Human rights law, in South Africa and Israel

Why has Israeli public interest law not succeeded in contributing to the end of Israel's occupation of the West Bank?

One possibility is that the strategy by which the lawyers shaped their work was mistaken. Daphna Golan and Zvika Orr, two Israeli scholars with deep roots in public interest advocacy themselves, have recently suggested this in an incisive and dismaying article,  "Translating Human Rights of the 'Enemy': The Case of Israeli NGOs Defending Palestinian Rights," 46 Law & Society Review 781 (2012). Golan and Orr write that:

Depoliticization of the work of Israeli NGOs has proved ineffective, not merely in terms of the ongoing and increasing human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories, but also in terms of the way in which the NGOs are commonly perceived by the Israeli public, legislators and government. (809)

They conclude:

[W]e propose that contemporary attempts to silence the translators of human rights violations [that is, public interest advocates] should signal to activists the need to reconsider some of their current depoliticized strategies and to think of new ways to broaden the understanding of their role in leading a process of fundamental change, which not only will ensure that the occupation complies with international law but will end the military occupation of Palestinian territories. (810)

Given how far Israeli politics have moved away from a commitment to finding a negotiated solution to the problem of the Occupation, it is entirely understandable that"activists' general feeling ... is one of despair and powerlessness to bring about a fundamental and deep change." (808) But I'm not sure that the reason for this state of affairs is that the public interest activists made strategic mistakes, or indeed that they made strategic mistakes at all.

To take the last point first: sometimes the good guys don't win. The forces driving Israeli and Palestinian politics away from negotiation and perhaps to endless confrontation and injustice are deep and powerful. Terror, anger and growing religious fundamentalism may simply be too much for any strategy to overcome. If the advocates of a different course have not succeeded, that may not show that they made any mistakes. Legally speaking, meanwhile, it seems to me that Israeli advocates have actually done rather well – not ending the Occupation, of course, nor ridding it of injustice, but winning judgments in a number of important cases that imposed some genuine constraints on the Israeli government.

I'm also not sure that pursuing a depoliticized strategy was a mistake. I must emphasize that I don't say this based on an understanding of Israel, of which I'm just a concerned observer. But I was struck by Golan and Orr's explanation of the difference between the impact of anti-apartheid lawyering in South Africa and the results of public interest efforts in Israel. They write that "law played a central role in the struggle against apartheid. Yet in South Africa the struggle for legality and basic civil rights was inseparable from the overall political struggle." (796)

It is certainly true that legal efforts against apartheid were part of a much broader social and political movement. But that alone may only remind us that in South Africa the movement against apartheid grew stronger and the government's resistance lost conviction. The larger politics broke against apartheid; within Israel, politics have not broken against the Occupation. Without a strong political movement to link with, activists' options are limited.

It's also not quite right to say that the legal efforts in South Africa were "inseparable" from the political struggle. In one sense, certainly, this statement is correct: the lawyers advocating for human rights were seeking goals that the movement broadly shared. But in that sense I think Israeli activists are also aligned with the political struggle against the occupation.

In another sense, however, many South African anti-apartheid lawyers did their work in ways that were distinct from the political struggle. The most important public interest law organization of the day was the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), which was co-founded and led by Arthur Chaskalson. (I wrote in this blog, with sorrow, about my friend Arthur’s death last fall.) Arthur, an absolutely determined foe of apartheid, nevertheless shaped the LRC as an organization expressing the highest traditions of the bar – legalist traditions rather than explicitly political ones. LRC lawyers, and I think anti-apartheid lawyers in general, challenged apartheid in its own courts by making the arguments that the South African legal system permitted. It was, I think, in good part their ability to present themselves as acting within the bounds of the system that contributed to their legal successes.

I wonder if Israeli human rights lawyers have been the victims not of strategic mistakes but of too much success. In South Africa, as apartheid ground on through the 1980s, no one thought the courts were an institutional force opposed to the government; what was remarkable was that occasional liberal judges, and even occasional conservative judges, ruled against the government. The victories may have meant more because they were more grudgingly yielded by the judicial system. As a result, one can speculate – though only that – that supporters of apartheid may have found these victories more unsettling than Israelis committed to the Occupation do. One can also speculate that the legal system in South Africa was so plainly unsympathetic to the anti-apartheid cause that no one really needed to argue about whether the lawyers fighting against apartheid in the courts were or were not fundamentally aligned with the political struggle.

Israeli activist lawyers, in contrast, have had the good fortune – and perhaps the mixed blessing – of appearing in courts committed to binding Israel to the rule of law. Perhaps the result has been to make the rule of law appear more politically charged than it did in South Africa, and perhaps the result is that when political winds turned against Palestinians those same winds began to blow at the edifice of law. Perhaps conservative Israelis now find it easy to write off the zone of legalist rights-consciousness as simply a political project. (David Remnick writes in “Letter from Jerusalem: The Party Faithful,” in this week’s New Yorker (Jan. 21, 2013), at 42, that Israel’s “[r]ight-wing politicians have long railed against what they see as the dominance of leftist élites in the media, academic, human-rights organization, and, especially, the Supreme Court – the nemesis of the far right – but they do so now from an unassailable position of power.”) And yet it would have been very hard indeed for lawyers to resist the courts’ receptivity to their arguments.

For all these reasons I’m not convinced that Israel’s public interest advocates have made mistakes. It might still be the case that the right move for lawyers now is to become more overtly political. "Politicization" exists on a spectrum, and some shift by Israeli lawyers may prove fruitful. I'd only say that shifting too far may be a mistake; the moral resources of the rule of law are powerful levers, not lightly to be put down. But I certainly don’t know what the best course now is, and I don’t at all envy the Israeli scholars and lawyers who after years of dedicated and difficult effort must wrestle with the question of how to challenge an occupation that has not ended but grown more entrenched over the 45 years it has been in place.  

Moral thinking -- and how we ask about it

I found myself thinking the other day about how important the framing of the question is to the answers you’ll get – even in such a subtle area as the understanding of people’s moral thinking.

Here’s a famous moral question, framed to help gauge the answerer’s level of moral development: the Heinz dilemma posed by Lawrence Kohlberg. As quoted in Wikipedia from Kohlberg’s Essays in Moral Development, Vol. 1 (1981), it reads:

Heinz's wife was near death, and her only hope was a drug that had been discovered by a pharmacist who was selling it for an exorbitant price. The drug cost $20,000 to make, and the pharmacist was selling it for $200,000. Heinz could only raise $50,000 and insurance wouldn't make up the difference. He offered what he had to the pharmacist, and when his offer was rejected, Heinz said he would pay the rest later. Still the pharmacist refused. In desperation, Heinz considered stealing the drug. Would it be wrong for him to do that?

Should Heinz have broken into the store to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

Carol Gilligan, in her book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development  (1993), famously contrasted 11-year-old Jake’s perception of this problem as “‘sort of like a math problem with humans,’” to be resolved using an ethic of rights, and 11-year-old Amy’s contrasting response of framing the issue as arising in “a narrative of relationships that extends over time,” to be addressed using an ethic of care. The two responses are strikingly different , though whether that difference reflects a gender difference in ethical thinking is another, and complex, question. What’s striking to me now is a point that Gilligan may also recognize, but as far as I now recall does not make central: that the presentation of the problem itself potentially shapes the answers it elicits.

            To put the matter more directly, Kohlberg’s question is precisely designed to pose an ethics question that is like a math problem. It’s meant, as many a law professor’s Socratic question is, to exclude all possible issues except one: in this case, the sheer conflict between two claims of moral right (respect for property and respect for life).

Those questions have their uses, in particular for encouraging students to practice skills of precision in identifying issues and reasoning about them. The price of asking such questions, however, is that if they work they narrow discussion and thought down to whatever line of reasoning the professor wants to focus on. They may also implicitly devalue, and they certainly aim to disregard at least for the moment, the many other thoughts and concerns that students may want to bring to bear on the matter at hand.

Perhaps these questions also reflect something true about the world – that sometimes stark choices must be made. But this claim is debatable. It’s been debated, in fact, in connection with the “ticking bomb” scenarios often advanced as the basis for moral argument about torture. If the ticking bomb scenario appeared in the actual world, its resolution might be a matter of constructing the right hierarchy of rights, the right of the terrorist not to be tortured and the right of his imminent victims not to be killed. But in the real world, there may never be a question so stark as the ticking bomb scenario’s assumed facts – which imagine that we know exactly who might have to be tortured, under circumstances so urgent as to admit of no alternative except immediate action. As some very thoughtful observers have argued, if the real world is messier than the scenario, then thinking about the ticking bomb scenario may be a beguiling distraction.  

But whatever the virtues and defects of these questions, for pedagogical or truth-seeking purposes, their power as questions is important to recognize. If we ask an 11-year-old, or a 45-year-old, a math problem about morality, it seems reasonable for us to predict that he, or she, will respond with a math answer about morality. Does that mean that the person answering actually views morality as a math problem? Perhaps – that would be one reason to respond this way. But perhaps not. Maybe he, or she, understands the question as ruling out any choices except (to use the Heinz dilemma in particular) to steal or not to steal. The question as phrased doesn’t quite do that, and it might take a much longer problem to explicitly exclude all other options. Still, the problem does seem meant to be understood this way. Maybe the person answering the question views questioners as entitled to answers that address the sort of question they meant to ask. Maybe he, or she, also assumes that math problems are problems to be responded to with math answers.

One might say a lot about the psychological traits these inclinations reflect – a conformance with authority, possibly, or maybe a generous desire to help the questioner. But whatever one might say on those scores, and whatever those observations might have to do with gender, they wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with whether the person being questioned thought about morality in terms of rights or relationships.

Here as elsewhere it’s very important to ask the right question. Otherwise the chance you’ll get the wrong answer has to increase.

Remembering Arthur Chaskalson

Arthur Chaskalson, a truly great man, died yesterday, December 1, 2012, in Johannesburg. The list of his achievements is almost unbelievable: Fifty years ago as a young advocate (that is, a courtroom lawyer) he helped represent Nelson Mandela in the case in which Mandela was sentenced to life in prison – a victory, since the only other alternative was death, and a victory that meant a great deal to South Africa’s future. In 1979, along with the distinguished lawyer Felicia Kentridge, he founded the Legal Resources Centre, which distilled the lessons of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s practice in the United States to become South Africa’s leading public interest law organization – and to win cases challenging apartheid, in apartheid South Africa’s courts. Then he took up the task of representing the African National Congress as one of its principal negotiators in the drafting of South Africa’s first post-apartheid constitution. That constitution created South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the first court in South Africa with authority to enforce a constitution that genuinely protected human rights. Arthur became the Constitutional Court’s first President and then, as this Court’s centrality to South Africa’s legal system became evident, he became Chief Justice of South Africa. And after he retired as Chief Justice, he served as President of the International Commission of Jurists, and in that position he led the ICJ’s incisive examination of the US “war against terror” and its uneasy relationship to law and human rights.

I had the great good fortune to be one of Arthur’s friends for the past 25 years. Our friendship began when we taught a course on “Legal Responses to Apartheid” together at Columbia Law School in 1987. Arthur’s own scholarly approach to South Africa’s law – he was a passionate opponent of apartheid who achieved results in part by being a dispassionate scholar of the law as well – helped me to realize that if I was going to talk about South African law I had to study it as hard as any other body of law, because South African law was easy to denounce, but not so easy to understand. Then he invited me out to South Africa, and I went, in the summer of 1988, and spent three weeks, mostly staying at the Chaskalsons’ home and meeting anti-apartheid lawyers whose work I admired immensely. Those experiences (and other wonderful opportunities I had to teach with and get to know South Africans opposed to apartheid) shaped my professional career, setting me on a course of research and writing about South Africa that remains a central part of what I do, and connecting me to people I’ve remained friends with ever since.

I remember Arthur for the profound impact he had on my professional life, and of course for the extraordinary series of achievements of his own career – enough for several successful lifetimes! But like many others, I also remember him for his humanity. He and his wife Lorraine, also a dear friend of mine, opened their house to their friends. I remember discussing the wellbeing of the many cats living in their backyard, the impolite meanings South Africans and Americans gave to certain Yiddish words, and the important question of how much to wash dishes before putting them in the dishwasher (I believe he and I both belonged to the “a lot” school). I also remember the phone service going dead, presumably in an effort by the apartheid police to prevent Arthur from planning legal strategy, during my first stay in their home. Arthur stayed the course despite that kind of pressure – and the last time we visited in South Africa, he took my wife Teresa, my son Dave and me to the Constitutional Court, and Dave sat next to him in the chairs the justices of that Court use to hear the issues that arise under a democratic constitution.

Flags will be at half-mast in South Africa all this week in remembrance of Arthur Chaskalson. He will be very much missed there, and here.

Thanksgiving

To celebrate Thanksgiving with family and friends, with an abundance of food and in a house with power, is to have a great deal to be thankful for. The assault of Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey and New York has been a reminder, an all too vivid reminder, of how fragile the elaborate social and technological systems are that maintain us. Some people lost their lives as a result of that fragility. Many more people suffer daily around the world in circumstances that are fragile, or worse, all the time. As we enjoy the return of our normal life, we have plenty of reason to recommit ourselves to building a world in which everyone’s normal life is worth giving thanks for.

"For Martin Chanock: Essays on Law and Society"

Hot off the presses: “For Martin Chanock: Essays on Law and Society,” Volume 28, Number 2 of the Australian journal Law in Context, available here. I edited this issue, with Heinz Klug and Penelope Andrews, and all of us were very pleased to have the chance to help celebrate the work of Martin Chanock, a remarkable historian of African and South African law, and someone we’ve known and liked for many years.

For those who are interested, the editors’ introduction frames the issue and discusses the eight articles which appear in it, all of which respond in one way or another to Martin’s wide-ranging work. We also quote the eloquent personal tribute to Martin from Jianfu Chen, the former Head of School at La Trobe University School of Law, where Martin is now an Emeritus Professor; Jianfu said that Martin exemplified “decency,” and explained that “the seemingly easy task of being a decent person demands the output of the highest quality of human beings: honesty, integrity, passion, and compassion.” (Page 6)

I also wrote one of the eight articles, “A Bittersweet Heritage: Learning from The Making of South African Legal Culture.” Martin’s book, whose full title is The Making of South African Legal Culture 1902-1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (2001), is (I said) a “deeply unsettling …. argument that race was at the heart of the entire enterprise of South African judging, not only the regrettable decisions but also the admirable ones.” (Page 76) I am inclined to think that this argument is correct, provided it is understood as a systemic observation rather than an appraisal of each and every judge – since there were individual, remarkable judges who waged legal battle against apartheid even as they held office under it. In the article I sought first to understand how Chanock’s argument could indeed be true, or more precisely to understand how even upright judges, capable of decisions that helped preserve the claims of human rights through very dark days in South Africa, were nevertheless people of their time and not somehow disconnected from its appalling problems.

But then I asked whether it followed, if Chanock’s appraisal was correct, that the right response today, as South Africa seeks to eliminate the taint of racism in its law and its life, is to disestablish entirely the institution of judging as it was practiced before the end of apartheid. My answer to this question was and is “no.” The old system’s formalism, with its “austere, independent judiciary, engaged in determination of outcomes through the application of a highly rationalised and complex logical process” (page 84), certainly needs reshaping. Its elitist manner should be diminished and its substantive reasoning made to rest on the new egalitarian liberty embodied in the constitution – changes that the Constitution, and the Constitutional Court, have aimed to accomplish. But the fundamental stance of judicial objectivity, the aim of judging “without fear, favour or prejudice,” the commitment to the idea of judges as experts on the law – all these, I urged, are both a kind of formalism and integral to liberty, in South Africa and throughout the world.

I’ll set out here the last few lines of the piece (page 88):

If the courts are to listen, and to help shape a country in which other government actors also listen, then perhaps what South Africa needs is not to beware of formalism but to beware of formulas. Let us seek a constitution of no slogans, in which courts – continuing their historic role of providing a measure of independent judgment about society – deepen their contribution by being as sensitive as possible to the entitlements, and imperfections, of all who come before them.

And the other seven articles are interesting too!

Fox News gives Romney the shove

After the network I was watching had declared Obama the winner on election night, I thought I’d see what Fox News had to say. I was pleased to find that they too had called the race for Obama. But Romney had not conceded. Initially that wasn’t startling, but I began to worry that he really might not give up and that we might be in for weeks of wrangling and litigation. We now know that he did consider exactly this course of action – his aides reportedly had their suitcases packed and were ready to depart on waiting planes to pursue challenges to the apparent results. While Romney weighed his options, what was Fox News doing?

The answer is that Fox was growing increasingly impatient. Their anchor interviewed the Fox correspondent at the Romney party in Boston, and pushed him to acknowledge that the delay was more than normal. That wasn’t all. Not much later, the anchor expressed at some length the idea that an essential part of the ritual of elections was the gracious concession, followed by the gracious victory speech, meant to enact the symbolism of bringing us all together after the divisions of the campaign. And, the anchor said, it was time for this to happen. I had the strong sense that the Fox anchor believed that Romney or his aides were watching Fox right then and there, and that the anchor was telling him that it was over. There was even a suggestion, though only a brief one, that Romney hadn’t been such a good candidate in the first place – and, again, now it was time for him to go.

A little while later, Romney went. More precisely, another network (I think it was CBS) reported that Romney had made the required concession phone call to Obama. Then, Fox said, the campaign “pool” reporters got the same news. And then Fox got confirmation too. It’s interesting that Fox seems to have been the last, or at any rate definitely not the first, to be told. Was that because the Romney people were angry about having been lectured to over the airwaves?

I haven’t seen this aspect of the Fox coverage discussed since Tuesday – though I’m not reading the conservative sites whose writers might have been the most likely to actually be watching Fox that night. But this moment when Fox helped give Romney the shove shouldn’t be forgotten.

What did client-centeredness teach us?

In October I had the honor of participating in a remarkable day-long conference at UCLA School of Law, organized by Scott Cummings in honor of David Binder, Paul Bergman, Gary Blasi, Sue Gillig and Al Moore, all of whom are retiring or have recently retired from the faculty there. Here’s a version of what I said, focusing on the impact of client-centeredness, the approach to lawyering spearheaded by David Binder and Paul Bergman:

What did client-centeredness teach us? I’ll talk about its conceptual, pedagogical, and normative implications.

Conceptually:

There was a time – that is, there still is a time in some circles – when it was often said that skills could not be taught, or learned. What skillful practitioners had was, most likely, acknowledged to be something, but what that something was was ineffable and, really, not that interesting.

It’s integral to the client-centered approach to interviewing and counseling, as I think to all of the skills thinking done by David Binder and Paul Bergman and others who have shaped the UCLA approach, that skills can be analyzed. They have component parts, from the micro level of individual questions or words to overall structures and plans. Others have shared this conviction, but I think no one has been as influential as they have in actually accomplishing this analysis and demonstrating to teachers and students that it made sense.

Moreover, because skills have component parts, it follows that it is possible to assess the performance of these skills by determining whether those component parts were present, and executed correctly, or not. Skills become measurable. Performance becomes subject to evaluation.

As a result, academics have a contribution to make to the profession’s understanding of skills. If skills are to be understood only in the crucible of practice, then only those who are in the arena can speak with authority about what they do. Academics’ role, if they have one, would just be to repeat the distilled lessons imparted to them by practitioners. And of course those lessons might not be very profound, since practitioners might be unable to speak very coherently, however authoritative they are, given what we’ve learned (from Gary Blasi and other students of cognition) about how inaccurate people often are at describing their own thought processes.

But if skills can be analyzed, it becomes entirely possible that academics’ analysis will be superior to that of practitioners – or, more precisely, that academics who are also closely engaged with practice will be able to understand practice in ways that full-time practitioners do not. One of our comparative advantages as academics is time; another is the discipline of academic analysis itself. We have our disadvantages, not least that we may be less deeply immersed in the realities and necessities of practice than those who do it full time, but time and rigor are important assets. Practice becomes an academic subject.

Pedagogically:

This of course brings me to pedagogy. What can be analyzed and understood by academics can, at least potentially, be taught by them too.

But how? Broadly speaking, perhaps, in the same way that they can be understood. It seems to me that David, Paul and their UCLA colleagues have insisted that if skills can be broken down into their component parts, the way for students to learn them is to start with those component parts, practice them, and gradually combine them in tasks of increasing complexity. I take it to be a corollary of their thinking that – as in the Depositions course about which David, Al Moore and Paul wrote not long ago  – the targeted practice and equally targeted feedback possible in simulations are integral. Correspondingly, live-client clinical teaching that actually means to teach particular skills needs to be very carefully targeted as well. Not everyone agrees; some clinicians put more weight on the experience of client representation and the opportunity for reflection as foundations for later learning of more specific skills. But I would say that David and Paul’s pedagogy is implemented, in greater or lesser degree, in “skills” courses around the country. It may have influenced the development of legal writing pedagogy as well, and it may be affecting the ongoing debate over the elements of instruction in the traditional doctrinal classroom too.

I’ll have more to say about pedagogy, but first I need to shift focus.

Normatively:

What I’ve said so far is incomplete in a very important way, because it might suggest that the contributions David and Paul have made are just about the analysis and teaching of technique. But this isn’t true at all, and so now I want to really talk about client-centeredness specifically.

Let me start this way: client-centeredness did not take shape as a response to an academic problem. I believe, which is to say I recall David saying, that client-centeredness was a response to a problem of value: that lawyers had been exercising unjustified power over their clients. To this day the profession's official rules of ethics (I’m thinking of Model Rule 2.1) speak only opaquely about how lawyers and clients should actually interact with each other, but client-centeredness helped us see the play of power - and its potential channeling and restraint - in each moment of interaction between lawyer and client.

In discerning this moment-by-moment potential for just and unjust relations between lawyer and client (just as in articulating techniques for achieving just relations) client-centeredness has been enormously influential. Exactly what client-centeredness calls for has, to be sure, become almost as debated a question as, say, what utilitarian ethical theory requires – as Kate Kruse has demonstrated – but that’s really proof of its influence. Similarly, there are now schools of clinical thought that claim different labels, such as collaborative lawyering, but I think these share a great deal of common ground with client-centeredness. So, for example, Bob Dinerstein, another panelist at the UCLA event, Isabelle Gunning, Kate Kruse, Ann Shalleck, and I recently wrote a book in which we positioned ourselves, in Bob’s happily chosen phrase, as endorsing “engaged client-centeredness.” That phrase reflects what I think is true for all clinicians today, regardless of the particulars of label: we are all client-centered now. And of course it’s also important to see that in this respect as well, David and Paul taught that academics had a distinctive contribution to make to discussions of practice, because they brought not only analytical rigor but normative challenge to the forms of practice that were once prevalent.

I think it’s appropriate to underline here the technique that may be the signature of client-centeredness: active listening. Simply to tell lawyers that a crucial part of engaging with clients was not talking was, of course, of value. But active listening is, as probably everyone here knows, much more than not talking. In fact, active listening involves a certain amount of speaking! The speech, however, is focused on conveying a particular emotional response from the lawyer to the client, a response that incorporates attentive understanding but goes beyond it to express a specific relation and connection to the client: nonjudgmental empathetic regard.

I once wrote an article arguing that sometimes more than empathy is called for between lawyer and client, but empathy, if not always sufficient, is surely always necessary. And empathy is more than a skill; I think it rests on values of acceptance, and ultimately respect, for clients. Respect, in turn, is integral to client-centeredness. The specific techniques of client-centeredness reflect a belief in the capacity of clients to arrive at thoughtful decisions if they are helped to see matters clearly – and a commitment to protecting clients’ right to make those decisions, their right of self-determination.

Just two more points about this norm of respect, this time in connection with pedagogy again: First, one of the important themes of current commentary about legal education suggests that skills and values are separate things and thus prompts concerns about whether success in teaching skills alone is a sufficient preparation for practice. Client-centeredness, however, is an approach to skills that rests on values at every step; if we teach client-centeredness, we are teaching both skills and values. Client-centeredness has a normative kick from the get-go.

Second, the implication of respect for clients is that students also should be treated with respect, and that their capacity to learn should both be recognized and assisted, with the same sort of careful attention to promoting student learning that client-centeredness gives to promoting client decisionmaking. The client-centered lawyer is not passive, nor is the student-centered teacher – they both have a lot of important work to do. But they both do that work as an expression, and a vindication, of respect.

Let me just add my personal thanks to David Binder for his own living of the norm of respect. I first showed up out here at the 1986 Arrowhead conference, where I gave a paper called “Lawyers and Clients” – a title whose rhythm I borrowed from Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” with my father, then dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, in my mind. Though I admired client-centeredness then, as I do still, in the nature of academic papers I focused on what I found to critique in it. A lesser person would have treated that paper as a reason for distance; David treated it as a basis for what’s become a quarter-century of collegial friendship. I was grateful then, and I’ve only become more grateful since.