Tag: Telford Taylor

Covering Their Tracks

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I don’t often listen to podcasts.

“Covering Their Tracks” will be an exception.

It tells the story of Leo Bretholz, who escaped from a train taking him to a Nazi death camp.

I learned about the podcast today from Raphael Prober, one of the lawyer/lobbyists I worked with on this issue.

My response to him follows:

Rafi,

It continues to be one of the greatest honors of my legislative career that you and Aaron [Greenfield] asked me to be the sponsor of the bill imposing responsibility on the French Railroad for its role in transporting to their death Jews and members of other minorities despised by the Nazis.

But not Leo Bretholz.  A real hero.

Several months after our bill passed, I visited Nuremberg, site of the Nazi war crimes trial.  At the end of a day of touring, my guide said, “You have wanted to come here for quite some time.”

“Only since I worked on this legislation this past winter,” I replied.

But I soon realized that I had wanted to come to Nuremberg ever since my Constitutional Law class taught by Telford Taylor, as you know, a chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

I will listen to the podcast later today.  https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/covering-their-tracks

Sandy

A Duty To Act

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Telford Taylor was my Constitutional Law professor.

He taught Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of Supreme Court review of the actions of the executive and legislative branches.

He also taught me what a lawyer could do.

He was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes trial.

He also defended people targeted in the McCarthy era.

Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It reminded me of Telford Taylor and of the legislation I successfully introduced to provide compensation for people who were taken to concentration camps on the trains of the French National Railroad.

One of the Nuremburg principles is the duty not to follow a superior’s unlawful orders

I helped write such a provision into Maryland’s police reform law two years ago.  An officer should Intervene to prevent an excessive use of force.

I was reminded of that by the failure of any one to act in the horrific video of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols.

 

“Persevere.”

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I’m listening to the tape of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, as I write.

No doubt you were also moved by her story from her freshman year at Harvard.

“Persevere” was the single word uttered to her by a Black woman whose path she crossed one night on campus.

Like Judge Jackson, I graduated from a public high school, but my family was upper middle class.

Baltimore City College and my mother had prepared me well for Amherst College.

My moment of perseverance came in law school.

I flunked a Civil Procedure exam.  The professor asked me how I did in my other classes.

“In Telford Taylor’s Constitutional Law class,” I responded, “I got an A.”

I met with Baltimore City Public Schools officials today.

We discussed the Jackson hearing.

“It’s your job to educate those students who go on to college for their moment when they need to persevere,” I said.

They understood.

Testifying and whispering

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When I took the Constitutional Litigation seminar at Columbia Law School, the professor was Telford Taylor.

Taylor was a chief prosecutor during the Nuremberg war crimes trial after World War II.

Nathan Lewin, a noted Supreme Court litigator, taught the seminar after Prof. Taylor retired.

Prof. Lewin and I testified together today, along with Delegate Dalya Attar, on legislation that would address the fate of Jewish women who are chained to their marriages because their husbands will not grant them a get – a religious divorce.

Del. Attar’s legislation, which I have co-sponsored, would require a husband to state, under penalty of perjury, that he has taken all steps within his control to remove all barriers to his wife’s remarriage.

A committee member asked Lewin about the consequences for the woman if she does not receive a get.

“Her children are considered bastards,” I whispered. Lewin repeated what I had said.

I never whispered in Telford Taylor’s ear.

 

What Telford Taylor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught me

| by delsandy | Sandy's 2015 Legislative Diary | No Comments

The Speaker of the New York Assembly was indicted yesterday on corruption charges related to payments to his private law practice for which where he performed little or no legal work.

It prompted this anecdote on the front page of the New York Times:

Al Smith, the storied governor of New York in the 1920s who laid the groundwork for the New Deal, has been credited with making a famously cynical remark as he walked through a law school library. He spotted a student, bent over books and reading.

“There,” Smith supposedly said, “is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.”

That’s not what Telford Taylor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught me at law school.

What I learned was that the rule of law is supposed to apply equally to everyone.

Moreover, when individuals fail to do the right thing on their own initiative, laws – civil rights, consumer protection, anti-trust, among many others, require them to do the right thing.

 

December 2 – In the Courtrrom

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Telford Taylor was the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

He never talked about it in his Constitutional Law class.

For most of the semester, he discussed Marbury v. Madison, where the Supreme Court first exercised judicial review to declare unconstitutional a law passed by Congress.

So I told my guide that I wanted to begin my tour of Nuremberg in the courtroom where the trials were held.

The room has been open to the public for many years, but there was no exhibit about the trials until last year.

This trial is the “significant tribute power pays to reason,” declared Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the first Chief Prosecutor, in his opening statement at the trial of Herman Goering and other high ranking Nazis and military officials.

In his remarks at the outset of the trial for German judges and lawyers, Taylor asserted, “The murderer’s dagger was hidden under legal robes.”

Our afternoon begins at the Nazi rally grounds, where Hitler would speak to 150,000 SS and SA members and 50,000 spectators. All that remains is trhe World War I memorial, which predates the Nazi regime.

Only one structure built for Hitler still stands, the partially completed Reich Congress. Modeled on the Roman Colosseum, it was to hold 50,000. There was no exhibit here about the Nazis until the World Cup was played in Nuremberg in 2006.

A stadium designed for 400,000 was never built. (They knew they’d have to hand out binoculars to spectators, notes my guide.)

At the end of the day, my guide says, “I guess you’ve been thinking about coming to Nuremberg for quite some time.”

” Freud would say, ‘Yes, since that constitutional Law class,'” I responded, “but I didn’t think about seeing the courtroom here until this past winter while working on the French railroad bill.”

Getting an "A"

| by delsandy | Sandy's 2011 Legislative Diary | 2 Comments on Getting an "A"
            I flunked Civil Procedure.
 
            My law school professor called me into his office to discuss how I could overcome my failing grade.  He all but gave me a subway token so that I could get to Penn Station and take the train home from New York. 
 
            But before he reached into his pocket, he asked a question, “How did you do in your other classes?” 
 
            I replied, “In Professor Telford Taylor’s Constitutional Law class, I got an A.” 
            Brigadier General Telford Taylor was Chief Counsel for 12 cases during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. 
 
            I thought of him often as I worked on the bill this session to require the French national railroad company to make available online the records of its deportation of Jews and others to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. 
 
            Today, Governor O’Malley signed that legislation into law. 
 
            At a reception afterwards, I thanked all of those who helped get the bill passed: the survivors and their descendants, our lobbyists, the Maryland State Archivist, and my legislative colleagues.
 
            I told the story about my grades in Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law. 
 
            “This past session,” I concluded, “we all got an A.”
 
            Normally, the last bill signing means that the next legislative session is eight months away but not this year.  

            We must meet this fall to adopt new boundaries for Maryland’s 
eight Congressional districts, consistent with the one person, one vote 
principle. 
 
             We may also consider legislation addressing the state’s ongoing 
revenue needs. In the next two weeks, I’ll be meeting with advocates 
to discuss how that can be done in a way that is fair and environmentally sound. 
 
             
 

Avoiding double secret probation

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              I had visions of John Belushi.

             We were trying to find a professor who had taught a certain freshman delegate, thinking that relationship would be very effective for lobbying. 

             We knew where the legislator had gone to school but not who had taught him. 

             I thought of Belushi rummaging through the trash to find last year’s exam. 

            “However you can legally find out who the delegate’s professor was, do it,” I advised the group around the table. 

            I know who taught me constitutional law.  It was Telford Taylor, Chief Counsel for 12 cases during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. 

            One of the legal principles established by that tribunal: coercion – acting pursuant to an order of the government or of a superior, does not relieve you of responsibility for your actions.

            That’s one of the arguments we’ll be making regarding the legal responsibility of the French railroad company for transporting Jews and others to the concentration camps under direction of the Germans. 

            “In my testimony, I want to quote Telford Taylor on this point,” I told one of the lawyers we’re working with. 

February 21

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