Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [139]
“Are you kidding me?” Bullock asked.
Londregan wasn’t kidding. And he let Bullock know he didn’t care for his style.
Convinced he was on the right side of the argument and that lawyers shouldn’t be immune to criticism, Bullock didn’t care what Londregan thought of him.
Even after he hung up, Londregan couldn’t stop fuming. He had heard and seen enough of Bullock. The legal dispute had crossed over into a personal one. More than ever he wanted to beat this guy.
Bullock felt the same way about Londregan.
39
THE SUPREMES
It took Wes Horton thirty years to have a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The opportunity would probably never come again, and he prepared accordingly. His secretary cleared his calendar for two months prior to the oral argument. His law partners took over all his other cases. And he locked himself away to research, write, and strategize.
A talented tactician with no emotional investment in the consequences of the case, Horton set aside his personal feelings about eminent domain, the city, the homeowners, and the media. He focused on one thing and one thing only: getting five of the nine votes on the Supreme Court. That’s all he needed to win, nothing more and nothing less.
Going in, Horton figured he had four votes from the Court’s liberal justices: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He expected they would side with the city’s argument that by creating jobs and generating tax revenue from the development, the city would lift the poor. Horton didn’t worry about these four justices. Nor did he bother with the Court’s three conservative justices, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas—he figured they would vote Bullock’s way. That left Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. In Horton’s mind, they were the swing votes. If he could get just one of them to accept his argument, he had the case won. He geared his entire oral argument to appeal to O’Connor and Kennedy.
Studying both justices, Horton determined they were less dogmatic and more likely to ask fact-based questions concerning the New London case. He figured he should do something unusual—prepare a blow-up diagram of the neighborhood and use it to show the justices exactly what the city planned to do in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood.
Along with his visual aid, Horton polished his argument, knowing that legal precedent favored the city. When the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its authoritative decision on eminent domain in 1954, it had affirmed the government’s right to take private property for public purposes. The only time it had revisited the issue since then was in 1984, when the Court actually expanded the public-use doctrine to allow Hawaii to condemn and redistribute massive amounts of real estate that had been held by wealthy families prior to Hawaii’s joining the Union. O’Connor had written the majority opinion.
Satisfied, Horton tested his case on a group of experienced judges and lawyers who played the role of Supreme Court justices in a mock hearing known as a moot court. The first moot court took place at the University of Connecticut’s law school. At one point, as Horton argued that a city’s desire to create economic development should justify taking private land under the public-use doctrine, a judge interrupted and asked a hypothetical question: under Horton’s theory was it permissible for a city to take property from a small motel and award it to a big hotel capable of generating much more in tax revenue for the city?
It was just the kind of hypothetical question a Supreme Court justice might ask. Horton instinctively answered no, insisting that was probably taking the eminent domain doctrine too far.
In a subsequent moot court before judges and attorneys at Georgetown’s law school, Horton got asked the same question. Again Horton answered no. Only this time the judges pressed Horton with follow-up questions. What about if private