I did my part.
A jury has awarded a woman over $5 mill based on the defendants’ failure to adequately disclose the evidence linking Hormone Replacement Therapy with increased breast cancer risk. Those interested can compare the issues and evidence in this case with the case I’ve made for medical malpractice lawsuits against abortion providers who fail to disclose the evidence linking induced abortion with increased breast cancer risk.
Ken at Popehat recently explained that his current hiatus from blogging has to do not only with blessed busyness on behalf of clients but also with the real life reactions of a menagerie of nut jobs that some of his blog posts and pro bono work have provoked. Similarly, I have been distracted by practical matters but also have good reasons to believe that some of my posts here have persuaded some who probably think of themselves as fine upstanding pillars of the community that I am a nut job. This latter observation does not dissuade me from speaking the truth as I see it but has convinced me that in the short term I need to stop taking cases in a particular county and especially certain types of cases in that county, and in the longer term I need to retire altogether from this whole law business at a younger age than is customary. (Hence the “practical matters” I’ve been preoccupied with.)
My efforts at the inception of my legal career to stop the lies being told to women by the State and by the abortion industry about the evidence linking abortion with increased breast cancer risk really fucked me up. They led me in the first instance to turn down several job opportunities most lawyers would give their left nut for, opportunities which would have taught me indispensable skills law school ignores, and after the debacle these efforts resulted in led to alcohol abuse, which led to flirtation with drug abuse, a life detour that was particularly toxic when combined with a series of jobs I regarded as beneath me. Granted, a better man would have recovered and picked himself up immediately after this soul-crushing blow.
Still, I regret nothing, while recognizing that I am a deeply flawed human being who aspires to get his act together before he dies. Those who would judge me should first read my crazy Comment published by the Wisconsin Law Review and distributed to every member of Congress by a Congressman / M.D., and my briefs filed in the North Dakota Supreme Court for the Red River Women’s Clinic false advertising case. Such a judge might still conclude, as apparently did all the judges on the North Dakota Supreme Court, that I’m nuts. But by our judgments we are judged, and all these judges will answer to God for their judgments, as will I.
The Book of Ecclesiastes turned me towards Jesus when I first read it at the age of eighteen while serving aboard the dry docked USS Kitty Hawk, and in recent days I’ve returned to it. “How dieth the wise man? as the fool.” We are all rapidly heading back to the same place. But to the extent it matters, at the end of the day, whether at the end of my life or at the forthcoming end of my legal “career,” I will proudly set that career, despite all my mistakes, and there have been several grievous ones, against that of all the “fine upstanding pillars of the community” any day.
I will blog again, in another month or so if not sooner.
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