The Law: Face on the Courtroom Floor

Striding into an Anchorage bank last summer, an Alaskan state trooper pulled out his pistol and seized $6,000. The money belonged to the local bar association, and the trooper was there on orders of the Alaska Supreme Court, which has stirred up a raging feud by its effort to put Alaska’s 211 lawyers under the court’s tight control. So determined is the court that it has even tried to disband the state bar association.

Alaska’s bar is now suing Alaska’s bench in a three-judge federal court, and is bitterly assailing such new rules as a $600 bond requirement for anyone seeking jury trial in a civil case. Last week, with their suit still in the process of litigation, the lawyers scored an out-of-court triumph-they engineered the defeat of the one Supreme Court justice who had the bad luck to be up for election this year.

Mild-mannered Justice Harry O.

Arend, 61, a veteran of 30 years in Alaskan law, had no opponent on the ballot; all he needed was a simple majority of the total vote to win a ten-year term. Instead, both Republican and Democratic lawyers blasted Arend across the state, decried the court’s jury bond rule, its 3% share in child-support payments and its upholding of the recent conviction of two Seward schoolteachers for the “immoral conduct” of trying to oust the school board and superintendent. The lawyers not only captivated schoolteachers, but they won over enough other Alaskan voters to kick Justice Arend off the bench. Now the Governor will have to appoint a new judge. Meanwhile, the bar has only two opponents on the bench to go.