Dear Judge Kopf,
On July 9, you posted “Some Things Are More Important Than Others” on your blog, Hercules and the Umpire. You explained why you will write no further entries in your online experiment exploring “the role of judges and particularly the role of federal trial judges.”
By writing Hercules and the Umpire, you helped to make the sometimes impenetrable mind of a federal judge more transparent, more open. To the chagrin of some, you published it online, for all the world to see. So, using the same medium to tell you what I am about to tell you seems right and proper.
Let’s start with embarrassment.
In your farewell, you describe a retreat for employees of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska. When asked how many employees at the retreat felt that your blog “had become an embarrassment” to the court, “the great majority raised their hands.”
Etymologists report that the first known usage of ’embarrass’ in English appeared in 1664 in the published diary of Samuel Pepys.
I wonder if your colleagues in the District of Nebraska would have been embarrassed by Pepys too. I’m glad that no one took a vote.
Pepys was a bureaucrat in the British Navy and later a Member of Parliament. He kept a meticulous daily diary from 1660 until 1669, writing over a million words over nearly a decade. His entries range from high-minded political and philosophical musings about then-current events to self-effacing accounts of his foibles to minutiae regarding his personal grooming and dietary habits.
Sound familiar?
Pepys recorded so many vivid — even when trivial or tawdry — details of life in Britain at the time that historians regard his diary as a primary source of knowledge about his century.
Turns out, you can learn a lot about the world from reading the daily reflections of someone who takes the time to write this way. In fact, there may be no better way to understand a person, an age, a culture, or an institution. A series of snapshots over time is often more accurate than a carefully posed portrait.
But, as you know, sometimes accuracy doesn’t look the way people want it to look.
Just ask Flannery O’Connor.
The short stories for which O’Connor is known are very funny. They also feature grotesque characters and lots of people doing awful things to one another. Some critics complained that she was mean-spirited, that she cast the world in a grim light.
The critics missed an important piece. Flannery O’Connor’s humor often comes from skewering the characters that are a lot like her. She shows us self-satisfied intellectuals who are so busy mocking the stupidity common folk that they make fools of themselves. People who are so busy exposing the swindling of greasy-haired itinerant preachers that they forget that even thieves sometimes tell the truth.
If O’Connor was mean, she was meanest to what she sees as her own shortcomings.
She sees too that even what is good about the world doesn’t always look particularly pretty.
In O’Connor’s essay “An Introduction to a Memoir of Mary Ann,” she writes, “Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil [ . . . ] but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing-down that will soften their real look.”
Like O’Connor, you didn’t settle for cliches or smoothings-down on Hercules and the Umpire. Like O’Connor, you are every bit as likely to be self-critical as you are critical of others. But, like with O’Connor, not everyone is your fan.
You earned a lot of critics when, for example, you wrote “On Being a Dirty Old Man and How Young Women Lawyers Dress.” You admitted, “In candor, I have been a dirty old man ever since I was a very young man. Except, that is, when it comes to my daughters (and other young women that I care deeply about).”
I was happy to take up arms with you over here at Above the Law. I liked that you had the guts to articulate a truth that is rarely articulated. You aren’t the only person to see the world as you described. You are just one of the few who is willing to describe it aloud.
But.
There are people who prefer not just their courthouses, but also their judges, to be made of marble. They seem to muddle up dignity and fairness with rigidity and stodginess. They would rather have judges stay tight-lipped about their opinions than have the benefit of hearing what individual judges think. They think that the only way judges remain impartial is by being bland.
Those people probably don’t like your blog.
Between you and me, Judge, those people scare me. I do not want them making law or deciding cases or teaching. I do not want them deciding my fate or picking my leaders. I would rather not sit next to them on a long flight or at a bar. They seem to be misunderstanding something important about being human.
Our humanity keeps the law a human endeavour, in the worst sense possible. But acknowledging our humanity keeps the law a human endeavour, in the best sense possible. Holding both of these at once is hard. But there it is, no less true for being hard.
Life is hard.
A few weeks ago, I wrote to thank you for some very kind words you wrote about me on Hercules and the Umpire. I apologized for doing so a few days late. I explained that my beloved greyhound was only recently home from the vet with a dismal prognosis. I was frantically researching doggie wheelchairs and the mechanics of lifting and shifting and caring for a seventy-pound paraplegic hound by myself. Meanwhile, he needed his bladder and bowels expressed by hand. I was awash in dog piss and and canine Ensure and tears.
You replied to my belated thank-you with words of deep empathy. Your offered more when, a few days later, my sweet dog died in my arms.
What I found most powerful about the words you shared with me in my grief was a lot of what I have found most powerful about Hercules and the Umpire.
You didn’t spout platitudes or pretend that the world was an okay place when it most clearly was anything but okay. You didn’t try to tell me death wasn’t death, or that shit wasn’t shit. But you also weren’t detached or formal. You were kind, open, vulnerable. While still being Richard Kopf, United States District Judge, you were Richard Kopf, human being.
You offered me a part of yourself when you didn’t have to.
By writing Hercules and the Umpire, you gave your audience of lawyers, law students, and other judges both the U.S. District Judge and the human being. You gave us a part of yourself when you didn’t have to.
Thank you.
All the best,
TST
