When I came to teach at former Attorney General Griffin Bell’s law school in 1990, I knew something about his alma mater, but little about the man beyond a sketchy bio.
I did know that, when President Jimmy Carter first appointed him, many people feared that Bell wouldn’t stand firm for civil rights, but that he’d proven them wrong — somewhat predictable in that, as a judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, he had earlier helped Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver Jr. to renounce his opposition to integration and lead Georgia’s desegregation with a minimum of fuss. But I didn’t know a lot more.
To learn about this legend whose spirit was said to define my workplace, as well as to honor a suggestion from Georgia’s thoughtful chief justice, I interviewed Bell on camera a couple of years later in his King & Spalding offices in Atlanta, far removed from the deep Southern burg of Macon, Ga., and our unsung little law school at Mercer University.
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn a lot about the man then. Probably because of my inbred Yankee insensitivity to the subtleties of Southern conversation (an art that Bell, on the other hand, knew to the bone), I remember far less about the interview than I should, just that his drawl was intact, his manners Southern courtly and his comments startlingly direct.
Lessons for law students
Later, Bell came to the law school to address the students, and he gave a performance fitting of a fine lawyer long accustomed to the public glare. In other words, he said little of interest.
Bored with obligatory reverence for a legend, I finally quizzed Bell before that crowd on his recent experience conducting an internal corporate investigation at the lucrative invitation of the Dow Corning Co.
Dow Corning had produced silicone gel breast implants that were thought to have caused serious autoimmune diseases.
Bell’s inquiry had concluded, in essence, that the company had done some falsifying of data but that it had no real evidence that the implants caused any serious disease, so that it should in fairness be exonerated of the most serious charges against it.
Soon after the study was released, Dow Corning blazed into bankruptcy over the claims that Bell had been hired to study.
In my audacity that day as a cocky young law professor, I asked Bell publicly how he could reconcile his largely exonerating report with the fact that Dow Corning had shortly thereafter been forced to go bust.
Bell’s response was the essence of practical clarity. “I wasn’t hired to predict business viability,” he said. “I was hired to evaluate the merits of the claims. I believe I did the job well.”
As it turns out, Bell was dead on about the matter.
As I learned more about Bell’s career over the years since then, I realize in reflection that Bell that day offered me, and my students, too, some powerful lessons on being a lawyer, principles that guided his conduct through many thickets.
The lawyer’s job may be to analyze and advocate, but it is not to promise results beyond the lawyer’s control or to justify popular or sought-after conclusions that happen to be wrong.
The public’s perception of an event may be wildly inaccurate.
Whether a fee is high or low, the scrutiny remains the same (that is, intense), and the lawyer’s ultimate fealty is not to the fee or the client or even public sentiment, but to the processes of law that enable a genuine search for truth and justice.
Bell’s lessons will outlive the man who died on Jan. 5.
Though I can’t pretend to be a lawyer of Bell’s caliber, I can at least help to relay what I comprehend of his counsel to a new generation of lawyers.
Qualities now sorely missed
Still, his peculiarly arch qualities of independent thinking will be sorely missed in a world where the practice and administration of law is too often buffeted by political whimsy and craven manipulation.
If only some recent attorneys general had done as Bell did when he held the office: posting the names of every politician who called on him.
And if only some financial industry overseers had recently done as he did when asked at a press conference about whether officers at his client E.F. Hutton had committed crimes. He said, bluntly and stunningly, yes.
Long live lawyering like the lawyering of Griffin Bell.
David G. Oedel is a professor of law at Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law.
