[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 20]
[Senate]
[Pages 27772-27773]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                TRIBUTE TO THE HONORABLE JAMES L. OAKES

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, last week, I had a long talk with Mara 
Williams, the wife of former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge James Oakes. 
Jim, who had served as Vermont's attorney general, as our Federal 
district judge, and with distinction as chief judge of the Second 
Circuit, had died the previous weekend at the age of 83.
  Mara told me how the family had been with Jim a few days before he 
died, and we then talked about the legacy he left.
  I spoke of knowing Jim for 40 years, and how I, and my family of 
lifelong Democrats, had voted for him for attorney general and had 
hoped he might be our Governor. As it turned out, the country was far 
better off having him on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and would 
have been even better off had he been elevated to the Supreme Court, a 
position he would have held with great distinction.
  We all knew of Jim's legal mind and great ability, his dedication to 
public service, his wonderful sense of humor, and his love for his 
family, but I knew him especially as a man with a great and good 
conscience.
  Jim Oakes epitomized the role of judge as the protector of our 
fundamental rights. A decade ago he noted that he was a person who 
``still believe[d] that a federal judge can make a difference and--in 
cases of extreme necessity where basic rights are being infringed--
should make a difference when the rest of our political structure bogs 
down.'' This appreciation for the role of judicial independence is 
something we must admire and remember.
  We worked together when he was attorney general and I was State's 
attorney, and I particularly remember one very difficult and tragic 
murder case where we were able to forge an unprecedented use of a grand 
jury to bring about justice when it looked like that would not have 
been possible. We talked about that as recently as a couple of years 
ago, but then, with Jim, we could pick up a conversation from where we 
had left off 6 months before when we had last seen each other.
  Fran Lynggaard Hansen quoted his eldest daughter, Cynthia Meketa, as 
saying:

       He had a very high intellect, but he was never a snob. He 
     had ups and downs in his early life and always identified 
     with everybody, the cashier at the bank, the guy at the 
     market, the man working at the dump. . . . But that was who 
     he was, kind, generous to people who needed a helping hand. 
     He was a sentimental softie and loved to be a mentor to 
     people, especially his law clerks, shepherding their careers 
     along.

  My good friend, Judge Garvan Murtha, said:

       He was never afraid to stand up for the rights for others 
     and to name what was wrong. He was a brilliant, caring, funny 
     man and appreciative of people. . . . He was a very wise man. 
     . . . In the Pentagon Papers case, he was dissenting, so he 
     ended up on the wrong side of the Court of Appeals, but the 
     Supreme Court ended up agreeing with him.

  His daughter Betsy Oakes said:

       I think everyone who loved and admired my father will want 
     to carry on his tremendous spirit of social justice.

  Mara tells me of the love all the family had for Jim--and I know the 
love he had for her, his three children, four stepchildren, 
grandchildren, and his brother.
  Adam Liptak wrote of Judge Oakes in the New York Times, and I ask 
unanimous consent that his article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

[[Page 27773]]



                [From the New York Times, Oct. 16, 2007]

       James L. Oakes Dies at 83; Nixon Choice for Federal Bench

                            (By Adam Liptak)

       James L. Oakes, who was appointed to the federal appeals 
     court in New York by President Richard M. Nixon and yet 
     quickly became one of its leading liberal voices, died on 
     Saturday in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He was 83.
       His death was reported by his wife, Mara Williams Oakes, 
     who said it followed a brief illness.
       Judge Oakes served for 36 years on the court, the United 
     States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was its 
     chief judge from 1988 to 1992.
       Scholarly and gregarious, Judge Oakes insisted in his 
     decisions, speeches and writings that judges should never shy 
     away from protecting fundamental rights.
       He had little patience, he wrote in a 1997 article in The 
     Columbia Law Review, for politicians who attacked such 
     rulings as improper activism. Historic moments, he added, 
     sometimes required judges to act ``when the rest of our 
     political structure bogs down.''
       In this sense, he was, he wrote, ``old-fashioned--fashioned 
     from the thirties of the Great Depression, the forties of war 
     and the Holocaust and fascism, the fifties of the cold war 
     and McCarthyism and Little Rock, and the sixties of the civil 
     rights movement, the assassinations and the would-be Great 
     Society.''
       James Lowell Oakes was born in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 
     21, 1924.
       After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law 
     School, Mr. Oakes served as a law clerk to Harrie B. Chase, a 
     Vermont judge who sat on the court that Mr. Oakes would one 
     day join.
       Mr. Oakes then spent 2 decades practicing law and working 
     in the state government in Vermont. In the 1960s, he served 
     for four years in the State Senate and two as the state 
     attorney general. President Nixon made him a federal district 
     judge in Vermont in 1970 and elevated him to the appeals 
     court in 1971.
       But Judge Oakes was not proud of the connection. In the 
     years after the Watergate scandal, he used adhesive tape to 
     cover the signatures of President Nixon and Attorney General 
     John N. Mitchell on the judicial commission that hung in his 
     chambers, one of his former clerks, Paul M. Smith, recalled.
       Judge Oakes's name soon became synonymous in some circles 
     with liberal jurisprudence. In 1981, he attracted the 
     attention of a young lawyer in the Reagan administration 
     named John G. Roberts Jr. Mr. Roberts, who is now the chief 
     justice of the United States, told his superiors, according 
     to The Washington Post, that a civil rights policy he 
     advocated was reasonable because ``even such an extreme 
     liberal'' as Judge Oakes had approved it.
       The Second Circuit is based in Manhattan, and it hears 
     appeals from New York, Connecticut and Vermont. Judge Oakes's 
     chambers were in Brattleboro, Vt., and he visited New York to 
     hear arguments and to confer with his colleagues. After his 
     service as chief judge ended in 1992, he assumed senior 
     status, a sort of semi-retirement.
       Besides his wife, of Brattleboro, survivors include a 
     brother, John D. F. Oakes of Wayne, Pa.; three children from 
     an earlier marriage, Cynthia O. Meketa of Bonsall, Calif., 
     Elizabeth H. Oakes of Baltimore, and James L. Oakes of 
     Fairfield, Conn.; and six grandchildren.
       In both his judicial and scholarly work, Judge Oakes 
     advocated environmental protections, procedural rights for 
     people accused of crimes, free speech, open government, and 
     limits on intellectual property laws.
       Among the rulings he was proudest of, his law former clerks 
     said, were a 1980 decision upholding regulations barring sex 
     discrimination in education, a 1987 decision applying the 
     principle of one-person-one-vote to New York City's Board of 
     Estimate, and a 2000 decision allowing illegal immigrants to 
     challenge deportation orders in court. All three decisions 
     were affirmed by the Supreme Court.
       Judge Oakes especially prized the Supreme Court's 
     vindication of his 1971 dissent in the Pentagon Papers case, 
     two of his former clerks, Kathleen M. Sullivan and William 
     Treanor, wrote in The New York Law Journal in March. The 
     majority in the Second Circuit had blocked the publication of 
     the papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War obtained by 
     The New York Times. The Supreme Court reversed that decision.
       ``The press should not be regarded only as a check on 
     inefficient or dishonest government,'' Judge Oakes said in a 
     1982 lecture on the legacy of the Pentagon Papers case. ``It 
     is important that it also be viewed as a powerful vehicle for 
     the effective functioning of a government that by definition 
     is democratic in nature.'' That required, he said, a near-
     absolute ban on prior restraints on publication of news 
     articles.
       Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a statement yesterday 
     that Judge Oakes was the ``model of what a great judge should 
     be--learned in the law, but ever mindful of the people law 
     exists to service.''
       Judge Oakes could be prescient. He dissented from a 1979 
     decision endorsing the use of an anonymous jury in an 
     organized crime trial. The decision, he said, was ``without 
     precedent in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence'' 
     and ``strikes a Vermont judge as bizarre, almost Kafka-
     esque.''
       He added, correctly, as it turned out, that other courts 
     would follow the precedent as surely as ``a flock of sea 
     gulls follows a lobster boat.''

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence 
of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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