Butte workers, their wives and their children, forever on the minutes of the Montana 1889 Constitutional Convention:
“Smoke is not a problem. It is, in fact, a disinfectant destroying disease… Smoke provides unexpected benefits to ‘womenfolk who are very fond of this smoke City of Butte because there is just enough arsenic in the smoke to give them beautiful complexions, making ladies of Butte renowned wherever they go for their beautiful skin and complexions.’”
Page | 21 What a pity that so many of these lovely-skinned womenfolk …
only got to show off those beautiful complexions laying in their coffins at wakes, since their lungs never quite equaled the facial beauty of arsenic, that the Kings had “bequeathed the womenfolk” of Butte.
Page | 22 The Buying and Selling of “Justice” in Butte – Rulings For Sale!
The three amoral Copper Kings, never once confused with …
Three Wise Men on camels near Bethlehem on the Eve of the Christ Child’s birth brought only gifts of treachery and toxins and dishonesty to Butte. These shrewd barons quickly discovered that riches could be gathered not only from the copper veins under the earth, but great riches also could be mined for profit above the ground: in courtrooms! Both sitting Silver Bow County jurists, the “Honorable” William Clancy and
Page | 23 Edward Harney were eager to exchange “justice” for big sacks of $100 bills, discretely delivered. Over the years and now I frequently try cases in Butte. Each time I’m in that lovely old historic Courthouse I stop and gaze at the visages of those two crooked jurists – their pictures still hang, straight I might add, on the elegant marble walls! William Clancy
1889-1903 Dept 2
E.W. Harney 1901-1903 Dept 1 The most notorious non-Cardozian of the two was a particularly practiced vulgarian: Judge Clancy. Sparsely educated. Decidedly rude and crude. Punctuated his “judicial decorum” by expectorating huge streams of brown tobacky juice, more or less accurately into a filthy bench-side brass cuspidor. His unkempt appearance betrayed his propensity for frequent strong drink. Legend still has it that in the 1890’s a wag stopped Clancy on the courthouse steps one morning, venturing, “I’ll bet I can tell you what you had for breakfast, Judge.” Bet on. Page | 24 The wag, mistaking the egg yolk and grease on Clancy’s long white beard as persuasive evidence, declared, “Judge, you had ham and eggs!” Clancy: “You lose! – Yesterday’s.” But, it was the youngest King, F. Augustus Heinze, who hit the “motherlode” of purchased “Rule of Law.” While he openly praised Clancy as, “Once bought, he doesn’t resell,” it was the crooked Judge Harney who provided Heinze with his largest illicit thefts from his rival Copper Kings by minting a new judicial mining method: “The Apex Ownership Doctrine”
Judge Harney, for cash, issued a stunning judgment for F. Augustus: “The holder of the surface claim to ore, …
Page | 25 wherever that vein outcrops the surface of the Earth, owns that outcropping vein, no matter where it goes, nor how fractured it is under the Earth, nor how many other people’s legal claims it traverses under.” The Owner of the most lucrative vein that ever outcropped on the Butte Hill? Yup, again you’ve guessed it –F. Augustus Heinze. The Deer Lodge Valley Ranchers Found Crooked Justice More Devastating Than Drought or Disease Eventually the outcry from profound human suffering and death in the blanket of arsenic smoke forced the Kings to move their smelting operations yonder from Butte. Daly moved his operation west to Anaconda, a village at the head of a fertile valley.
His smokestack soared some two football fields high over the fresh, pure spring waters he built on.
Page | 26 The winds scattered his spewed arsenic and sulfide toxins throughout the Deer Lodge Valley.
Those toxins quickly destroyed grass, hay, trees and choked, cruelly, the life out of …
Page | 27 cattle, horses and sheep. The ranchers were financially and environmentally devastated. They sought “justice in court” with lawsuits sounding in nuisance and trespass. They had nationally renowned chemical and ag experts who accurately proffered arsenic and sulfides in the smelter’s smoke caused their damages. Outcome of their case? Miserably and abjectly squashed, like a cricket. The crooked Judges threw out the ranchers’ experts as “lacking the foundation to proffer ridiculous causation opinions.” Predictably, King Daly’s experts bought, from the crooked jurist, plenary absolution and forgiveness, allowing …
Anaconda Standard, Early 1900s Page | 28 Daly continued profit by spewing his toxins and destroying vegetation and livestock in the Deer Lodge Valley. The Montana Supreme Court, Finally, With the Rule of Law – Stopped this Crooked Justice
In response to such judicial chicanery in Butte, in 1903 the Montana Supreme Court fashioned a “Writ of Supervisory Control.” It is now ensconced in our 1972 Constitution. As I speak, I just recently obtained exactly such a Writ of Supervisory Control from the Montana Supreme Court. Under the Writ, the Supreme Court removes jurisdiction from an errant District Court proceeding under a decidedly unjust “mistake of law or fact,” neither of which can ever be justly remedied in the “due course” of trial and appeal. Amazing: A good and just rule; fashioned to stop crooks buying crooked judges – but in utter irony, benefiting other crooks! However, over the last 114 years of Montana jurisprudence, the Writ has keenly rescued Justice from Injustice for a passel of proletariat Montanans. The State of Montana Slowly Reacted and A New Constitution Was Born in 1972
Beginning in the 1950’s and 60’s, a gentle new and refreshing zephyr began to blow in badly needed reform for Montana. The crooked Copper Kings were six feet under, just like the minions they buried to achieve untold wealth. Their successor corporations, mighty and from distant cities on the east coast, started closing the depleted mines and smelters, deserting Butte and Anaconda, leaving behind enormous pits of toxic water washing downstream, ruining the riparian areas.
Page | 29 The Berkley Pit remains in Butte today, running water of glowing colors of toxicity, killing thousands of migrating snow geese, as recently as this winter when they land for migration rest. Ironically, in this new reign of Trump environmental ruin, Nixon’s EPA ordered hundreds of millions of dollars to remediate, albeit over decades, this cesspool of toxins. And it’s gradually working. The conglomerates vamoosed, like the Copper Kings, leaving not a thin dime to clean up their hundreds of millions, and even into the billions of dollars of mess, unreclaimed. The inspired leader to bring about change was a noted historian, gifted educator and rancher, …
Page | 30 K. Ross Toole. His pulpit was his classroom in Missoula where he lectured generations of young Montanans: “For too long have our precious resources in Montana been raped and pillaged and plundered by the ilk of the Copper Kings and fortune seekers from distant places,” he told the students. K. Ross decried this pitiful injustice of the profiteers raping and pillaging Montana, leaving enormous scars perhaps never to heal, and cleanup costs on the backs of Montanans tax dollars that could never be raised high enough to accomplish cleanup. K. Ross preached: “We need a new Constitution.” The 1889 one? Shamefully supportive of, really, the rape, pillage and “bolt the state with the cash” that I’ve been talking about here. K. Ross smiled as he lectured the students “Hell, the ’89 Constitution was essentially just plagiarized from California’s!” My Personal Prelude to the ‘72 Constitution In 1954 I was an intrepid 5-year old riding my horse as master of the endless plains under the Big Sky, when a stranger suddenly and silently invaded: Perthes Disease, a form of polio hit me. For four long years the head of my femur and the hip socket it fit into gradually lost blood supply and began to disintegrate before gradually returning, with but the one treatment – a 90 degree fixed brace strapped on my left leg every
morning, walking on crutches and never putting even the slightest bit of weight on the affected left leg for four years. When I was released from the brace and crutches, at 9, my left leg was the circumference of a little boy’s femur and had lost 2 inches in length to the right one. During those long four years, Grandpa A.C. was living with us as Grandma had passed away. A.C. was nearing the end of his 87 years, but sharp as a tack, still loving each day under the Montana skies, and he instilled in me a love for Mother Nature that has never left me and grows stronger each year that I live. Page | 31 For hours the old man and the crippled kid…
hauled bales of hay out to the heifer calves by running one of my crutches through the wires, then each of us grabbing an end and pulling it out to the middle of the corral.
He broke the bale and we each distributed tiny loaves all over the corral for the calves. Then, back to the barn, both of us sitting on a bale, A.C. would smoke his pipe and chew tobacco – simultaneously – teaching me “lessons of life” and the wonderments of Mother Nature and the respect that we must hold for her:
Page | 32 When to my devastation he was gone, my special Dad further instilled this love of the beauty of the nature the Earth displays in his teachings: “Clifford, always stop. Take time. Look up to the blue skies that run forever over Montana.
Drink in the bright colors of sunrises and sunsets, and wonder at the brilliance…
Page | 33 of the shining stars and the moon during the frigid winter nights. Glory in the changing seasons – all four of them –
each season grants Montana a different beauty – and never forget son, all these gifts come directly from Mother Nature.” I still stop and take time. Everyday. And I have never forgot.
Page | 34 The Preamble to the ‘72 Constitution
My first year at Montana Law School was ’71 - ‘72. The fall of ’71, the Constitutional Convention was convened in Helena. As we began studying law, legal history was in the making in Montana! A hundred delegates from all over our state, elected on partisan republican and democrat tickets, were brought together. Their Chairman, a Democrat, brilliantly seated them alphabetically.
Ninety days later, in March of ’72, they unanimously emerged with an inspired Constitution, which was ratified by vote of the people in June of that year. As I first read our new Preamble in ‘72, the words of Montana poetry Grandpa A.C. had spoken to me as a crippled boy in the barn leaped right back into the front of my mind:
Page | 35 Article II: Declaration of Rights; Section 3, Our Inalienable Rights, in Simple Words
These simple and powerful words have consumed a great deal of my 43 years in Montana courtrooms fighting for rulings; fighting for rulings, unbelievably, to finally reaffirm that the Montana Constitutional guaranty of “a clean and healthful environment” means, by God, just that! I must digress – I’ve often reflected over these many years:
Page | 36 Shouldn’t a clean and healthful environment, really, …
be a fundamental right of all mankind …
anywhere and everywhere on this planet?
Page | 37 If only … But I’m still a believer in … “someday.”
Page | 38 In Montana the shining apex jewel of Montana Supreme Court victories I’ve been involved with just came in the last few years: It holds, bluntly, “toxic polluters must remediate the land and the water and the air they fouled and restore it to its pristine condition before the devastation for profit began – no matter the cost in relation to so-called “appraisals” of market value of the ruined properties.” Rather unique jurisprudence for a mineral-rich state I’m very proud to report to you. My case rose from the ruins of the North Moccasin Mountains in my home county of Fergus. In the 1980’s and 90’s and into the early 2000’s a would-be out-of-state “mineral extraction king” ascended the top of the beautiful peaks of the North Moccasin Mountains. Then, with gigantic equipment and dynamite, …
he bombed, ripped, stripped and busted the mountain’s rocks, destroyed fresh pure spring water, just like the mountaintops of West Virginia savaged to reveal coal deposits. Distressingly, the then-political “leaders” of Montana, and environmental “regulators,” encouraged and enabled [jobs they cried!] the carnage to the North Moccasin Mountains of Mother Earth by Colorado’s “Canyon Resources.” Dr. DeVoto crushed the North Moccasin’s shattered rocks and dumped them into “leach pads” …
Page | 39 – the “leach pads” were filled, not with just small chunks of rocks, but also with arsenic and cyanide, washed with once pure spring water, to render tiny trinkets of gold …
for jewelry and such to be sold around the globe. Dr. DeVoto’s excellent adventure with arsenic, cyanide and spring water, to render those trinkets of gold, ruined Big Dog, Little Dog and Last Chance Creeks – and my clients’ ranches, downstream. It was distressingly reminiscent of the Deer Lodge Valley Ranchers’ destruction by King Daly’s towering toxic smoke stack nearly a century earlier. But the Rule of Law in Montana had changed on Dr. DeVoto! – Justice. No longer for sale! We had a new Constitution! And “[Montanans have] the right to a clean and healthful environment!” And a Supreme Court that enforces that Constitutional right. Page | 40 The Associated Press quoted me, in articles and editorial praising our court victory, while condemning these mining practices that were “throw backs” to the era of the Copper Kings:
Still does. As I Leave You My Dean’s Address, Some Departing Thoughts There is no doubt in my mind we can win the war Trump is raging against our Mother Nature’s planet; but we must have the committed leadership of our Academy – We, as the “best of the best” courtroom litigators in the world must rise: courthouse to courthouse, state to state, province to province, and truly, nation by nation to invoke what our Academy’s founding fathers charged us with over sixty years ago: PRESERVE, PROTECT AND PROMOTE THE RULE OF LAW Obviously, our global economy and standards of life require reasonable development and use of Mother’s enumerable natural resources, which can be done properly and respectfully. But not by allowing the steamroller of the Trumpian assault, which is gutting and eliminating our rules, and regulations, and ripping the heart out of our agencies of protection for Mother’s global environment here in the USA. The Rule of Law is the only sword that can and will slay this dragon. We in the Academy can take needed inspiration into this battle from the still ringing inscriptions of our last two Deans: That sword is fresh from its swift defeat of the blanket Trumpian ban of people of a targeted faith.
Page | 41 It needs to be drawn out of its scabbard again, to defend our Mother’s planet. Defeating Trumpian toxic insults to Mother Nature’s planet is exactly the soaring theme framed by Dean Noël Ferris; we have, for certain, arrived at a WATERSHED MOMENT Which moment harkens the stirring call to arms Dean Mark White rallied us with just a year ago – our Academy must rise up as our Mother Nature’s – STONE CATCHERS We must never forget, each and every one of us was accorded the high professional privilege of membership in this elite Academy, only because we have all dedicated long careers to waging “inspired battles against the tyrannies of injustice”: Today, Mother Nature cries out, begging us to act on her behalf – to “rescue justice from injustice for her; to STOP HURTING HER SO.” Really, isn’t it clear that a future of a clean and healthful planet; for us, our children and grandchildren depends on us? The time is here, my Brothers and Sisters of the Academy, to act; and that time is now. Thank you.
Dean Edwards was honored to work with his typist and transcriber of his dictation, Lori Heimbichner, and his graphic/photo coordinator and choreographer, Carisa Fisher. Without them, his Address would have not been presentable to the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.
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