Minnesota Lawyer Blog

I spent yesterday (and I mean the whole day -- 5:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) working as a Ramsey County election judge, and it was an eye-opening experience.

The precinct where I worked wasn’t even one of the busiest in town, attracting about 1,100 voters during the 13 hours the polls were open. But there was a long line to start the day, and voters came in steady streams throughout.

The evidence that Minnesota saw near-record voter turnout was confirmed by the hundreds of first-time and newly-registered voters, and the willingness of people to go the extra mile to make sure others got a chance to cast a ballot. On a regular basis, registered voters from the neighborhood -- including folks from the precinct’s halfway houses and homeless shelters -- returned to the polls with friends, roommates and neighbors who wanted to vote, too. (Under Minnesota law, a registered voter can “vouch” for the residency of anyone who lives in the same precinct, even if that person doesn’t have a permanent address.)

Even though no TVs or radios were allowed inside the polling place, the stream of new and young voters gave me a strong hunch about how the presidential race would turn out. That hunch was confirmed when, after closing, the precinct’s chief election judge ran the final tally and found that almost 900 voters (more than 80 percent) of voters in this mostly white, overwhelmingly working-class precinct voted for Barack Obama.

The enthusiasm of the voters even carried over into the judicial elections. Many voters who were advised to examine both sides of the ballot were glad to discover they would have a say in who their judges would be, and a few even brought notes into the voting booth based on research they had done on the judicial candidates.

Pity poor "Joe the Lawyer."

While both presidential candidates professed support for the Ohio man mulling buying a plumbing business, they both disowned trial lawyers to some degree.

In the case of John McCain, the subject came up in reference to a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that a woman who discovered on the verge of retirement retired that her employer had paid her less than male counterparts was time-barred from suing for pay discrimination. McCain thinks the case was rightly decided; Barack Obama has supported congressional attempts to amend federal discrimination law to allow claims such as the woman's. In referring to the bill during the debate, McCain dismissively called it a "trial lawyer's dream."

Meanwhile, Obama, citing examples of times at which he had broken with fellow Democrats in his voting, pointed to a bill he had backed limiting some lawsuits when he first arrived in Congress. The measure "wasn't very popular with trial lawyers," he said.

But I bet Joe the Plumber loved it.

I was watching some of last night's Democratic presidential debate when I heard Hillary Clinton take John Edwards to task for receiving lots of donations from (gasp!) trial lawyers. It was then that it occurred to me that all three of the Democratic candidates debating were lawyers. Clinton practiced at the Rose firm in Arkansas. Edwards was a North Carolina trial attorney who obtained a number of big verdicts and settlements for his clients, most notably $25M for a three-year-old who was disemboweled by the suction of a pool drain. Barack Obama was a lawyer in Chicago, where he represented community organizers and handled voting-rights cases. He became a constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago and a state senator.

Two out of the three went to Ivy League law schools -- Clinton (Yale) and Obama (Harvard). Edwards went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In any event, it was a spirited debate. Since it's a political topic, I won't weigh in too deeply. It's just as well, anyway. I kept flicking between the debate and "The Lobotomist" -- the PBS "American Experience" airing that night on the controversial father of the lobotomy operation. I don't know if public television purposely ran something about lobotomies opposite a presidential debate -- but the irony was not lost on me. I was tempted to give them a piece of my mind ...