Wampum

Thomas B. Griffith Update

You may recall Thomas B. Griffith as the Bush nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal who practiced law without a license.

According to a local NBC affiliate, he had a “contentious confirmation hearing” earlier this week.

Griffith serves as an in-house counsel for Brigham Young University in Utah, but he's never passed the bar in that state, which drew some controversy.

Griffith told the Senate committee that Utah law does not require him to be a member of the state bar, as long as he is closely associated with members of the Utah bar and as long as he doesn't make any court appearances.

That, of course, does not explain why Griffith practiced law in the District of Columbia without a license for three years. It also does not explain why he practiced law in Utah for a year when he was not licensed in any jurisdiction whatsoever. Does Utah permit that as long as the non-lawyer “closely associated with members of the Utah bar?”

Whether or not Griffith skirted the requirements of Utah law for the last four years he was there, he violated D.C. rules and Utah law for the previous four years.

One would not expect a person nominated to the bench of the second most important court in the land to really be so afraid that he would flunk the Utah bar exam.

Another Update:

The New York Times notices that Griffith was practicing without a license.

In addition to prcticing without a license in two jurisdictions, Griffith gave false information to the Utah bar. As the Washington Post reported last November:

Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, appeared to provide inaccurate information to Utah bar officials about his legal work and lapses in obtaining law licenses over the past year, according to documents released yesterday at his nomination hearing....

Even as Griffith defended his record yesterday, the new documents added to that controversy.

They show Griffith reported to Utah state bar officials last year that his law license had never been suspended. It had been suspended from 1998 to 2001. He also told the state bar that he relied on his D.C. license to practice law in Utah.

As I have previously noted, the Utah statute in effect when Griffith began practicing law there specifically prohibited the practice of law by anyone who had a suspended law license.

The Salt Lake City Tribune weighs in:

A clerical oversight should not disqualify someone from being a judge. But this looks like more than that. It looks like carelessness, or worse, arrogance.

A license is the essence of being a professional. Plumbers and teachers know that, and so should lawyers.

Playing by the rules is what the law is about. Any lawyer who does not exemplify that concept in his own behavior should not be on the bench, especially one as important as the appellate court in D.C.

Exactly so.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at March 11, 2005 11:17 AM | TrackBack