PASSIONATE ADVOCATE

By PETER SISTROM

A year ago, knowing he was dying, Arthur Liman told me he wanted to write about his life as a lawyer. He had a notion that he could inspire young lawyers to regard our profession as he did--a way to serve the public interest. Arthur was worried that publishers wanted something else--gossip, indiscretions, boasts. He knew so many important people, had handled so many famous cases, that such a book could have been a best seller. But he was steadfast. "I won't do a book like that," he would say. He was too loyal to his clients to tell tales, too genuinely humble to brag and too idealistic to believe celebrity defined a successful legal career.

He was shambly, unglamorous, sentimental, tolerant, fair and liberal. People thought he had a bad haircut, and he knew it: he once said he was the only person whose hair had been improved by chemotherapy. He could seem self-absorbed, but in fact he loved being a mentor. Two years ago, Arthur asked for my help in setting up an office to defend poor New Yorkers facing the death penalty, and I saw him at his finest, doing the civic lawyering he loved no less than his monumental dealmaking. Even as his illness advanced, the only thing that made him sad, I think, was the unfinished task of calling lawyers back to the ideals he lived by and believed in.

--Peter Sistrom