Civil Rights, Law, and the Federal Courts: The Life of Cecil Poole, 1914-1997
Boalt Hall School of Law Professor: 1970
HickeToday, we want to start at about 1970 when you were just on your way over to Boalt Hall to become a professor. You told me how you ended up your stint as U.S. attorney, so let's start with what you did at Boalt Hall.
Poole
At Boalt Hall, the Regents' Professorship, and the regents, indeed, left it pretty much up to me what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was to make the acquaintance of and hear discussions by these young people. So I had a couple of seminars. The Evidence professor had recently died, and so I did some lectures in his place. I didn't quite know how far I ought to be getting into actually physically preparing to do some writing. I had the feeling that, while I thought this was a great thing that was happening to me, it wasn't going to last always.
Hicke
Hadn't you taught before?
Poole
Yes. I taught five years at Golden Gate.
Hicke
I think you mentioned it, but we didn't really talk about much. What did you teach there?
Poole
The first year, I taught the criminal law classes. I, at that time, was in the District Attorney's Office. Then in the second year, they asked me if I would take the evidence classes, and I said I would, and for a while I did both classes. But I realized that was pretty hard to do. I didn't have all day to study up on these things, and I wanted to make certain that I was prepared. I felt I knew evidence. I had tried, well, I don't know how many cases I had tried as of the time that I first started at Golden
Hicke
Are we talking about now when you were at Boalt Hall?
Poole
I did this first at Golden Gate. These [students] were people who, at that time, were mainly folks who had jobs, and the classes were in the evening. What I told them at Golden Gate was that it was not my intention to have some kind of a secondhand teaching and learning experience here. "I'm going to give you exactly what they give to the people in the first-rate law schools around the country. You may or may not do well on the bar examination with these, but if you stay with me and you take these books, Morgan and MacGuire, and you use that, we'll go through that thing, and you and I will have a great experience on it."
When I went over to Boalt, I had seminars, as well as a couple of classes. My seminars had to deal generally with the prosecutive function, and periodically I would take a class for one of the professors. I'd get them coming in. There would be a large crowd of them that would come in.
Hicke
Sort of guest lecturing in others' classes?
Poole
Yes, but I was a professor. I did enjoy it. Someone asked me what I liked about the classes mostly. I said, "I think it was their irreverence." [Laughter] They would challenge you, even when they couldn't win, but they would challenge you. It was good.
Hicke
That was different from your own experience in law school?
Poole
It's hard for me to remember now, but I think in most of our classes there was a good bit more deference. A lot of time had elapsed between. I remember how deferential we were at Harvard with classes by Dean Landes and by Felix Frankfurter. Those people were pretty powerful, and the smart ones who figured they were going to show how bright they were would finally end up by having themselves just hanging by a noose, particularly Frankfurter. I think I told you about that, didn't I? He would call on somebody to answer a question, and three weeks later that guy's still answering the question. They did that to some extent at other schools. But in any event, I enjoyed the seminars, and I enjoyed the discussion. Because when you get into a discussion, you give them a fifteen-minute talk and then they come after you, and that's good. I liked it.
Didn't I show you that picture with Earl Warren? I was talking to Earl Warren; the Chief Justice of the United States was there.
Hicke
I remember seeing the picture.
Poole
One of the professors over there sent it to me. He found it in his files somewhere and he sent it to me. But anyhow, I took those courses, and I found that when you came to grading people, everybody thought that he or she was better than the instructor. I talked to some of the old pros over there, and I said, "I would suppose there is some tendency on the part of new people who come here to sort of grade down, on the theory that they want to show the class that they're not too smart, and `To meet my standards you've got to do more.' That's a great temptation, I'm sure of that. But," I said, "I'll only do it to a couple of them." [Laughs] I also had some self-critiquing from some of them too. I would tell them some of my experiences in the class and what had happened and what my response was, and they wouldn't say you're wrong, but they'd get into a dialogue.
Hicke
Alternatives and that sort of thing?
Poole
Yes, and I appreciated that very much too.
Hicke
That must have been interesting.
Poole
I had an office, and I would go in there, and I was writing a lot of miscellaneous things, but I didn't know whether I wanted to really write. Deep in my heart, I knew that I was never going catch up with that fugitive SJD that I didn't get at Harvard, and so I wasn't kidding myself. I was pretty realistic about that. What I really started to work on was a manual dealing with the contact between state court prosecutors and people in the law and federal court, since I had eight and a half years of one and eight and a half years of the other. I got, I don't know, forty or fifty pages of it. The truth is I simply abandoned it.
Hicke
That's too bad.
Poole
There were a lot of distractions. I spent a lot of time talking to the students that I had, and I would have a time set with them to come to the office and talk to me. I would give them an option, if they wanted it, to pick the subject. I told them that "Your response to what has happened in class may be good, bad or indifferent, but I want you to tell me what it is, because that way you can help to teach me too." Some of them would. Some of them were very reluctant to do so, but then some of them were forthright.
I remember one student came in. I gave her a grade, and she thought that she was much better than that. She came to see me and she brought her husband. She was a young person, and she brought her husband. I told her that "If I suggested to you that it would be better if your husband weren't here, I think that would defeat whatever you had in mind in coming with him. So let's let him sit down and let him hear. You can ask some questions if you want to." So we talked about forty-five minutes. What she really wanted was to know if I wouldn't give her a higher grade. I said, "It was my impression of you that you are retentive and bright, but I also got the feeling that you're not malleable and entertain divergent points of view." She had told me that she was a third-year student, and she had made an application to one of the schools in the northwest on the coast. I told her that the grade system is an arbitrary way of trying to encompass a lot of things into a mark. It's not really possible to do that, and there are things that many of the people in the class did, which, if I seized that as the indicia, would mean either that they got high up, far down, or somewhere in the throwaways. I guess, to tell you the truth, I learned more from them than they learned from me. I would ask them a lot of questions about why they felt this way. They were anti-authority all the way.
I told you about the chap who came wearing the hat, didn't I? There was one chap—he had a hat, and he wore it in the class. Every now and then, I would see him looking at me. I guess he was saying, "Aren't you going to ask me about my hat?" I never said a word to him. So when his time came for a conference at my office, he came in and he didn't have his hat on. So we talked and talked, not about that. We talked about a number of things. He started to go, and he said, "Mr. Poole, I thought maybe you didn't like my wearing the hat in class. So I'm kind of surprised today, you didn't say anything about it, about the absence of it." I said, "In the classroom, I assumed that that's how you grew up, that you wore your hat indoors. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as your parents didn't object to it, I'm not going to." [Laughs] He walked out of my office. As he started pushing the door to, he opened it and he said, "Boo."
Hicke
He wanted you to mention it.
Poole
Yes, he really did. I was also much interested in the academic programs, the lectures, the advent on campus of some well-known or highly regarded person out of business or government or law or whatever it was, and I went to a lot of those. The year passed before I realized it. The year went, and by that time my friends down in the law office were saying, "Hey, are you going to take that second year or not?" And I said, "I doubt it, but I'm still
Hicke
I think it's really valuable for students to have a professor who has been so involved.
Poole
They asked a lot of questions. "What does a jury do in a room when they're there?" questions like that. "How do you know what kind of arguments to make to the jury? Do you make a different argument to a jury that you think, maybe let's put it this way, may be bright and smart and a different one to those who are not?" I said, "It's hard to characterize a whole jury that way." I said, "One of the things that I think you ought to know is that—certainly this is true in the private sector and in the civil cases—lawyers don't simply go in and face a jury that they know nothing about. They have all these people who research them. They'll give you stuff like this [demonstrates] on them: you know who this person is, what his education is, how he is registered, where he works, and all this sort of thing."
Hicke
Favorite breakfast?
Poole
Yes. So I said, "When I first started trying cases, they didn't do much of that at all. It wasn't really until later on that I realized that they were doing that. So I would have police and the intelligence people run out on them what was in the—it wasn't the computers—but they would run all this stuff out on these machines."
Hicke
IBM card machines?
Poole
Yes, and get all that they could get. And I said, "I'll tell you, one of the things I learned from that was to remember not to count on what you believe the other side is necessarily going to produce. In other words, don't think that a witness who is a percipient witness is necessarily going to be produced. He's not friendly to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor will have an uphill climb if he tries to get him, but don't be certain of that."
I told them a little anecdote that I had, a true thing that happened to me when I was in the District Attorney's Office some
Hicke
Don't leave town tonight.
Poole
Yes. On the second time, I said to the lawyer when we started the second trial, "I'm going to enjoy this, because you're going to have to put him back on and have him say exactly what he said before, and he's a liar, and you know it, and I know it."
Hicke
And that will be tough.
Poole
I said, "I can prove it now. So let's make out some kind of a deal." He said, "How about a sentence where he gets sent to San Quentin, but suspend that and make him do a year in the county jail." I said, "A thousand dollar fine." He said, "Okay." I said, "Tell us what he did with that equipment that he stole." He said, "Oh, he didn't steal it. Let's go to trial."
Anyhow, I told some of these students, "Don't forget now, what that lawyer did was, he didn't have a defense if I'd had all my witnesses there. When they didn't have it, he just threw his case out the window, and he proceeded to have the guy get up on the stand and say "I wasn't there. It's the wrong people." Then I told them some other things that I used to do, and I told them some things about how the grand jury works, how the state grand jury works, and how the federal grand jury operates, how many of the decisions made by a grand jury are communicated down the chain to assistants, and whether they have any real independence. And I said, "For the most part, they do, because while you can tell someone what you think are the strong stress points that they
I used to go around the courts, and I would slide surreptitiously into the back row and watch and see how my people were doing when I was U.S. attorney. They would not be paying attention back there. I went into a federal courtroom, and one of my assistants was Terry Hatter, and he is now a federal judge. Remember he was the one who held that the army couldn't discharge that gay master sergeant, or whatever he was. Anyhow, I had brought Terry to San Francisco, and he was with me about, I guess, three or four years. This was early in his days, and I went to the courtroom. I was making rounds that afternoon. I would sort of slide in there and sit down. The judge saw me—Judge Oliver Carter, who is long since dead. This was a special proceeding. It was a motion to quash certain of the evidence. I think it was a narcotics case, but I don't remember too much now. Anyhow, the arresting officers were there, and they were being examined. In those old courtrooms at Seventh and Mission, they had the brass rails, the round brass rails, and one was about this high [demonstrates]—
Hicke
Three feet.
Poole
And one was about this high [demonstrates]. So the lawyers sometimes had a habit of putting their foot on one of the lower brass rails and talking in front of it, and the judges hated that, because then they had to polish the brass again. Anyhow, when I went in there Terry was halfway sitting on the upper rail, so I shifted a little bit, and there was another assistant sitting in the very back of the room next to me. His name was Bob Marder. I said, "Marder, you go up to Hatter and tell him I said to get his butt off that rail, get in front of the judge, and don't come within five feet of that rail anymore." So he went up there and told him that, and Judge Carter was looking at him like this. [demonstrates]
Hicke
Nodded and smiled.
Poole
I said, "You want to beware of things like that." In other words, when you go in there, people expect that you are representing the state or the federal government, so you have a weighty responsibility, and you can't do all the things that some others can do.
Hicke
As a U.S. attorney, or whatever?
Poole
That's right, that's right. Anyhow, Terry didn't get over that for a long time. I told some of the kids at Boalt about that.
I got to know, as I say, a lot of the professors and the teachers. I don't get over to Boalt very much anymore. I have gone there for moot courts.
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb4779n9p8&brand=oac4
Title: Civil rights, law, and the federal courts : oral history transcript : the life of Cecil Poole, 1914-1917 / Cecil F. Poole
By: Poole, Cecil F., 1914-1997, Interviewee, Coblentz, William K, Author, Hicke, Carole. ivr, Interviewer
Date: 1997
Contributing Institution: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
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