Fifty Years as a Lawyer

           To my astonishment, 2018 marks my 50th year as a licensed attorney.  In October the North Carolina State Bar invited me and each of my fellow 50-year lawyers to submit a brief essay reflecting on our careers.  Here's mine.    

         I didn’t go to law school out of a life-long desire to be a lawyer; in fact, my ambition was to be a print or television journalist.  I went because a lot of my friends were going, because I won a scholarship, and because my Alamance County draft board had me square in its sights.  I reasoned — wrongly, as it turned out — that during my three years in law school the Vietnam War might somehow be brought to a merciful end.

          Passing the bar in 1968 allowed me to accept a commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps.  I served four years on active duty, during which I met my wife and learned way more about actually being a trial lawyer than I ever learned in law school, including the fact that I liked it and wasn’t bad at it.

          I came to Raleigh early in 1973 and joined the firm of Sanford, Cannon, Adams and McCullough.  Around 1977, through a great stroke of luck, I had the honor of succeeding the late William C. Lassiter as counsel to the North Carolina Press Association, which allowed me to combine my passion for journalism with my skill and training as a lawyer.  I’ve represented journalists ever since and, with the help of thoughtful and conscientious judges who cared about the First Amendment, even helped make some pretty good case law along the way.

          My law practice has been made fun and intellectually stimulating not only by the cases I’ve handled and the clients I have represented, but also by the great people I’ve met on my journey.  Over the years I’ve been blessed to work alongside many dedicated and talented colleagues such as Bob Spearman and Al Adams, both of whom sadly are now departed, and my current partners at Stevens, Martin, Vaughn & Tadych.  I’ve had the good fortune to appear before a wide array of great trial court judges like James H. Pou Bailey, Robert Hobgood, Earl Britt, Don Stephens and my undergraduate and law school classmate, Howdy Manning.  I’ve particularly loved appellate practice and my many opportunities to argue in the North Carolina Court of Appeals and  Supreme Court, and in the Fourth Circuit.  And I’ve had the great honor to be a member of the Wake County Bar, where civility, integrity and professionalism are endemic.

          My law practice has been enriched by the opportunity to teach law and journalism classes at UNC and, for 18 years, leading a “Free Press & Public Policy” seminar at the Duke University school named for my  hero and  mentor, Terry Sanford.  Students keep you honest and on your toes.

          Most importantly, my entire life during the past 50 years has been elevated and enlivened by the unwavering love and support of my wife Marilyn, whose own career as an advocate for abused and neglected children made North Carolina a better place.  No lawyer ever had a better companion for the road.

Bob Spearman's Obituary

        Bob Spearman, an honored trial lawyer who led the legal fight to breathe life into the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantee of a sound basic education for all public school students, died on December 3, 2017. The causes were dementia and Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Patricia Hinds Spearman; daughters Madolyn Marschall (Mark Salditch) of Baltimore and Dorothy Marschall of Corte Madera, California; grandchildren Zoe Salditch, Leah Salditch, Ellis Hurtado and Weston Hurtado; and sister Mary Lindsay Spearman of Chapel Hill.

        Robert Worthington Spearman was born in Durham on January 23, 1943, the son of Walter S. and Mary E. Dale Spearman. During his formative years in Chapel Hill, where his father was a beloved professor in the UNC School of Journalism, he attended the public schools, delivered the Chapel Hill Weekly for pocket money, became an Eagle Scout, and developed his lifelong love for birds and Carolina basketball. For high school his father, an ardent Democrat, sent him to the Groton School in Massachusetts because President Franklin Roosevelt had gone there. He served as co-captain of the Groton basketball team, graduated first in his class, and was awarded a Morehead Scholarship.
In the fall of 1961, Bob embarked on his near-legendary tenure as a student at UNC, where he compiled a perfect 4.0 academic average and became the first (and only) person in history to be elected president of both the student body and Phi Beta Kappa. He was a member of Chi Psi fraternity, the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Order of the Grail, and the Society of Janus. As Student Body President he and other student leaders worked alongside Chancellor William B. Aycock, UNC President William Friday and Governor Terry Sanford to oppose North Carolina’s infamous “Speaker Ban” law, which was the subject of his senior honors thesis. After graduating with highest honors in 1965 Bob attended Oxford University (Merton College) on a Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford he earned First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and played basketball, where one of his teammates was Princeton All-America and future U.S. Senator Bill Bradley. “The implicit understanding,” he said, “was that if Bradley was open and I took a shot instead of passing to him, I would come out of the game.”

        After graduating from the Yale Law School in 1970, Bob served as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. At the time neither knew that it would be Justice Black’s last term on the Court, or that Bob would help him draft his last and most famous opinion, in the “Pentagon Papers” case. Returning to North Carolina in 1971, he entered private law practice in Raleigh. He practiced with Sanford, Cannon, Adams & McCullough and its successor firms for his entire career, retiring on January 1, 2010 from Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein. Although he handled a wide array of antitrust cases and other complex commercial and business litigation in both state and federal court, Bob was best known for his creative and energetic representation of public school students from poor and rural counties in the landmark case known as Leandro v. State of North Carolina. The Leandro case, which was filed in 1994 and is still pending, resulted in two major State Supreme Court opinions. The first ruled that North Carolina schoolchildren have a judicially enforceable constitutional right to a sound and basic education. The second affirmed a series of later superior court decisions after trials, and held the State had wrongfully denied this right to many State schoolchildren. Bob’s Parker Poe colleagues, for whom he was a mentor and role model, are carrying on
his fight.

        Bob’s honors as an attorney included his election to the American College of Trial Lawyers and his service as a director of the American Judicature Society. He served as a faculty member for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy, taught trial practice at the UNC School of Law, and was a frequent lecturer at judge’s conferences and lawyer seminars.
He also served as chair of the Wake County Democratic Party from 1979 to 1981, and as chair of the State Board of Elections from 1981 until 1985. He was a founder and chair of the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research.

        Because Bob loved birds, nothing made him more conflicted and flummoxed than a gang of red-bellied woodpeckers who relentlessly attacked the cedar siding on his and Pat’s Raleigh home. After several attempted remedies proved to be useless — including placing a fake barred owl and a scarecrow on the roof — Bob essentially declared a unilateral truce and wrote a hilarious essay about the “woodpecker war” that he distributed to friends and family. 

        He also loved good food, good wine, good books, his family, his alma mater, and reunions with his Groton, Carolina, Oxford and Yale friends and classmates.
A celebration of Bob’s life will be held at a later date. His family suggests that memorial contributions be made to The Carolina Covenant Scholarships General Fund. Office of Scholarships and Student Aid, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, P.O. Box 1080, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-1080.

Remembering Bob Spearman

I was honored to be asked to speak at Bob Spearman's Memorial Service on April 29, 2018.  Here's the text of my remarks, to which I adhered pretty closely except for adding a story about how Bob and I each won a bottle of wine on a long-ago flight to San Francisco by being the first to answer questions in a trivia contest put on by the flight attendants.  Bob was the first passenger to identify the four states whose capital cities begin with the same first letter as the state, and I was the first to come up with the names of the seven dwarfs.

Separately I have posted Bob's obituary.

          I met Bob Spearman in the fall of 1961, on the first day of freshman orientation at Carolina.  We were introduced by Pete Wales, Bob’s Groton classmate and fellow Morehead Scholar, who was in my orientation group.  Both became my lifelong friends and now, sadly and unexpectedly, I have outlived them both.  I guess Billy Joel got it right: only the good die young, or at least before their time.

          Over the course of 57 years Bob and I took classes together, worked together and played together.  As undergraduates at Chapel Hill we also plotted and schemed together in an effort to defeat or repeal North Carolina’s infamous “speaker ban” law, an affront to free speech that was as noxious, notorious and unwise then as HB2 was recently.  Happily, our co-conspirators included then Governor Terry Sanford, UNC President Bill Friday, prominent UNC alumni, and other leaders of the state and university.  Confronting that serious and challenging First Amendment challenge not only helped cement my friendship with Bob; it also was an important impetus, together with the Alamance County draft board, in my decision to go to law school and to become a First Amendment lawyer. 

          Early on I realized two things about Bob: that he was incredibly smart, but he never tried to impress you with how smart he was.  To the contrary, he was one of the least pretentious people I have ever known.  We often talk about people as being comfortable in their own skin, but I don’t think that really applied to Bob because the stuff inside his skin included a spine made up of damaged and deteriorating vertebrae that made him very uncomfortable for much of his life.  Instead, I prefer to think of him as a person who, unlike most of us, was always comfortable in his own mind.

            Bob loved good food and good wine, but he was not a gourmet; he was a gourmand.  (Given the sophistication of this crowd, I’m sure I need not explain the difference.)  He would eat pretty much anything that was put in front of him — and often something that was put in front of the person seated next to him.   The one exception was Brussels sprouts, which he loathed.  When I asked him why, he said it was because at both Groton and Oxford they were always served the same way: cold and gray.  Collards, he believed, were an infinitely preferable green vegetable.

          Bob liked to read about eating almost as much as he liked to eat.  One of his favorite authors was Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer whose first book was entitled “Alice, Let’s Eat.”  Bob shared with Trillin the view that the best way to show proper appreciation to one’s dinner party hosts was graciously to accept their offer of a third helping.  Another favorite was R. W. “Johnny” Apple, a New York Times reporter famous for his ability to knock out a riveting front page lede under the pressure of a deadline, and for the staggering size of his expense account statements.  Bob gave me books by Calvin Trillin (including the aptly titled “Third Helpings”) and sent me clippings of Johnny Apple stories.  I can still remember his delight over the September 29, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, which contained an article about Johnny Apple that not only ran to almost 10,000 words and was written by Calvin Trillin.  Bob sent me a copy of the article, which he devoured as enthusiastically as if it were a bowl of crawfish étouffée.

          Given the gusto with which Bob ate, it’s startling that he never acquired a physique like Johnny Apple’s, who was known around the Times both for his profundity and his rotundity.   To the contrary, Bob never seemed to gain any weight.  In his 50s and 60s he could still fit into clothes he had had as a college sophomore; in fact, he sometimes wore clothes he had owned as a college sophomore.

          There are many other things about Bob that I could talk about this afternoon, such as the astonishing breadth and depth of his knowledge; his love of both books and birds; the full-throated enthusiasm with which he watched Tar Heel basketball games on television; his mechanical ineptitude, which left him completely flummoxed when he was confronted by any tool more complicated than a wheelbarrow; or how he would go into an almost impenetrable zone of concentration and focus when he was preparing for a court hearing.  Instead, if you will forgive me for injecting a note of sadness into what is, after all, an occasion for joyous remembrances, I’d like to talk for a few moments about Bob at the end of his life.

          I didn’t see Bob’s steady decline into dementia coming; indeed, in retrospect I see that I didn’t even recognize it after it had begun.  Looking back, I see that if I had been more perceptive I would have realized that something was up when Bob abruptly retired from the practice of law that he loved so much; or when after he and Pat moved to Chapel Hill he didn’t do what so many retirees here do, which is to fill their schedules with the endless array of lectures, seminars, concerts, outings and spectator sports offered up by this great university.   Only when his dementia began to manifest itself in episodes of aphasia and forgetfulness did I come to realize that a more understanding friend would have said long before, “Bob, are you okay?  Is there something I can do for you?”

          Unfortunately, I didn’t ask.  For one thing, Bob’s and my relationship, like those of many men who are friends and colleagues, didn’t extend to asking each other such personal questions.  For another, I always thought of Bob as so self-sufficient and so much in control that it was impossible to think of him as needing help.

          Nearer the end of his life, when he lived first in a group home at the Governor’s Club and then in a memory care facility, I visited with him.  I would show up at the group home with barbecue sandwiches or a bag of BLTs from Merritt’s Store and a cold beer or two, and we would sit on the deck and watch the birds in the adjacent trees and I would read bird poems to him.  Later I got some great advice from my son George who, as an Episcopal priest, has many occasions to visit with folks suffering from memory loss.  He told me that often one of the last faculties that such patients lose is their ability to recall and enjoy music, which certainly was true for Bob.  Even when he could no longer speak or feed himself, he reacted visibly and happily when I cranked up my iPod and my portable speaker and played beach music and 1960s rock and roll hits from the Chi Psi juke box.  The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” was a particular favorite.

          So, I leave you with some unsolicited but heartfelt advice:  if you have a friend or family member whose mind is failing, don’t fall back on the excuse that “I just want to remember them the way they were.”  Suck it up.  Pay them a visit.  Talk to them, even when you have no idea whether they are taking in anything you are saying.  Sing to them or play music for them.  It will be hard, and you almost surely will leave with tears in your eyes.  But one of the last of the many things I learned from Bob is that it also will be therapeutic for the person you visit — and for you.