Judges: Skolnick’s Guerrilla War

Almost every losing plaintiff yearns for revenge. But what if he is poor, confined to a wheelchair and has no law degree? Despite those handicaps, a Chicago polio victim named Sherman Skolnick fought back so hard that last month two members of the Illinois Supreme Court resigned amid charges of conflict of interest brought by him. Moreover, the revelations about those judges —Chief Justice Roy Solfisburg and Associate Justice Ray Klingbiel—have inspired a committee of the state legislature to embark forthwith on a “top-to-bottom inquiry into the entire judiciary in Illinois.”

When Skolnick was 34, his parents lost a lawsuit against a brokerage house that they had accused of frittering away a stock fund set up for their son. Skolnick, now 39, recalls: “I kept running into judges who seemed unfair, dishonest and politically motivated.” He was so embittered that he set out to improve Illinois justice by investigating judges and reforming the system under which they are elected in the state. The son of an immigrant garment cutter from Russia, Skolnick dropped out of Roosevelt University, where he was an A student but required special transportation to the campus, which he could no longer afford. Later, he taught himself law at home and carved a full-time career as a sort of modern day Robin Hood for the law’s many losers.

Among his early efforts, Skolnick brought suits to reapportion electoral districts for the Illinois Supreme Court and the state appellate court, the Cook County board of commissioners and the Chicago city council. In the process, he devised a strategy called “guerrilla law,” which he defines as an “unorthodox but legal means of fighting judicial impropriety.” His favorite tactic is to move that a judge disqualify himself from a case because of alleged bias. During a 1966 suit calling for reapportionment of city-council electoral districts, Skolnick discovered that Federal Judge William J. Campbell had once been a director of the Albert Parvin Foundation. He charged that the foundation had ties with Chicago gamblers and political bosses.* Whatever the truth of the accusation, Campbell named two prominent lawyers to hear the evidence for him. As a result of their report, he ordered the district boundaries redrawn by November 1970.

Skolnick lives in his parents’ modest duplex home on Chicago’s South Side, supported mainly by his father’s union pension and social security benefits. He can move his wheelchair, but only with difficulty, and must be chauffeured to his press conferences and court appearances. Working with him are 30 or so volunteers whom Skolnick has organized into the Committee to Clean Up the Courts. Like him, most of them have grievances against the courts. Each week, they pore over stock records, title transfers and other documents for evidence of judicial mischief. The eyes and ears of Sherman’s guerrilla army are a network of informers who range from lawyers and cops to federal agents.

Rare Humility. Three years ago, Skolnick’s committee began hearing rumors of conflicts of interest involving the Illinois Supreme Court. Last February, an anonymous tipster told Skolnick to check the stockholders of Chicago’s Civic Center Bank & Trust Co. Sure enough, the name of Justice Klingbiel turned up. Skolnick also learned that Klingbiel was a stockholder in 1967, when the court exonerated the bank’s general counsel, Theodore J. Isaacs, from charges of conspiring to defraud the state while serving as Illinois’ director of revenue. Moreover, Klingbiel had written the majority decision.

Skolnick also claimed that Chief Justice Solfisburg had been serving secretly as counsel to the bank—a charge that was never substantiated. When the Illinois high court appointed a commission of leading lawyers to investigate his claims, Skolnick cried “whitewash,” refused to cooperate, and was sentenced to four months in jail for contempt. He was hauled out of the courtroom in his wheelchair and loaded into a police van. He later assisted the commission, however, and the contempt order against him has just been dropped. With rare humility, Skolnick told the judge: “If I offended you, I apologize.”

Skolnick’s whitewash charge was wrong. Both Klingbiel and Solfisburg admitted to the commission that they had owned stock in the Civic Center Bank at the time they voted with the 4-to-2 court majority to clear Isaacs. The commission heard testimony that Klingbiel had accepted a gift of 100 shares transferred from Isaacs, and Solfisburg had bought 700 shares of Isaacs’ stock at a cut rate while the case was before the court. Moreover, after voting to quash the indictment against Isaacs, the testimony indicated, Solfisburg began to sell the shares off at a 25% profit. Concluding that the incident had severely shaken public confidence in the court, the commission urged the two Republican judges to resign. Two days later, while publicly denying any wrongdoing, they did so.

Skolnick promises more revelations about other judges. “We have angles on top of angles,” he says. Some people believe that his guerrilla war verges on neo-McCarthyism. Still, the state legislature’s investigators have now requested financial reports from all 600 state judges in Illinois. The Chicago Bar Association has also called on the state to adopt the “Missouri Plan,” under which all future state judges would be appointed by the Governor from lists of qualified candidates submitted by a non-partisan commission. However brash his tactics, Sherman Skolnick is one little man who may instigate real reforms.

*Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas broke his ties with the Parvin Foundation this year. Douglas was criticized for accepting consultant fees of $12,000 a year from the foundation, which Senator John Williams of Delaware claimed had links with Las Vegas gamblers.