Trial and Error: the Education of a Courtroom Lawyer.

John C. Tucker Carroll & Graf www.carrollandgraf.com 357pp., $26

All trial lawyers, whether they practice in small towns or large cities, suffer from the image of the attorney who draws out discovery and settles the case after thoroughly litigating it and wringing every possible dollar from the client. John Tucker's history of his law practice from the 1960s through the 1980s sets him apart from this stereotype.

Louis Nizer's My Life in Court was the book through which most lawyers in the 1960s and 1970s explored the world of a litigator. Robert Kennedy's book about corruption within the Teamsters, The Enemy Within, was another, from an investigative perspective. Both provided insight into the meaning of being a trial lawyer. More recently, Evan Thomas's The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams: Ultimate Insider; Legendary Trial Lawyer provided a candid insight into the career of one of Washington, D.C.'s most famous trial lawyers of his era, the 1960s to 1980s.

Tucker's legal career spans these generations. We learn of his substantial and hard-won successes, but we also fed his painful losses. It may seem as if he is merely reviewing his career, from 1958 to his retirement at age 51. In reality, he is leading us through evolutionary eras in social history, Chicago politics, and the practice of law-remember, he started out in the years of the Warren Court.

About his first case, in which he represented a 19 year-old man charged with armed robbery, Tucker writes with humility and acknowledges his own inadequacies as a new lawyer he was appointed counsel and the senior mentoring lawyer was not available for the trial. Tucker takes the conviction of his client as a significant personal failure resulting from his inexperience.

With his challenging first trial behind him, Tucker moved through the Chicago court system, handling indigent criminal cases as if he were a public defender, gaining experience with the classic trial practitioners of his era. He writes with interesting detail about these pro bono eases, revealing his learning process and evolution as a trial lawyer.

We watch him represent a "world-famous Chicago architect" and then move back into the appellate realm on behalf of indigent criminal defendants. We toil with him in rape cases, drug cases, commercial litigation, and white-collar criminal cases. In the latter, Tucker appears to have found his greatest expertise and enjoyment.

Tucker's description of then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's political world is a historical portrait that will leave a younger reader wondering how the Daley dynasty existed as long as it did. Trial and Error also takes us to Judge Julius Hoffman's appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Tucker encapsulates Hoffman, describing him as

   a despicable man who was widely rumored to
   have purchased his federal judgeship with a
   $50,000 campaign contribution to Everett
   Dirkson's senatorial campaign and who regularly
   turned the concept of justice on its head,
   bullying lawyers and litigants alike while consistently
   catering to the powerful and treating
   the weak with disdain.

Tucker is not subtle when describing Hoffman, in any context. His experiences with the judge give anyone who is familiar with the Chicago Seven trial of 1969 a better context in which to understand Hoffman and his antics at this infamous event (I hesitate to call it a trial).

In the Chicago Seven case, Tucker represented some of the defense lawyers Hoffman cited for contempt. He understands the judge's idiosyncracies and explains why the defendants and their lawyers were, without knowing it, lucky that Hoffman was randomly assigned the case.

Tucker rightly ridicules the judge, though he fails to adequately criticize the defense lawyers for their part in creating the circus that this trial became. In any event, we see the trial for what it was: politics; government overreaching; theater; an irascible, vain, and not very bright judge; and defendants and lawyers who knew how to exploit it all.

The author's descriptions of Chicago ward politics will make even the most ardent political partisan wince. Tucker moves from opposing the Daley machine--in part through the Chicago Seven trial--to representing Daley Democratic political appointees whom Daley's successor, Mayor Jane Byrne, sought to discharge. His representation of appointees during the Democratic Party's infighting is ironic and insightful, and the case led to a Supreme Court ruling in Elrod v. Burns prohibiting the wholesale firing of government workers simply because they belonged to the political party that had lost the election.

Tucker had a wide range of clients. His representation of two Chicago bookmakers over several years fits squarely with the idiosyncratic nature of his cases. In describing his work on behalf of these two organized-crime gambling ringleaders, Tucker paints his clients more gently than they probably deserve. His enthusiasm for his clients--the "good guys"--contrasts sharply with his castigation of the Chicago division of the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force and some of the FBI agents assigned to it. He rightly criticizes the FBI agents and strike-force attorneys for their "get 'em at any price" attitude but expresses no concern over the parasitic conduct of his own clients.

He also describes representing a physician charged with not filing tax returns--and once again running into Judge Hoffman. Trial and Error seems to imply here that the government had no right to prosecute a hardworking, honest man who merely failed to file tax returns. Setting aside this issue, Tucker's description of his efforts to defend the man illustrate the procedural mechanisms a resourceful lawyer can use to try to best protect a client. Although the case ultimately failed, Tucker's passion for his client is worth absorbing.

Trial and Error presents a historical review that those who remember the era will find accurate, but will appreciate more with new details. For those to whom Trial and Error presents events outside their contemporary experiences, it is a good look back at an era of trials not long past.

Jerome F. O'Neill practices law in Burlington, Vermont.