Word: legalizes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Flym acts as a bridge between his radical friends and the legal establishment. Indeed, he is often the only communications link between the two. He tries hard to emphasize, however, that Flym the lawyer is dominant over Flym the political idealist: "I'm craftsman," he says. "What I'm interested in, in these cases, is more the legal issues than the political questions. But the political questions often raise fundamental legal issues." And a lawyer's pragmatism colors the idealist's view of a controversy: "While there's a lot of heat generated, it's a matter of starting...
These beliefs do not constitute a legal defense, of course. "The way our system of justice works," Flym explains, "you can't address yourself to questions not relevant to the specific charge." Nonetheless, Flym says that the charge of criminal trespass could be profitably addressed at two levels. First, whether those inside were ever actually forbidden to be there by someone in authority; second and more important, whether anybody indeed had the authority to tell them to leave. "An argument with some validity," Flym says, "would have been that the trustees do not have any authority to take such action...
...criminal law needs to be reformed. It really needs to be reformed more than any other body of law today. The criminal process is not intended to look a the big picture. It distorts reality by focusing on a small corner. It therefore works badly in these political-legal cases because it doesn't permit taking into account the motivations of the actors in the drama." But once again, Flym the political idealist clashes with Flym the hard-nosed lawyer. "I guess it would be difficult to design a legal process that would not--as a rule--tend to limit...
Flym hopes to develop a practice "partially centered around the needs of the disadvantaged." He is still defending several student on various "political-legal" charges, including several Harvard students whose cases he says he can't discuss...
...nature of the times," he says, "that these legal issues are political issues. And because of the nature of these times, I'm a political man more and more." MICHAEL E. KINSLEY