A Lawyer Despite Himself

Even as a teenager, Terence Hallinan was quite a handful. Perhaps he got it from his father, Vincent Hallinan, the fiery San Francisco lawyer who has served at least three jail sentences, including one for contempt (arising from his defense of Harry Bridges) during which he ran for President on the 1952 Progressive Party ticket. Perhaps it all started with a beating that three Marines once gave one of his brothers because he opposed the Korean War. When that happened, Vincent gave his sons boxing lessons. "If you're going to hold radical opinions," he said, "you have to be able to fight."

Terence soon became known as "Kayo" Hallinan. After tangling with three sailors in 1954, he was made a ward of the juvenile court. After clobbering a ski-lodge proprietor in 1955, he received a suspended three-month sentence. Tried for another assault in 1957, he got a hung jury, settled a damage suit by paying his alleged victim $5,000. Even after he entered San Francisco's Hastings College of Law in 1961, Terence had at least three fights, one of them a melee growing out of a bare-knuckles duel between his brother and another law student in Golden Gate Park.

As for civil disobedience, Terence was first arrested (and fined -L-1) for "blocking a footpath" during a 1960 peace march in London. In 1963, while trying to register Negro voters in Mississippi, he was arrested for loitering and littering, but the charges were not pressed. He joined CORE in San Francisco, helped organize the New Leftist W.E.B. DuBois Club, was arrested six more times for protests at business establishments that allegedly discriminated against Negroes. For twice refusing to leave a Cadillac agency, he was convicted on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to unlawful entry.

Keeping Cool. Did all this bar Terence, now 30, from becoming a practicing lawyer? Yes, said the California Committee of Bar Examiners, citing Terence's "propensity for lawlessness." As the committee saw it, Terence lacked that vital lawyer's virtue--"good moral character."

The California Supreme Court has just disagreed. In upholding Terence, the court reminded the committee that bar admission usually turns on whether an applicant has committed or is likely to commit "acts of moral turpitude." Even a criminal conviction is insufficient; examiners must weigh "the nature of the offense." The high court noted that since 1963, "petitioner has repudiated the use of force as a political principle." Repressing pugnacity, he kept his cool during all of his arrests for civil disobedience. Indeed, said the court, Hallinan has the very "good moral character" that the bar examiners failed to see. And unlike them, the court refused to believe that civil disobedience automatically sacrifices "the right to enter a licensed profession." If that rule were followed, said the court, "we would deprive the community of the services of many highly qualified persons of the highest moral courage. This should not be done."

Last week, sporting a sober tie and conservative suit, Attorney Hallinan took his oath of office and announced his first case: a $2,000,000 libel suit on behalf of his father. The defendant: Cosmetics Manufacturer William P. Patrick, a Republican also-ran in last year's California gubernatorial primary, who allegedly called Vincent Hallinan a "paid propagandist for Fidel Castro." Terence says his father "doesn't mind being called a propagandist for Castro and the Cuban people," is upset only over the word "paid," which implies the crime of failing to register as a foreign agent.

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