Review: My life in court

My life in court by Louis Nizer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't often read court lawyer memoirs, but this one recalls to me Triumph of Justice: Closing the Book on the Simpson Saga. In both cases, the authors strike me as sold on their own brilliance. Maybe to be successful in that work, one needs the self-confidence and even the brilliance. For this one, a compendium of many cases and case types, I enjoy most the mechanics of witness examination and the practical realities of psychology learned by the author. This ranged from technical aspect like the negative pregnant to his own Rule of Probability: "What was probable, probably happened." This was not so much a rule as a yardstick for testing the credibility of evidence. It calls upon the trial attorney to evaluate what his client is telling him had occurred and what his adversary presents as evidence against the attorney's own life experience and common sense.

It seems almost quaint the shock Nizer feels is evident in such things as private group nudism and in-home foot fethishists and cross-dressers. These apparently prurient topics for contemporary readers, with exception detail for the foot fetisher, arose in divorce cases described which include the more prosaic infidelities around that involving Eleanor Holm, American competition swimmer and Olympic gold medalist. In 1954, she divorced Billy Rose—receiving $30,000 a month (worth $267,546 today) in alimony and a lump sum of $200,000 (worth $1,783,643 today).

Libel cases include that of Quentin Reynolds, journalist and embedded frontline World War II war correspondent for his libel suit against right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, who called him "yellow" and an "absentee war correspondent". Reynolds through Nizer, won $175,001 (approximately $1.5 million in 2014 dollars), at the time the largest libel judgment ever.

While it note make the back cover, the case of Victor Ridder, publisher of the New Yorkers Staats-Zeitung, unmasked as a Nazi agent after being a signatory to the “Christmas Declaration” in December 1942, which urged the German people to sue for peace. The concluding case of the Joseph Vogel MGM Presidency had promise of being a new topic due to the difference of venue: the press and proxy shareholder bouts, etc. However, it felt the most tedious and lacking any center of real interest in this day, dealing with significant corporate turmoil, including a takeover attempt in 1957 from former president Louis B. Mayer in association with two board members, Stanley Meyer and Joseph Tomlinson. Vogel managed to fight off the takeover attempt with Nizer's help...

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