Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Invited by the Harvard Law Review in 1986 to address its 100th-anniversary banquet, he lectured about Harvard and Yale law grads on the Supreme Court and in legal practice who hindered rather than helped the fight for racial justice. He warned, "Because today's law students will be tomorrow's political leaders, judges and Supreme Court Justices, it is crucial that they develop a social conscience...
...Ronald Reagan could remember very little about his efforts to arm the contras, but when confronted with facts indicating that he'd been told about it, he insisted his "heart and [his] best intentions" proved otherwise. After Ollie North bragged about his own lying and got off on a legal technicality, the G.O.P. wanted him to be the Senator from Virginia...
...months to come brought a fight between the President's legal advisers, arguing to add another brick to the stonewall, and his political aides, urging confession, the fact that the lawyers kept winning said a lot about who was really in charge...
Part of the answer lies in the makeup and background of Starr's handpicked team. Though Starr prides himself on having created a "microcosm" of the Justice Department, "but perhaps more elaborately fine tuned," true legal diversity eluded him. He had tough prosecutors and brilliant litigators recruited from around the country, but his Lewinsky team had few lawyers with strong criminal-defense backgrounds to provide balance, help plot the next move or weigh in on the treatment of witnesses. "Government lawyers have never had to sit in a room with somebody who is completely innocent," says a former Starr assistant...
...RUFF, now White House counsel, who briefly worked for the Teamsters under Carey. In 1993 Ruff allegedly paid Jack Palladino, a San Francisco private detective, more than $150,000 out of Teamsters funds for unspecified services. A House subcommittee that had tried to investigate the payment was stymied by legal objections from Ruff and Carey. There have been allegations that the money was for work Palladino did for Clinton in his 1992 campaign to keep stories of sexual misconduct from becoming public, or that the money was used to suppress Teamster dissidents. Ruff has denied the allegations as "false...