I actually wrote this for my own blog last year, but since Griffith has been put up for nomination again, and it's tue subject of a dkos front-page post, I thought I'd repost it here.
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By way of Discourse.net, we find the tragic tale of Thomas B. Griffith, a George W. Bush nominee to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals
Thomas
B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in
Washington, has been practicing law in Utah without a state law license
for the past four years, according to Utah state officials.
Griffith, the general counsel for Brigham Young University
since August 2000, had previously failed to renew his law license in
Washington for three years while he was a lawyer based in the District.
It was a mistake he attributed to an oversight by his law firm's staff.
But that lapse in his D.C. license, reported earlier this month by The
Washington Post, subsequently prevented Griffith from receiving a law
license in Utah when he moved there.
Under Utah law, Griffith's only option for obtaining the state
license was to take and pass the state bar exam, an arduous test that
lawyers try to take only once. He applied to sit for the exam, but
never took it, Utah bar officials confirm.
[...]
"The Utah State Bar advised him that to the extent that his
duties as general counsel involved giving legal advice, he ought to
closely associate himself with a Utah bar member," Justice spokesman
John Nowacki said. "It has been Mr. Griffith's practice to closely
associate himself with a Utah bar member when giving legal advice."
Nowacki declined to comment on whether the state bar advised
Griffith to take the bar exam. According to sources familiar with a
letter the state bar wrote to Griffith last year, bar officials
recommended that Griffith take the exam, and work closely with a Utah
bar member while his license application was pending.
Griffith discovered in November 2001, a year after he joined
Brigham Young, that his District law license had lapsed several years
earlier, in 1998, for failure to pay his dues. He immediately paid his
dues and renewed his D.C. license, Nowacki said. But for the first year
in Utah, he was advising Brigham Young, a Mormon university in Provo,
without a current law license from any state.
[...]
Griffith, 55, is a member of the Republican National Lawyers
Association and was the lead counsel for the Senate during the
impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Married and the father of
six, he is a former partner at the D.C. firm of Wiley Rein &
Fielding, whose partners served in prominent positions in past
Republican administrations.
Here are a few particularly striking things about this story:
1) Griffith didn't know for three years that his DC bar membership had lapsed. Three years? Three years?
And then he blamed it on a staff oversight? I guess the Republicans
really are the party of "personal responsibility" ... for the peons.
But the thing is, as an attorney, it is his personal responsibility to
ensure that he is licensed to practice. It's not anyone else's
responsibility. Griffith blew it, and then he made it worse by ignoring
his responsibility to the people of Utah to ensure that he was licensed
to practice there. The obligation runs from an attorney to the people
of the state where he or she practices. That's the point of having a
bar exam and continuing legal education -- to protect the public. But I
guess those rules are just for the little people.
2) The DC Circuit Court handles, among other things, administrative law cases.
These kinds of cases are complex. They require close parsing of densely
written regulations and briefs, and attention to detail. And this is
the court to which George W. Bush wants to appoint Griffith, who can't
be bothered to even notice the expiration date on his bar membership
card?
3) If you look at the timeline, you'll note that Griffith's DC bar
membership expired in 1998, and that he served as chief counsel to the
Senate in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. That second fact
suggests to me that his nomination is a payoff for that service, but
even more interesting (and morbidly amusing) is the fact that the
impeachment trial took place in January and February of 1999. So he was advising the Senate on the most serious of constitutional matters without a license to practice law.
I remind the reader again: lifetime appointment.