By Alan M. Dershowitz
The Daily Record Newswire
“William P. Homans Jr.: A Life in Court”
By Mark S. Brodin
Vandeplas Publishing, 2010
320 pages
$49.95/hardcover
$29.95/trade
William P. Homans Jr. was an original. We will never see the likes of him again. He was also a walking contradiction.
First and foremost, Homans was a great criminal lawyer, one of the very best I have ever encountered in my nearly half-century of practicing criminal law in the Boston area.
He was a Brahmin, born to aristocracy and some wealth, who lived much of his life on the verge of bankruptcy and died owing money.
He represented primarily those whom many Brahmins detested. To be sure, there was a longstanding Brahmin tradition of noblesse oblige, but Homans never acted out of such elitist guilt. Instead, he became as one with the poorest and most outcast of his clients.
The contradictions in his life became evident quite early. His parents apparently entertained and supported a Nazi friend of Hitler who had attended Harvard and had a Brahmin ancestor. (His parents were not alone in cavorting with Nazis during the 1930s. The Harvard establishment, led by President James Bryant Conant, collaborated with Nazi academics and political figures.)
Yet young Bill, right out of Harvard, volunteered to join the English Navy to fight Hitler even before Pearl Harbor. His war years, though heroic, showed early signs of what was to plague his later years. He drank too much, was often depressed, and may even have attempted suicide shortly after his mother died.
Following the war, he tried practicing corporate law but hated it, once actually throwing a batch of boring legal papers out the window of his law office.
Ultimately, he became one of the most important figures in the Boston legal community during the second half of the 20th century. His cases are legendary, having touched on the most important issues of the day.
He certainly followed the advice of his fellow Brahmin, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in living the passion of his times. Representing his clients, he challenged the criminalization of abortion, the overuse of pornography laws, the red baiting of the 1950s, the gay baiting of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the death penalty and the perennial plague of Massachusetts political life — pervasive corruption, accepted, even gleefully acknowledged, at the highest levels of government.
Those cases and causes made him a highly visible and much admired lawyer, but he also represented the downtrodden in many obscure cases that have been brought to life by Mark Brodin’s excellent account of his fascinating, though troubled, life.
And troubled it was. Homans struggled with alcohol and cigarette addiction, domestic discord, an inability to deal with his finances, and neglect of his health.
If those difficulties affected his representation of clients, it was not obvious to anyone who ever saw him in court or checked the results of his cases. He won many cases that lesser lawyers would have lost or pleaded. He lost some, of course, as all lawyers do, but never because of lack of effort or passion on his part.
Homans was a complicated man. I worked with him, though peripherally, on some cases. I drank with him once or twice. I served with him on the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and I am very close to one of his best friends in the world, another great lawyer, James Hamilton, who was his law partner for several years.
In my discussions with Homans, it was difficult to discern a distinctive political philosophy. He called himself a conservative who sought justice for all, but by the time I knew him, he certainly seemed to be a liberal seeking justice for all.
His friends and associates ran the political, ideological, racial and religious spectrum. He tended to think in concrete rather than philosophical terms. His passion was directed at the case of the moment and how to win it. His philosophy was the sum total of his work, and his work was the most important part of his life.
His work should inspire young lawyers, but his life should not serve as a model of balance — as he would have been the first to acknowledge.
Because of this lack of balance, the people of the commonwealth were denied the opportunity to have Homans appointed to the judiciary. Both Govs. Frank Sargent and Michael Dukakis wanted to appoint Homans
to be a judge, but they lacked the courage to do so because he owed back taxes. Yet they both appointed judges with far less integrity, financial and otherwise. What a great Judge Homans would have been!
Writing a fair biography of so complex a person provides a real challenge. Brodin, a professor at Boston College Law School, met that challenge. He did not sensationalize the negatives, nor did he ignore them. His book perfectly reflects the actual life of William Homans by devoting the vast majority of pages to his work as Homans devoted the vast majority of his hours to work.
It also acknowledges Homans’ personal failings, as Homans himself always did. In one respect, the book does not reflect the life of its wonderful subject: Brodin has written the book with the balance that Homans lacked in his own life.
Perhaps the best summary of the contributions of Homans was provided by Judge Julian T. Houston, who had been mentored by him. He described Homans as:
“A hero to every lawyer in this Commonwealth who knows him, not only because of his extraordinary career, but also because he has never succumbed to bitterness or turned his back on his responsibilities to his clients. Despite the toll that such a career has taken, despite the personal and professional sacrifices and disappointments, he is and has always been and will always be the living embodiment of grace under pressure.”
Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard Law School.
