One day in the spring of 1969, Harriet Sherman walked by the Civic Center Bank (CCB) in Chicago's Loop and noticed through its plate glass windows that, although there were hardly any customers in the lobby, business was dormant. Many prominent Illinois politicians, including Governor Otto Kerner, had subscribed to the bank and it had opened a couple of years earlier with considerable fanfare. On a hunch that the bank "might be a shuttle bus to Switzerland," Sherman went to a nearby pay phone and called Sherman Skolnick, a perennial citizen gadfly in city and state politics, and voiced her suspicions. The two searched the records of CCB stockholders and noticed that two justices on the Illinois Supreme Court owned a substantial number of shares.

There was nothing wrong with that on the surface. However, Skolnick recalled that two years earlier, the state supreme court had unanimously upheld a trial court's dismissal of a 35 count indictment against Theodore Isaacs who was a prominent Chicago attorney, state revenue commissioner in the Kerner administration, and was also the moving force in organizing and managing the CCB. Chief Justice Roy Solifsburg and former Chief Justice Ray Klingbiel had acquired the CCB stock just before PEOPLE v. ISAACS was handed down.

The justices' "take" was unimpressive even in 1960s dollars. And it was certainly small potatoes by Illinois standards where as CHICAGO DAILY NEWS columnist Mike Royko once suggested, "Where's Mine?" was the state's unofficial political motto. Solifsburg made $3,500 when he sold the stock a year later. Klingbiel's stock--received as a "campaign contribution" after his retention election was over--was worth $2,000. But the timing was bad, very bad. Justice Abe Fortas had just resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court after the revelation that he was receiving "research" money from wheeler-dealer Louis Wolfson who was currently lodged in the federal cooler with a cert petition coming to the Court. Moreover, Solifsburg and Klingbiel were not on the Cook County Circuit Court where various permutations of gift giving seemed to be as common as holiday decorations at Christmas - they were, after all, justices on the state's highest court.

By early June, word of Skolnick and Sherman's findings reached a couple of newspapers and they broke the story. As concern and confusion increased over the next few days, Skolnick filed an unprecedented motion with the Illinois Supreme Court asking that it appoint a special commission to investigate the allegations. (Such investigations would normally be handled by the state courts

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commission, which had the power to remove judges, but that Justice Ray Klingbiel chaired body.) With newspapers printing front page stories and the
legislature mounting its own investigation, the court granted Skolnick's motion and named the presidents of the Chicago and the Illinois bar associations as co-chairs.

The special commission named Chicago lawyer John Paul Stevens as its chief counsel. Thus began the rise of the man who has now served on the U. S. Supreme Court for the past quarter century.

The commission, saddled with a mandate to report by July 31st, held hearings in mid-July. Stevens did most of the questioning and he was determined to get to the bottom of the matter. He was "opposed" by Albert Jennet, a name partner in Chicago's largest law firm, who represented Isaacs. Stevens soon established that both justices took steps to conceal ownership of their CCB stock and that Klingbiel had written the court's opinion in the ISAACS case out of rotation. Filing its report only a few minutes before the deadline, the special commission recommended that Solifsburg and Klingbiel resign. Within a few days each did so.

Many, including Skolnick, had expected the commission to do a whitewash job, a not uncommon occurrence in Illinois. Yet, Stevens ferreted out the complex details from sometimes-hostile witnesses and was not afraid to draw the harsh inferences from what he learned. He was genuinely appalled at the justices' behavior. During seven intense days of hearings, including a couple of evening sessions, Stevens was on the front page winning a reputation for honesty, fearlessness and intelligence.

The limelight put him on the fast track. A year later Senator Charles Percy recommended him to fill a vacancy on the Seventh Circuit. Five years after that, on the advice of Attorney General Edward Levi, former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, President Gerald Ford named Stevens to the Supreme Court position just vacated by William O. Douglas.

Stevens's experience with the CCB stock scandal not only propelled him to the top of the judicial heap; it left lasting impressions on him. In a Foreword to the book, Stevens discusses three lessons learned. First, after questioning all the Illinois Supreme Court justices, Stevens came to believe that they paid little attention to opinions in cases they were not assigned. As a consequence, Stevens declined to join the "cert pool" that all other justices use. Stevens's clerks research every petition, and Stevens reads many of them himself.

Second, although he recognizes that most pro se petitions are without merit, Stevens remembers Skolnick's petition, and has refused to join his colleagues in curbing such petitions though rules authorizing fines or contempt citations for repeated use by self-appointed monitors of government probity. Third, Stevens admits that he "clutters" up the U. S. REPORTS with far more concurrences and dissents than his colleagues write because two members of the Illinois Supreme Court dissented from its ISAACS opinion, but declined to publish the dissent (it was virtually written because one was assigned the case in rotation, but could not obtain majority subscription) or even note that they had voted to the contrary. Serving as counsel to the special commission may not have turned Stevens into a maverick, but it most likely reinforced his tendencies in this direction.

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Fate was not so kind to Theodore Isaacs. Although the Illinois Supreme Court refused to revisit PEOPLE v. ISAACS, Isaacs along with Otto Kerner was indicted in federal court in 1971 for bribery, tax evasion and other crimes for pressuring (while Kerner was governor) a racetrack owner to sell them stock in her company. By then Kerner was on the Seventh Circuit (a colleague of Stevens) and had won national acclaim for his role as Chair of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder. Its report, popularly known as the "Kerner Report" on racial polarization in America, was widely discussed in the late 1960s. Both Isaacs and Kerner were convicted and spent time in prison.

Justices Solifsburg and Klingbiel practiced law for a while and then retired. Both were disgraced, but Klingbiel, perhaps exemplifying the widespread acceptance of Illinois's "where's mine?" political culture, never seemed to realize his breach of ethics. In fact, he had been quite candid (unlike Solifsburg) about his activities in testifying before the special commission. He had put his CCB stock in his grandchildren's names, but the connection was not difficult to make.

Ken Manaster writes about the scandal intimately. Shortly out of law school he was one of Stevens's staff attorneys. He is now on the law faculty at Santa Clara University. He writes well enough to pursue a career as a fiction writer. Although there is too much focus on the hearings to make ILLINOIS JUSTICE a crime novel, Manaster's earlier description of the burgeoning scandal and how it was investigated is reminiscent of several popular crime novels. Scott Turow's books set in fictional Kindle County or Patricia Cornwell's novels about Kay Scarpetta, the Virginia state coroner, come to mind.

ILLINOIS JUSTICE is too descriptive to make a notable contribution to the disciplined study of courts. But it is a good read and reveals in detail a past (we hope) culture of justice and politics in the Prairie State that those of us in most of the other 49 have long vaguely realized, but never quite understood.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Bradley C. Canon.