Legal News

One Way of Looking at Clinton: Hillary, Esq.

By Peter Lattman

Since we’re (1) focused on women and the law today and (2) have presidential politics on the brain, let’s take a look at Hillary Clinton, shall we? Today’s NYT reviews Susan Morrison’s “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary.” The Times calls it “an intriguing but highly uneven anthology of reflections about Mrs. Clinton by a spectrum of well-known female writers.”

Our favorite way of looking at Hillary Clinton is looking at her as a lawyer. And whaddya know Law Blog readers, that’s one of the thirty ways this book looks at her too! From the Times review:

One of the more illuminating essays to look at Mrs. Clinton through a single narrow lens is Susan Lehman’s chapter on Hillary as a “product of corporate legal culture,” shaped by a decade and a half at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. Mrs. Clinton’s self-consciousness and “lawyerly inclination to avoid risk and run everything past the pollsters,” Ms. Lehman argues, are qualities that corporate attorneys are trained to cultivate, just as “the ability to argue all sides of an argument” is “a hallmark of the lawyerly” mind. “Neither Hillary Clinton nor the average corporate law partner is likely to make anyone’s blood jump or their heart sing,” Ms. Lehman concludes. “When you are in trouble, however — real trouble — it may be that the person you want to see isn’t the guy who wows you with his wit and charisma but someone who has really done her homework, pored over all the boring details and then gone back over them again, just for fun.”

Beloved Law Blog readers, are we vivisecting Hillary to a fault here or is there some truth in this hyper-analysis?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 15, 2008 (boomark / email).