Word: courtrooms
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...Johnson health-care fortune, left an estate of perhaps $500 million. By the terms of his last will, nearly all of it went to his much younger third wife Barbara, a Polish immigrant who was once the family chambermaid. And thereby hangs a legal squabble currently featuring the unkindest courtroom disclosures this side of the Von Bülow case. Johnson's six children by previous marriages were virtually all cut from the will. They tar their stepmother as a scheming shrew who came to be the housekeeper and stayed to clean house with a vengeance. She blasts them as decadent...
...unfolding in a New York City courtroom, the case has already generated paper on a scale more typical of an antitrust battle. Not even writers of Dynasty could have dished such a saucy stew. In the courtroom, the children pointedly ignore Barbara Johnson, 49, who each day sits just a few feet from them, looking serene and expensively groomed--a far cry from the Polish art-history graduate who arrived in the U.S. in 1968 with just $100 and a few words of English. She went to work as a maid for Johnson and his second wife, and three years...
Presiding over this to-hell-with-you hullabaloo is Judge Marie Lambert, a seasoned New York City politician who runs her surrogate's courtroom with a singular feistiness. "Will someone turn the lights on back there?" she hollered one morning last week after taking the bench. "This place looks like a funeral parlor." A joke about funeral parlors during the biggest inheritance case in state history? It may be that for Lambert, a self-proclaimed defender of widows and orphans, this case arraying one against the other is a test of her emotional fortitude. She had frequent run-ins last...
...forestall years of legal delays. Meanwhile, Judge Lambert has asked for the jury's patience as they examine this complex test of wills, in which "we are all working hard." Shoveling dirt can be hard work indeed, and it is expected to take more than two months in her courtroom alone to get to the bottom of it all. --By Richard Lacayo. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York
...debate that centers on the proper role of the Comptroller General of the U.S. would seem poor bait to draw a crowd. Yet the courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court was packed last week with visitors who came to watch a tangled legal battle over just that issue, and with good reason. Rarely has such a narrow question held such wide implications for the conduct of Government. The real issue at hand was the budget-balancing scheme of the storied Gramm-Rudman Act. Whether the Comptroller is a servant of Congress or an impartial accountant is likely...