Cross-Examination Lawyers Defend Themselves Against Criticism By Quayle, Bush

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA); September 8, 1991; Section: LOCAL; Edition: MIDNIGHT; Page: B1

It wasn't so much what he said as how he said it that got Vice President -- and attorney -- Dan Quayle in trouble with the nation's more than 700,000 lawyers. Indeed, American Bar Association President John J. Curtin Jr. of Boston agreed with Quayle's message last month that something has to be done to reduce the expensive and time-consuming process of going to court.

But blaming lawyers for America's failure to compete effectively with foreign countries isn't the answer, Curtin said.

The nation's legal community was still talking about the Quayle-Curtin confrontation at the ABA's annual meeting in Atlanta when President Bush drew cheers the next day at the Fraternal Order of Police convention in Pittsburgh by criticizing criminal defense lawyers who use "technicalities" to help their clients.

"Those 'technicalities' he's talking about are better known as the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution," snapped Allegheny County Public Defender Lester Nauhaus. "Quayle and Bush are just a pair of pandering politicians engaging in lawyer bashing for political gain."

Although lawyers long have been easy targets for politicians and others, some attorneys readily admit that the criticism is at least in part justified.

"It's fashionable today to flog lawyers, and a lot of them should be flogged" for dragging things out, said Geoffrey Hazard of Yale Law School and director of the American Law Institute, an independent law reform organization based in Philadelphia that includes 3,000 lawyers, law professors and judges.

But flogging them because they allegedly hinder foreign trade is misplaced, he said.

The public frequently directs its anger at criminal defense lawyers who use ''technicalities" and "loopholes" -- the attorneys call it dogged hard work -- to free their clients or reduce the charges against them. Judges involved in such cases also are often criticized for being "soft on crime." Public Defender Nauhaus said the underlying problem in many of these cases is "poor police work in which a person's rights were violated," such as an illegal search of a car or home. "Judges don't let people go because of good police work."

Professor John Burkoff of the University of Pittsburgh law school, a specialist in criminal law, says it would be "easy to make law enforcement more efficient. Just give up the Bill of Rights. But that's not how we do things in this country." Burkoff said Quayle "raised issues that deserve to be considered but did it in such a rhetorical and political way that it was counterproductive and his message was lost.

Attorney Jerry I. Meyers of Pittsburgh, immediate past president of the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, said Quayle's contention that America has lost its competitive edge overseas because of lawyers is misdirected. "We've lost our competitive edge because of the lack of quality of the products we make.

I can remember when American cars were the finest made. The competitive advantage we once enjoyed has been lost because of short-sighted management concerned about making money now instead of over the long haul." In an in-your-face rebuttal to the vice president's remarks, ABA President Curtin told Quayle that the civil justice system and the lawyers who work in it are not the problem. "Your own federal government's definitive study conducted by the non- partisan Congressional Office of Technology Assessment found that capital costs, the quality of human resources and (the better use of technology by foreign businesses) were, in fact, the critical factors hurting us in world markets -- not the tort liability system."

Curtin assured Quayle that the ABA would carefully consider his proposed reforms and asked the vice president to reconsider his basic assumption that lawyers are at the heart of America's failure to compete effectively. Stay tuned.