Eugene Volokh
Professor of Law, UCLA
Morgan dated Eugene Volokh from spring, 1996 until August 1998. During that time they were very close, often traveling together. We got to know Eugene's parents, having them over to make Easter Eggs and for other occasions. Eugene was with us for one Thanksgiving.
Subsequent events shocked Melinda because her ideas on friendship are, evidently, very different than the Volokhs, who come from a very different culture. Melinda believes your friends are always your friends.
When Morgan and Eugene began dating Morgan gave Eugene a
Dear Eugene,
You were born with an IQ that makes you almost as smart as the smartest person living, by some measures. You and your family used your brains to make yourselves rich. You could afford to plate your toilet with gold fittings. Do you expect me to be impressed?
You sell software. It is great software. You write opinions on law. They are competent opinions, exhaustively researched and monumentally informed. I like your opinions on the 2nd Amendment. They are useful. It would be amazing if it were otherwise. You have, along with the high IQ, an eidetic memory that enables you to recall everything you have read. I am sure this saves you money on late fees at the library.
But you are still a sneaky little wienie with no character whose courage would have to be calculated in negatives if there was a means for measuring such transcendently human values.
The first subject is courage and your pretensions to possessing that value through your parents. Courage is something you can’t buy with money. The cost of possessing it is charged in a very different kind of human exchange. We will get to the second subject, the abuse of power, a little later.
Courage comes in all forms. Sometimes courage is facing down impossible odds and dying with dignity. Soldiers have one kind of courage. I admire courage in soldiers. George S. Patton, Jr. is one of my heroes.
But courage takes many forms. Sometimes it is enduring a lifetime of struggle and fear eking out pennies to ensure your child survives and prospers. Sometimes courage is intellectual. Standing up for what is true when all of your associates sneer at your theories.
It has taken all kinds of courage, named and unnamed to make us human and to create the human world. We live in a human world of glorious possibility because of the courage and integrity of people both great and publicly lauded and unknown.
I have a list of heroes. These are people with courage of the enduring and substantial kind. It takes courage to live right.
I have many heroes. One of those is Exene.
Exene cleaned our house for a while after my mother had surgery. She always came back to visit. She would have been in her 70s when I first met her. But she “could not abide folks who warn’t working” so she had not retired. She cleaned houses all of her life. She was born on a plot of land in Texas, the last of many children to a sharecropper and his wife. He was born in the Slave Times, although he could not remember them. Exene grew up poor. When there was not enough to eat she folded the red dirt into a leaf and ate it to give her gaunt belly the illusion of fullness.
Exene married very early and barely attended school. She and her husband moved to Los Angeles when Watts was a nice place to live, filled with families and hope. She and her husband both worked hard and were regular participants in their local church. She sang loud enough to fill a church all by herself. By the time I knew Exene she and her husband owned six apartment buildings. They bought a new Cadillac every year. She came to work in a fur coat and with a firm attitude. I always tried to stay home if I knew she was coming. I learned more from Exene than from any other teacher I ever had. Exene had courage and indomitable will. She affirmed the value of hard work, thrift, and facing down pretense, dishonesty and wrongdoing where ever and when ever she encountered it in her life.
Courage like Exene’s is one of the values that make our world possible. Without all of the forms of human courage we would not live in an unfolding world of human possibility today. America is itself an expression of Exene’s kind of courage.
Your presumption of courage is offensive. But it is your abuse of power that is the most offensive. It was the evidence of your willingness to abuse power that made me move from thinking of you an amusing nerd to thinking of you as an ugly little faker who is incapable of ethical intercourse with others.
You abuse power and you lack courage.
You possess power because you are respected for your wealth and for the legal opinions you churn out. You use power to achieve your goals. You are a bully who relies on prestige to posture and preen. You are not capable of having power and not abusing it for your own gain – and you don’t even notice when you do it because your cultural background tells you that is how the world works.
The abuse of power is, on the contrary, one of our gravest problems. As a culture of individuals we need better ways to restrict the abuse of power. We have a lot of potential tools. We have the system within specific organizations that license, in your case the California Bar. We have litigation. We have the older but underutilized social tools. Those would be public exposure and making you into a public byword for various kinds of nasty behaviors you indulge privately. I have not yet picked a particular set of tools. I have not actually decided whether or not I will use these or innovate variations on all of them. Life is full of possibilities. I am feeling creative. I hope the process will be instructive for the world at large. At least that is my intention. This is a kind of cultural engineering in the very present tense.
I am calling you to book. Exene would say you need a whipping. The abuse of power is an absolute evil to be abominated by all decent people. To misuse the authority given to you by an institution such as the Bar Association of California was a violation of trust that makes you morally unfit to serve the public either as an attorney entered into the Bar or as an instructor at a respected institution of learning, such as the University of California at Los Angeles.
Privacy does not
exist for public figures. That is a good thing. All of us should be
prepared to live in the light. Exene would agree.
You bullied me, using your license from the State to practice law. You wrote me a letter telling me I was guilty of slander for yelling at my daughter’s answering machine. I did yell. She deserved it and she knows that. You should have known it, too.
There are things no decent human being does.
When my son shot himself in the head your response offered to his distraught father was, “he should have used a higher caliber gun.” What kind of scumbag says something like that? The answer is the high visibility advocate for the Second Amendment, Dr. Eugene Volokh says that. I think the NRA should know that, too. I would like them to explain why they use you as an expert.
You then bludgeon the victim’s mother when she discovers her own daughter is accepting $5,000 a month to slander her to her political contacts and old family friends. You enabled Morgan’s abusive behavior using your law background. You later admitted your assertions were groundless and made to, “help your girlfriend.” Did it ever occur to you that issuing a written opinion as an attorney when you knew what you were saying was false was morally questionable? If it did, I am certain it did not weigh with you. Your moral compass points down.
Morgan has a borderline personality, a serious emotional disability from which she is struggling to recover. What is your excuse? You acted to keep me from defending myself from her vicious behavior. In so doing you became a participant in that abuse.
Eventually, the relationship failed. Two years later Morgan got back in touch with you. She had realized how inappropriate her behavior had been and wanted to heal the wounds her behavior had caused with everyone in her life. She had done that with me, her mother, and she reached out to you, her former lover. You accepted her apologies and told her you forgave her for lying about having a heart problem, an assertion that might have caused you mild embarrassment, but no substantial problems.
Morgan confided in you that she was being battered. You, an officer of the court, expressed squeamish concern. But instead of making her aware of her rights and seeing that she sought help you saw a way to profit from her situation. You traded what could have been her life for a chance to write for the Online Opinion Journal, an opportunity provided by John Fund.
You pressured her to give you confidential records under coloration of friendship and in confidence and then gave John Fund material you had gathered to discredit her. This Fund passed on to the District Attorney in NY.
You could, so you did. Trust is another value to which you are entirely blind.
People like you should not be practicing law. They should not be teaching law. They should not pretend to a humanity they do not possess.
The law is not a game with rules that enable your ugly predatory ways. Rules of law are not to be edged and hedged to further your own self-advancement.
You and your family are all about self-advancement and you don’t much care who you use and abuse on the way up.
But most Americans do care.
Your chosen profession, the law is, or should be, the means by which we as a people obtain a true and right justice. Courts, considered opinions, the weighing of testimony and evidence; these are the means for shedding light that enables the process to make relationships whole by condemning what is wrong and affirming what is right. Our system does not work as we want it to. Yet. It, and the institutions of governance first formulated by the Founders are a work in process. America is changing its mind about what we are doing because it is not working. Scumbags who write the law use it for their own ends. Scumbags like you help them and sidle up to the trough of power. .
The vision of a just world has moved people across the Earth. It is moving us today to stretch ourselves, formulating answers that work. The vision for a benevolent and just world rejects pretense and the abuse of power. Therefore you, like the Dodo are not the future but the past tense of humankind.
Now go away and don’t let the door hit your nether regions on the way out.
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Copyrighted August 2002, Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
