Not just anybody can be a columnist for the Hartford Business Journal. Oh, sure, my mom traded me to the paper for a six-pack of beer and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes when I was 11, but I could have grown up to be some low-level drone like the editor or something.
I was elevated to columnist because I met the standards as laid out in the Personnel Handbook: breathing, curious, able to write with a quill pen without dripping the ink, and opinionated about everything except a fair wage for columnists.
Troublemakers could argue that those standards are murky — and unnecessary. Look, for example, at a guy such as Andy Rooney, the “60 Minutes” television commentator who is 109 years old and long ago stopped breathing. He still writes newspaper columns.
Well, yes, but he doesn’t write for the Hartford Business Journal. Rules is rules. We know what works.
And so it is with our attorney general in Connecticut. State law says you must have 10 years of “active practice” as a real live lawyer to be eligible to be the attorney general.
Those of you engaged in the active practice of reading or watching the news know that Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz wants to be attorney general, but there is some confusion about whether she has, in fact, been in the active practice of law for 10 years — and what exactly the state law means by “active practice.”
Asked for his opinion, the current attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, shrugged his actively practiced shoulders and opined that the state law isn’t clear — and that some really bored judge might have to decide the matter, on a case-by-case basis.
This ‘issue” is more hilarious than profound. At the least, it provides some mild entertainment in the barren landscape that is state politics in Connecticut: Elect all the Democrats you can find — and then elect a Republican governor to lock the door to the treasury.
Atty. Susan has made the case that even in her Secretary of the State job, she kind of, sort of, occasionally practiced law, because yelling at corporations about their filings, in triplicate, of various forms; and mucking around in the corporate governance, is sort of, kind of, law stuff — in an excruciating administrative law kind of way.
In truth, about the only person in recent memory who practiced law in the Secretary of the State’s Office was Henry Cohn, now a judge. Cohn was secretary of the state for a tiny while, he was deputy secretary of state, and as near as anyone knows, he was also locked in a small room out back for decades, where he was the unofficial, adjunct, special assistant Secretary of the State for Law Stuff.
It would be a fascinating question to explore; this business of what one has to do to be engaged in the “active practice” of law — and what kind of “practice” would make you perfect for the attorney general job.
What if you graduated from law school, immediately went to work for a stuffy firm that did commercial real estate — and never set foot in a courtroom, except to sue your plumber in small claims court? Would that be “active” enough?
What if your specialty was schmoozing with young prosecutors in traffic court in order to get your clients’ drunk driving arrests reduced, prior to the hearing. Is that active enough to be “active?”
If Bysiewicz survives scrutiny of her non-lawyerly secretary of the state lawyering, she’ll probably win in November. She’s a Democrat. Actively engaged in the practice of politics for at least 10 years.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
