Editorial

Front Page - Friday, September 17, 2010

I Swear ...

Possession is how much of the law?

Vic Fleming

As a kid, I heard it said that “possession is nine tenths of the law.” By the time I got to law school, I’d forgotten that I did not have a clue as to what that meant. Now I think I know, thanks to a blog post by one Mike Frisch.
On the “Legal Profession Blog,” Mike Frisch is identified as an ethics professor at Georgetown Law Center. He and others report and comment on unusual matters that involve lawyers.
In a post dated August 31, 2010, Frisch gives an account of one of the most unusual ethics cases that I have ever heard of.
Entitled “Attorney Possessed By Client’s Deceased Wife,” this item reports that in Arizona, a hearing officer recently recommended a six-month-and-one-day suspension of a lawyer who
(a) had once owned a “new age boutique” at which she did tarot card readings,
(b) met a male client “while taking ballroom dancing lessons from him”;
(c) was retained by the aforesaid male to handle a divorce case;
(d) saw the divorce-related representation come to a conclusion when the wife committed suicide;
(e) engaged in an intimate relationship with the male client “involving his late wife’s estate” (presumably, the quoted language indicates that the relationship did not begin until after the wife’s suicide, but there are no details offered on this point);
(f) “claimed to be able to convey the thoughts of the deceased wife to the client”;
(g) purportedly channeled communications from the dead wife’s “for three years, until she and the client stopped dancing together and parted ways.”
Obviously, the former client filed a grievance.
The blogger’s post quotes from the hearing officer’s report:
“[I]t is not up to this Hearing Officer to decide whether in fact Respondent was or was not truly possessed by and speaking for [the client’s] deceased wife. Respondent believed it, [the client] believed it, as did at least two other independent people who witnessed it. Given all of this, it is hard to believe that Respondent schemed and connived to make all this up. Once it happened, it is certainly possible that Respondent got carried away with all the attention she received as a result of it and either embellished or exaggerated. On the other hand, Respondent could have genuinely believed in and felt controlled by circumstances.
“A review of [the evidence] shows that having the spirit of [the client’s] deceased wife within her was not an entirely pleasant experience for Respondent and the degree of her voluntary participation in it simply cannot be determined. The experts ... cannot even agree on what was going on.”
So, the next time you hear someone say, “Possession is nine tenths of the law,” tell them that the other tenth is an ethics grievance.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.

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