[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 157 (Wednesday, October 17, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Page S12983]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              TRIBUTE TO JUSTICE WILLIAM E. McANULTY, JR.

 Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I speak in memory of my dear friend, 
William E. McAnulty, Jr., justice of the Kentucky State Supreme Court. 
He died last month of lung cancer, at the age of 59.
  Justice McAnulty should have been with us for many more years. But 
Bill lived a life that could have been called complete no matter when 
his book closed--complete because it was full of love, full of humor, 
and full of pathbreaking work.
  Bill jumped at the chance to be the first African American to serve 
on Kentucky's Supreme Court, declaring that he didn't have time to wait 
to make history. ``And to those many, many before me,'' he added, 
``thank you for not waiting.''
  And Justice McAnulty knew that, just as he owed a debt to the civil 
rights pioneers who came before him, he in turn would be remembered by 
those who came after: After his success, he said, black lawyers ``will 
understand the door is open and they are able like any other lawyer or 
judge to enter. I've looked at my entire career as being someone who 
could pave the way for others behind me.''
  ``He was simply born to be a judge,'' said a prominent Kentucky 
attorney. But when I met Bill at the University of Louisville law 
school, his accomplishments on the bench were still far in the future.
  What I remember most from our student days together is his 
mischievous streak for practical jokes and his crackling sense of 
humor--qualities that served him wonderfully as a judge.
  When a lawyer paused in the middle of a lengthy closing statement and 
asked Bill to wake a snoring juror, he replied: ``You put him to sleep. 
You wake him up.'' And when this University of Louisville graduate and 
life-long Democrat was preparing for brain surgery in the last days of 
his life, he asked the doctor for assurances that he wouldn't wake up a 
University of Kentucky fan or with the judicial perspective of Justice 
Clarence Thomas.
  Bill faced his sudden illness and his imminent death with a bravery I 
wish we could all be blessed to emulate. In one sense, it was deeply 
unfair for that sickness to strike only a year after his crowning 
achievement, service on his State's highest court. But as Bill would 
have told us, only a false measure of success could be stolen so 
easily.
  Bill earned a much deeper kind. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
quoted at his funeral: ``To laugh often and much; . . . To know even 
one life has breathed easier because you have lived--this is to have 
succeeded.''
  So I join Bill's surviving loved ones--his father William, his wife 
Kristi, and his four children--in their sadness. At the funeral, the 
presiding pastor implored Kentucky's Governor, ``We know you can't give 
us another Judge McAnulty, but please give us somebody like him.''
  A success like the life of Justice William E. McAnulty, Jr., is no 
cause for mourning. But we grieve Bill's death, and I can't deny that I 
will miss this best of friends very, very much.

                          ____________________