Remarks by George W. Liebmann at memorial event for Judges Kaplan and Schneider
REMARKS BY GEORGE W LIEBMANN, PRESIDENT OF THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF THE BALTIMORE BAR, AT A MEMORIAL EVENT IN HONOR OF JUDGES JOSEPH H.H. KAPLAN AND JAMES F. SCHNEIDER, APRIL 3, 2024
The Bar Library, since I became its President for the second time in 2006 has had a series of memorial events in honor of distinguished Baltimore judges and lawyers. At that time, the Library’s collection of portraits was scattered throughout the courthouse, with smaller items in filing cabinets, and few items on display dating after the 1920s. Since then, we have consolidated, displayed, and added to our collection by way of becoming a museum of sorts of Baltimore legal history, including commemorations of twentieth-century lawyers, but not living ones. We have had memorial events in honor of William L. Marbury, Reuben Oppenheimer, H. Vernon Eney, Charles Dorsey and Harry Cole, among others. This series, interrupted by COVID, is resumed with the present event, which honors Joseph H.H. Kaplan, a Past President of the Library and James F. Schneider, a past director, succeeded by his wife, Equity Master Susan Marzetta, who cast the decisive vote to preserve the Library as an independent institution in 2006. Both their widows are here tonight.
Because of the efflux of time, I have been unsuccessful in obtaining colleagues of Judge Kaplan in two of the significant episodes in his career, the proceedings leading to the resignation of Vice President Agnew and the Old Court receivership. We will hear, however from two of his colleagues on the Circuit Court, Judges W. Michel Pierson and Robert Kershaw, as well as from my predecessor as Bar Library President, H. Mark Stichel. Judge Schneider will be memorialized by Mr. Stichel and by Federal District Judge Ellen Hollander. his Bankruptcy Court colleague, Judge Duncan Keir, and by one of his former law clerks, Laura Bouyea. I will have some concluding reflections
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We will be permanently displaying in the Thieblot Room downstairs, the memorable joint photograph of Judgs Kaplan and Schneider, testament to their almost perpetual youth. It will be accompanied in Judge Schneider’s case by a characteristically modest and humorous autobiographical essay and in Judge Kaplan’s by a tribute to him in American Judicature Magazine by Judge Paul Grimm, fittingly entitled “The Best Judge You Never Heard Of.”
I came to Baltimore law practice by the same route as Judge Kaplan: we were recommended by Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School to be law clerks to Chief Judge Frederick W. Brune of the Maryland Court of Appeals. The same route was followed by Robert Martineau, Secretary to the 1967 Maryland Constitutional Convention and Larry P. Scriggins of Piper and Marbury, who became head of the ABA Corporate law section. My association with Judge Schneider lasted throughout his entire tenure on the Bankruptcy bench, which almost perfectly coincided with my 35 years as a part-time federal bankruptcy trustee.
Early in my law practice, I attended annual sessions of the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference, where Professor Bernard Ward of the University of Texas Law School sparred with his more conservative colleague, the late Professor Charles Alan Wright, and celebrated the “thin black line” of Southern federal district court judges who enforced school integration in the South. Judges Kaplan and Schneider were members of a similar, longer, but less celebrated ‘thin black line’ of federal and state judges who were opponents of financial chicanery and unravelled complex cases which their less conscientious colleagues, some of them in Maryland, were prone to sweep under the rug in order to close cases and gain the favor of keepers of court statistics. Such negligent judges are the patron saints of sociopaths and create a real political danger. The Third Republic in France and the Weimar Republic in Germany were importantly undermined by unpunished financial scandals; the unwashed public does not react well to obvious defalcations that go unpunished. A graphic fictitious portrayal of one was provided by the British novelist Anthony Trollope, the villain in his The Way We Live Now bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Jeffrey Levitt.
The last case in which I appeared before Judge Kaplan was one in which I represented a minor player in the complex affairs of an hotel in the Dominican Republic. Judge Kaplan cut through nonsense; the principal actor, a lawyer, migrated to Florida where he was disbarred only last month. The last case in which I appeared before Judge Schneider involved my bankruptcy trusteeship of a lawyer whose specialty was resisting foreclosures, including those on her own properties. I gained possession of them with the aid of two United States Marshals, dispatched by Judge Schneider, who put their hands on their handguns to dissuade the debtor from again changing locks. She was reported to the Attorney Grievance Commission by Judge Schneider and was subsequently disbarred in a 95 page opinion by Chief Judge Getty of the Maryland Court of Appeals.
The United States withstood the financial crises of 1907 and 1929 with the aid of thorough investigations by the Pujo and Pecora committees, followed in the first instance by the Federal Reserve and Clayton Acts and in the second by the Glass-Steagall Act, the federal securities laws, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the jailing of the head of the New York Stock Exchange. Only Charles Keating paid a price for the 1980s federal savings and loan debacle; the subsequent sub-prime mortgage scandal saw no prosecutions, billions in federal subsidies to the five largest banks, and the largely irrelevant Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Thanks to Judge Kaplan’s management of the Old Court receivership, justice, both civil and criminal, was both done and seen to be done in Maryland. Due to a famous or infamous memorandum, I was a bit player in that affair; the publicity given to it was not due to me but to Judge Kaplan’s insistence on accountability.
We are living through an Age of Excess reminiscent of Edwardian England and Wilhelmine Germany. If a free and honest economic system survives it, we will owe its survival to countless relatively obscure judges who share the intellectual curiosity and moral compass of Judges Kaplan and Schneider.
I tried to arrange for a friend of mine, a trumpeter, to blow Taps at this point, but he is away in Korea and this inadequate praise must serve instead.
Posted in: Economic Regulation, Efficiency in Government, Judiciary and Legal Issues, Regulation