The importance of being heard

There is a lovely latin phrase ‘acta non verba’ it means ‘deeds, not words’ and there is a wonderful story that Thurgood Marshall loved to tell that so beautifully illustrates it.

Picture 1960s New York. A time of great change and advancement in the world and one with World War 2 and all its destruction and loss still a recent memory. But within this wider landscape there was a smaller story still and one which holds a great lesson. It’s a lesson in the importance of being heard. The importance of the ‘great’ listening to the small, those who themselves and their society may feel don’t really matter. BTW the story is apparently true.

The woman was what we’d call a vexatious litigant. In this particular instance she was convinced that the government was seeking to insert electrodes into her brain so as to steal her ideas for TV shows. Not exactly something you’d expect to draw the attention of a government. And certainly not something you’d expect to hold the attention of the US Court of Appeals.

But in this instance, it did. As you’d expect given her history and the nature of this particular allegation, the woman had filed her case and lost. As per usual, she sought to appeal. In her history she’d never had an appeal heard as she had typically lacked the evidence to support her cases. But a very strange thing happened in this instance. The Chief Justice, J Edward Lumbard, listed her appeal for a hearing. Now that was a surprise to all.

The appointed day for the appeal came. The Chief Justice was joined by two fellow judges to hear the appeal. The woman was representing herself and used her 15 minutes allotted to state her case. She didn’t offer up any evidence, the argument was incoherent, but the judges all listened to her, impassive and respectful. And then of course it came to the US attorney to argue against her appeal. No doubt you can understand, given that the appeal concerned the threat of the US government inserting electrodes into someones’ brain so as to steal ideas for TV shows with no evidence to back that up, the US Attorney sent along a very junior assistant attorney. This poor assistant attorney gets up to argue to the Court of Appeal merely by stating that they rested on their brief. The brief argued that the case was so frivolous, so lacking in merit, that the US Attorney had no argument to put.

Now this is where we begin to understand why a Chief Justice would list such a case for an appeal. Why would he divert his and his fellow justices time to such a seemingly purposeless case? Why would he divert the resources of the court and the US Attorney? When have you ever heard of a Chief Justice standing in his own court! Well apparently Chief Justice J Edward Lumard stood and ‘thundered’ at this poor junior assistant attorney “Are you trying to tell me, young man, that after this woman, in the exercise of her fundamental constitutional right to petition her government for the redress of grievances, has come into this courtroom to argue her case, her own government will not even do her the dignity of a response? Get up here and argue, sir!” The story goes that the young junior assistant attorney got up, fumbled around for a few minutes trying to argue that there was no evidence and, thankfully, the Chief Justice shortly told him he could sit.

When the Court of Appeal handed down the decision a few weeks later it dismissed the appeal, providing no commentary.

But the lesson? The woman never filed another case. She’d been heard. Her rights, the fundamental respect that all of us should know to be our birthright, had been upheld. And a leader had led.