Is Harrell the new Cathell?
September 3, 2008
Some of Court of Appeals Judge Glenn Harrell’s recent opinions have been pretty colorful, and I got to wondering why.
In today’s decision suspending two out-of-state lawyers from the practice of law in Maryland, Harrell refers to the situation at the lawyers’ Maryland office as going “to Hades in a handbasket” and described the time afterward as “post-Apocalyptic.”
In last week’s Tom Clancy case, Harrell included a footnote explaining the concept of bad faith by quoting extensively from an episode of Seinfeld.
In July, writing about an attorney grievance case in which the lawyer’s Montgomery County-dwelling client had claimed to have had exclusive information about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, Harrell noted dryly that Hussein was ultimately found in Iraq, “a location of some distance from Montgomery County.”
Harrell says he’s always liked to get creative with his opinions when it’s appropriate.
“When I was an undergraduate in college, I liked to write and just be creative and sometimes legal writing can get pretty difficult and dense,” he told me today. He likes to relate legal points to “something people think they can get their arms around rather than string-citing cases or block-quoting cases,” he said.
To me, Harrell’s recent opinions are reminiscent of another top court judge who doesn’t like to write staid opinions. That’s Judge Dale Cathell, who officially retired last year but sat regularly until his replacement, Judge Sally Adkins, was sworn in in June.
Cathell’s handiwork includes a dissent in the infamous drugs-in-buttocks case, in which he opined that “If a person wants to have an expectation of privacy in that area of his or her body, he or she should keep their pants up when in public.”
“Ultra-traditionalists… think that everything has to be the way it always was, and it seems to me there really is no downside in making an opinion more readable,” Cathell told me. “More people will read it.”
I wondered if maybe Cathell’s departure from the court was related to the apparent uptick in colorfulness in Harrell’s opinions. Maybe Harrell is stepping up to fill Cathell’s funniness shoes? I ran that theory by Harrell, who laughed.
“No,” he said. “I miss him, but he’s not my muse.”
He said he has always delighted in making his opinions more interesting and suggested that someone with too much free time could go back and check that out by reading his old decisions.
Cathell, though, said Harrell’s wit does have something to do with him.
“You have to understand that I taught him everything he knows,” he said.
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
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