William F. Causey Complete Oral History

William Causey, Esq.
Oral History Project
The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit

Oral History Project United States Courts
The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit
District of Columbia Circuit
William Causey, Esq.
Interview conducted by: Eugene Goldman, Esq.
December 4, 2024

ORAL HISTORY OF HONORABLE WILLIAM CAUSEY, ESQ.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. i
Oral History Agreements
William Causey, Esq…. ………………………………………………………………………………… iii
Eugene Goldman, Esq. ……………………………………………………………………………………v
Oral History Transcript of Interview
December 4, 2024 ………………………………………………………………………………………….1
Index …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. A-1
Table of Cases and Statutes …………………………………………………………………………………B-1
Biographical Sketches
William Causey, Esq….. ……………………………………………………………………………C-1
Eugene Goldman, Esq. ……………………………………………………………………………. D-1

NOTE
The following pages record interviews conducted on the dates indicated. The interviews were
recorded digitally or on cassette tape, and the interviewee and the interviewer have been afforded
an opportunity to review and edit the transcript.
The contents hereof and all literary rights pertaining hereto are governed by, and are subject to,
the Oral History Agreements included herewith.
© 2025 Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit.
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
The goal of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia
Circuit is to preserve the recollections of the judges of the Courts of the District of Columbia
Circuit and lawyers, court staff, and others who played important roles in the history of the
Circuit. The Project began in 1991. Oral history interviews are conducted by volunteer
attorneys who are trained by the Society. Before donating the oral history to the Society, both
the subject of the history and the interviewer have had an opportunity to review and edit the
transcripts.
Indexed transcripts of the oral histories and related documents are available in the
Judges’ Library in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, 333 Constitution Avenue,
N.W., Washington, D.C., the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the library of
the Historical Society of the District of Columbia
With the permission of the person being interviewed, oral histories are also available on
the Internet through the Society’s Web site, www.dcchs.org. Audio recordings of most
interviews, as well as electronic versions of the transcripts, are in the custody of the Society.

Schedule A to Oral History Donation Agreement of Interviewer
Eugene I. Goldman
Donor Name
Voice recordings (including but not limited to digital recordings and cassette tapes) and
transcripts resulting from the oral history interviews of William F. Causey conducted by Eugene I.
Goldman on the following dates:
Interview No. Date Description of
Media Containing
Voice Recordings
Transcript Page
Numbers
1 12/4/2024 MP4 81
– 1 –
Oral History of William F. Causey
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is Eugene Goldman, and the
interviewee is William F. Causey. The interview took place via Zoom on Wednesday,
December 4, 2024.
MR. GOLDMAN: Good morning, Bill. Are you ready to go?
MR. CAUSEY: Good morning, Gene. Yes, I am. Thank you for doing this.
MR. GOLDMAN: My pleasure. Can you please provide us with some background on your
early years, where you grew up, and something that has stayed with you
since birth?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. I was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 20, 1949, which
happened to be the day of President Harry Truman’s inauguration. I was
born with the congenital heart condition of pulmonary stenosis, which
means that the pulmonary valve which permits blood flow from the heart
to the lungs was not functioning properly, so I was not getting enough
oxygen in my blood system. I was a classic Blue Baby.
My mother was an Army nurse in World War II, and she could see
within a few months after my birth that something was wrong. I struggled
to move a lot, and my fingertips and lips were bluish. Fortunately, I was
growing up in Baltimore. She took me to Johns Hopkins Hospital, and I
was seen by an incredibly talented pediatric cardiologist at Hopkins by the
name of Helen Taussig. And in fact, a book has just been written about Dr.
Taussig’s fascinating life.
Dr. Taussig diagnosed my pulmonary stenosis and followed me for
the first couple years. She was deaf and would use her fingertips to
– 2 –
“listen” to my heart murmur. As my condition got worse, she urged
Dr. Alfred Blalock, the famous heart surgeon at Hopkins and with whom
Dr. Taussig had worked for many years to perfect the Blue Baby
operation. She asked Dr. Blalock to operate on me. I was three years old at
the time. Dr. Taussig told me years later that she asked Dr. Blalock to
operate on me and that he replied, “Helen, I don’t do three-year-olds. They
don’t survive the operation.” Dr. Taussig then said, “well if you don’t
operate on him, he’s going to die.” Dr.Taussig said Dr. Blalock looked at
her for a few moments and then said, “Helen, I’ll do it for you.”
So, all this occurred before the development of the heart lung
machine, which is why there was a great risk with my surgery. The heart
lung machine wasn’t developed until several years later. So, I was placed
on a block of ice to lower my heart rate for the surgery. My open heart
surgery at Hopkins was in April 1952. I survived the surgery well and
have done well to this day, seventy two years later.
Without doubt, the best thing my mother did for me, other than
take me to see Dr. Taussig, was to tell me in my very early years, “you’re
not special. You’re just like every other kid. Don’t think you’re unique
because of your heart surgery. You are like everybody else, so go be like
everybody else.” That was a great piece of advice from my mother. I had
this huge scar across my chest, the classic horizontal Blalock incision, and
as a little boy, it was embarrassing to have other children stare at me. But
my mother was right, so I would act like every other child I was around. I
– 3 –
went to public school. I played like the other kids and participated in
sports all through high school and then a little later more seriously later in
life until my budding baseball career abruptly ended with a rotator cuff
injury.
MR. GOLDMAN: I was going to ask you that some people who have developed conditions
early on associate with others within an organization or an association that
looks after people with similar conditions. Have you maintained an
interest with an organization that is associated with that early condition?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. I have. Several years ago, I joined the Board of a nonprofit
organization known as the Adult Congenital Heart Association. It’s a
national organization that was started about 26 years ago. It deals with
issues that affect adults who have a congenital heart condition. For many
years after the 1950s and early 1960s, when children who had surgery
when they were young and grew up to be teens and young adults, there
were very few cardiologists who were trained to deal with their conditions
as an adult, so many of them dropped off the page of care. The ACHA was
formed to work with those adults and help them get care. I wanted to give
back to the heart medical community, and I’m now serving on the board of
this organization. It is very fulfilling work.
MR. GOLDMAN: Good. Let’s track your early college years, and to the extent you were
diverted by some other interests which interfered with the completion of
school, tell us about your political activities early on.
– 4 –
MR. CAUSEY: When I was growing up, I wanted to be a fireman, then an astronaut, then
a baseball player, by the time of high school, a teacher. Because I was
living in Baltimore, one of the best colleges in the area for teaching was
Towson State College. It is now called Towson State University. I went
there my freshman year thinking I was going to be a teacher.
I was always interested in politics, When I was in high school, I
would play hooky from school at times and take the train to Washington,
DC to walk the halls of Congress and watch the Supreme Court. One day,
on a Friday afternoon in April of 1967, I was in what was called then the
New Senate Office Building. Late that afternoon as I was about to get on
an elevator, Senator Robert Kennedy entered the elevator. He was alone.
He started asking me all kinds of questions. Was I a student? What did I
think about the war in Vietnam? What are you studying in school? We got
off the elevator and he kept asking me questions as we walked down this
long corridor to his office. He just kept asking me questions. He was very
friendly. I remember that he looked a lot older than he looked on
television, and he was shorter but with a bit of salt and pepper hair. We
got to his office, and he said I want you to give my secretary your name,
address, and phone number, which I did. Her name was Angie Novello.
Then let’s fast forward about a year to March 1968. I was about to
end my freshman year at Towson. I was living at home, and one Sunday
afternoon I received a phone call from a Washington lawyer named Fred
Dutton who said he was working with Robert Kennedy and told me that
– 5 –
Kennedy had decided to run for president. Dutton asked if I wanted to be
involved in the campaign and to work with a young lawyer in Baltimore
named Paul Sarbanes. Dutton said that Sarbanes was going to head up the
Kennedy campaign in Maryland with several other local lawyers and
politicians, including a lawyer named Joseph H. H. Kaplan who worked
with Sarbanes at Venable, Baejter & Howard in Baltimore, and Charles
Moylan, Jr., who was the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City and later a
judge on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. I said absolutely.
I joined the campaign within a week after Kennedy announced on
March 16, 1968. We had a small makeshift storefront office on Baltimore
Street downtown. I started working at the office while still going to
school. In about two weeks Sarbanes told me that Kennedy’s campaign in
Indiana was not doing very well. The Indiana primary was important
because it was the first presidential primary in a conservative state, and
Kennedy had to make a good showing. Sarbanes wanted me to help
organize the student groups in Indiana for Kennedy. I talked to my
academic advisor at Towson, and he said that I could take a leave of
absence and make up the coursework later. Soon I was on a bus with Joe
Kaplan, a law partner of Sarbanes working on the campaign, to
Indianapolis. I was in Indiana until the primary on May 7, 1968. I stayed
at Ball State University, and travelled all over the state, many times with
Kennedy. Kennedy won the primary.
MR. GOLDMAN: What campaign work did you do on the ground? Did that include Oregon?
– 6 –
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. I was in Indiana for about six weeks, organizing and speaking to
student groups in all the major universities in Indiana – IU, Purdue, Ball
State. I traveled a lot with Kennedy around the state, mostly when he went
to college campuses. It was a very heady experience. After Indiana I was
expecting to come back to Baltimore to finish my freshman year at
Towson, but the campaign wanted me to stay on and travel in the next
primaries, again helping to organize student groups and speak to college
students. I was in Nebraska for a few days, then on to Oregon. The
campaign was very worried about Oregon. It was a Democratic state, but it
was a very independent state, and polls were showing Eugene McCarthy
was doing very well. Of course, as you know, Kennedy lost Oregon.
MR. GOLDMAN: That was I think the only Kennedy family loss up until that point. How did
that feel to the folks in the campaign at that point?
MR. CAUSEY: I think it was a gut punch to just about everyone but Kennedy. He was
very much a pragmatist and realist. The person who seemed to be least
affected by the Oregon loss was RFK. I think he could tell by campaigning
in Oregon that things weren’t going well, and I think he was anticipating
possibly losing. But the Kennedy family, they’re fighters. Word spread
quickly within the campaign, that look, it’s now on to California, and let’s
make sure we win there because if we don’t win California, this is all over.
MR. GOLDMAN: Of course, it has a greater minority population than Oregon by far.
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. California was very different than Oregon. The crowds in California
were huge and friendly, almost scary. I was going to go down and work
– 7 –
the California campaign after Oregon, but I stayed mostly in Northern
California, which had a more active and progressive student population
than Southern California. I was in San Francisco with Ted Kennedy and
his people when RFK was shot, and then everything, of course, came to an
abrupt and very sad end.
After the funeral in New York City, I came home and was on the
train platform at Penn Station in Baltimore with Sarbanes, Kaplan,
Moylan, and all the Maryland Kennedy people, Ted Venetoulis, who was
the Baltimore County Executive, and John Carrol Byrnes, who later
became a judge. I remember like it was yesterday the train slowly rolling
through the train station with the bell slowly ringing. After about a week, I
got the Dean at Towson to get me into a couple of courses that summer,
and it was then that I decided to transfer to American University in
Washington that Fall.
MR. GOLDMAN: Why did you make the change?
MR. CAUSEY: After the RFK campaign, I became much more politically aware and
interested in politics. I thought I was pretty good at talking and debating
with groups, so I decided that maybe instead of teaching, I should go to
law school and think about a political career. Paul Sarbanes, Joe Kaplan,
Charles Moylan and others in Baltimore politics encouraged me to do that.
And it made sense if I was going to do that, to come to Washington, and to
American University because its School of Government and Public
Administration had a great reputation. I figured if I wanted to be a lawyer
– 8 –
in Washington, it’d probably be a good idea to go to the school of
government in Washington. So that’s why I went to AU. Plus, I love the
city of Washington, so it was great to make the change. And to start living
on my own. One of the best decisions of my life.
MR. GOLDMAN: You were there during turbulent times like 1970, 1971? Could you
describe your experience during those turbulent times?
MR. CAUSEY: As soon as I got to AU in the Fall of 1968, I think because people knew I
had worked on the Kennedy campaign, I was elected President of the
Young Democrats, and that was the campaign year when Humphrey and
Nixon were running for president. The Young Democrats were quite
active that Fall. It was great fun after a sad summer, and I got to know a
lot of students on campus.
One incident that occurred at AU that I remember well involves
the University’s library. When I arrived at AU, there was no main library
building. The so-called library was scattered among several buildings on
campus, and there was a lot of complaints from students and faculty. One
day in early 1970, five of us decided to have an event that would make the
point about the lack of a library. We decided to have a groundbreaking
ceremony for a new library. We got spoons from the cafeteria, called the
student newspaper to be present to take a photo and write a story about the
event, and we picked the spot where for the groundbreaking ceremony
where we thought the library should be built. The next day our picture was
– 9 –
in the student paper, and there was a story talking about the absence of a
library building on campus. That was all people talked about for weeks.
By early 1970, I think in part because of the library story, many
students said to me that I should run for president of the student
government, and so I did. There were four other candidates at the time, a
wide spectrum of political interest and student population diversity, so it
was a very interesting campaign. I didn’t win outright. I had a runoff with
one other candidate, a very conservative young person who was very
ambitious to be student body president and who was a fierce competitor in
that campaign. I won that runoff election. I never did find out what the
vote total was, but I won the election, and I went on to be president of the
student government. I was sworn in four days before Kent State happened
in May of 1970.
You can imagine the turmoil not only that Spring, but in the
following year, with Kent State and the war in Vietnam and the first year
of Nixon. It was quite a turbulent time.
We had a very serious, well-known publicized demonstration at
American University in May 1970 as a result of the invasion of Cambodia
and the killings at Kent State in an area adjacent to the university known
as Ward Circle, the spot where the university is located in Northwest
Washington, DC. There was police involvement, and a number of people
were arrested. It was a pretty ugly situation, and here I was president of
– 10 –
the student government four days after Kent State. It happened to be the
only time I was teargassed, and it is not a pleasant experience.
Anyhow, I got to know George Williams, the president of the
University, very well because we had to work closely together during
these turbulent times on campus. Although George Williams and I were
different in many ways, we got along very well. It was a very interesting
time, and I thoroughly enjoyed my year as student body president,
including some of the people I met and appointed to positions within the
student government. One of the issues I was not able to promote with
Williams as the new student body president was the library issue. Another
issue another I promoted with Williams as student body president was that
the Board of Trustees of the University should have a recent graduate on
the Board. I convinced Williams that this was a good idea and he helped
get that passed, along with Barrett Prettyman, a well-known lawyer in DC
who was on the Board and who I had first met in Oregon in the Kennedy
campaign.
Shortly after I graduated in the Spring of 1971, the Board invited
me to become the first former student board member. I think Williams
wanted me on the Board because he also was lobbying the board for
money for a new library. I served on the AU Board for two years. During
my service, the board passed the funding for the new library. It now sits on
campus, on the exact spot where the five of us had the groundbreaking
ceremony a year earlier.
– 11 –
MR. GOLDMAN: At what point did your interest in attending law school solidify?
MR. CAUSEY: By the time I got to AU in 1968, I knew I wanted to go to law school. I
continued to keep in contact with some of the people on the Hill that I had
met in the Kennedy campaign as well as people in Baltimore such as Paul
Sarbanes and Joe Kaplan. I thought at the time that I might want to go
back to Baltimore and run for public office someday.
By this time, Paul Sarbanes was in the House of Representatives.
He later went on to be a very important element in the impeachment of
Richard Nixon, and Sarbanes and I kept in touch. Sarbanes would always
say to me every time I would see him that I should run for either the state
legislature or maybe even Congress. Of course I was flattered, and I
always had it in the back of my mind to maybe do that someday.
MR. GOLDMAN: So you attended law school. Where?
MR. CAUSEY: I did return to Baltimore for law school at the University of Maryland.
MR. GOLDMAN: Where is that law school located?
MR. CAUSEY: It’s in downtown Baltimore, near the University of Maryland Medical
School. I got a piece of advice from somebody very early on when I was
admitted to Maryland. They said law school is hard, but not that hard.
You’re going to do well. You should get yourself a parttime job during the
day somewhere in the judicial system that would enhance your
development in law school and as a young lawyer. I became a law clerk to
Chief Judge Dulany Foster, who was the chief judge of the courts in
Baltimore City at the time. And I served in that job during the entire time I
– 12 –
was in law school. In many ways, it gave me a better legal education than
I was receiving in the classroom.
So I would go to work clerking for the judge during the day and
walk the few blocks to law school at night, It was a great learning
experience for three years. I did not like law school, but I learned so much
clerking for Judge Foster.
MR. GOLDMAN: How did the law school treat night students?
MR. CAUSEY: I think very well. We had a large night school population. When I went on
to teach later at Georgetown Law School, I quickly realized that night
students were in many ways more engaging students than day students.
They had more living experience. They were more mature – many of them
had families and were working like I was. They took their legal education
more seriously. It wasn’t a continuation of college, which is how a lot of
day students viewed law school. Although I did not enjoy the subject of
many of the classes I had to take, I was not enthralled at the time with
property or secured transactions or domestic relations, I thought by and
large my night school education at Maryland was excellent, and I had
some great professors.
MR. GOLDMAN: I think that is absolutely correct. People in the class included when I went
to night school, guys and women in the service who were using their
benefits to go to law school, serving in our military, Department of
Defense, other intelligence agencies. You may have also experienced
women who were now out of the house in terms of development of their
– 13 –
children. It was now their time to do something. So what I sense from you
is you learned a lot about the maturity of your classmates even though you
would be could be a considered a so-called baby compared to them.
MR. CAUSEY: Right. But still, what was great for me about that time was during the day,
I’m working with all the lawyers in Baltimore City being essentially the
extended arm of the chief judge, so everybody would treat me well even
though I was just a law student. And then at night, I’d go to law school
and be with all these wonderful students that were in my class. It was a
great experience.
MR. GOLDMAN: Give us a minute or two on Judge Foster, for whom you clerked.
MR. CAUSEY: Delany Foster came from a very old and famous Maryland family. His
family went back to almost the beginning of the colony of Maryland in the
early 1600s. Being the chief judge, he knew everyone and certainly most
of the lawyers in the city. This was in the early 1970s. The judge later told
me that he thought I was the best law clerk he ever had, but I am sure he
said that to all his law clerks. But he did ask me to stay for two additional
years. One of my most prized books to this day is a leatherbound copy of
Black’s Law Dictionary that the Judge gave me when my service ended
that has a wonderful inscription from him.
Judge Foster was an avid reader, and we always loved to talk about
the books we were reading. I remember that we both loved the novel Burr
by Gore Vidal that came out then, and the judge and I talked for hours
about that book. He was a great fan of early American history. He was
– 14 –
also a big fan of Teddy White’s book The Making of the President 1960,
and we would talk a lot about that book. We also talked a lot about my
experiences in the Kennedy campaign. Judge Foster was a conservative
Democrat, and he was not enamored with RFK. I am not sure I convinced
him of his errors, but we had some great discussions.
Judge Foster was an early riser, and he would always be in
chambers when I arrived at about 8:30 in the morning. He was a fairly
large man and had quite a presence on the bench, and I think many
lawyers were intimidated by him. And he knew how to move cases along.
One of the things he was responsible for as chief judge was to grant
requests for postponements in criminal cases. I suggested that we should
keep a record of the number and reasons for the postponements, and he
and I developed a form for lawyers to use to fill out with the name of the
case and the reason for the postponement request, and the lawyers had to
see me first to get the form and fill it out. The judge wanted to have a form
to start keeping a record of postponements in the criminal court. After the
lawyers filled out the form, I would then take the lawyers in to see the
judge. The judge was very stingy with granting criminal postponements. If
you did not have a good reason, forget it. Word quickly got around the
courthouse that you had to have a good reason for a postponement. Many
of the lawyers would ask me if they thought the judge would accept their
reasons for a postponement before filling out the form. Of course, I said I
have no idea, although I usually could tell what the judge would do. I
– 15 –
think the lawyers eventually did not want to ask for a postponement and
have it denied because that would look bad to the clients. And that did
eventually reduce the number of postponement requests, which is what the
judge wanted to happen in the first place.
So, I got to know just about every criminal lawyer and prosecutor
in Baltimore at the time. And every time the Supreme Court or the
Maryland courts would decide a case that involved criminal procedure, he
asked me to read the opinions and brief him on what they said and to give
him a copy of the opinions with my highlighting and markings.
I also recall that there were times when trial judges throughout
Maryland had to sit by designation to hear cases in the Maryland Court of
Appeals or Special Appeals, which trial judges had to do occasionally. By
practice, he was exempt from doing this because he was chief judge, but
he always insisted on sitting. He wanted to do nothing less than all the
other judges. He would take me down with him to Annapolis to listen to
the arguments, and then we would talk about the cases on the ride back to
Baltimore, and he would ask me to draft an opinion. It was like serving as
an appellate law clerk. I always thought my drafts were quite good, but he
always found something to add or change.
I remember one case that involved the Maryland rule called the
boulevard rule. It was what was otherwise known as the right-of-way rule
that provided that when cars would approach an intersection at the same
time and there was no traffic light or stop sign, the car on the driver’s right
– 16 –
had the right-of-way to proceed before the others. There was a serious
accident involving a death that involved the application of this rule. I was
in law school and did not fully appreciate why he, as chief judge with all
he had to deal with in Baltimore City, had to spend time on this case that
essentially was an interpretation of traffic law. But I was impressed that he
took so much time to read the trial record and read the cases to decide the
case. It was a lesson for me that every case is important to the parties, and
that details and facts mattered. An important learning lesson for a young
lawyer that I was not learning in law school.
Judge Foster had a summer beach house in Bethany Beach, and
every summer he would invite me down for a long weekend with him and
his wife. We would sometimes go out to dinner. Judge Foster was a huge
fan of hard crabs. We would see people in the restaurant in Delaware who
knew him by sight. He seemed to know everyone wherever he went. He
had great political instincts and would shake every hand with a smile.
He passed away about four or five years after I left working for
him. He had an impressive funeral in Baltimore that brought out the entire
legal and political community.
MR. GOLDMAN: Looking at your history, particularly your work experience on the Hill, I
found it quite relevant to recent years discussion about the reach of the
Presidential Records Act. Can you tell us your first venture working on
Capitol Hill and getting into the original Act, its meaning, because it
– 17 –
became quite an issue for President Trump with respect to the prosecution
in Florida.
MR. CAUSEY: It’s a bit of a long story, but I’ll try and compress it as best as I can.
There’s something in this story about being at the right place at the right
time.
When I was in my last year at law school, Maryland required
students to write a paper, and you had to get a faculty member to be your
advisor for the paper. I asked Peter Quint, who taught Constitutional Law,
to be my advisor. He was a terrific professor, a very young guy, which is
probably why most students related to him. He said he would be happy to
be my advisor but under one condition, that he selected the topic. This was
in the Fall of 1974. Professor Quint wanted me to write a paper on who
legally owns the papers of the President of the United States when the
president leaves office. I thought that was an interesting topic and I said
okay.
For my research, I read what happened to the presidential papers of
just about every president of the United States, which ranged from
bonfires at the end of the term to giving them to libraries and museums for
presidential libraires to hiding them under the bed. There was no policy or
law at all for what happened with presidential papers. So, in my paper I
concluded that there ought to be a uniform federal standard for what
happens with presidential papers. I didn’t come down on who should have
– 18 –
them or who should have ownership, just that there should be a federal
standard used by all departing presidents.
To this day, I have to sadly say that I cannot find that paper. I have
no idea what grade I got on it, but apparently, I got a good grade because I
passed. Shortly after I graduated, I gave a copy of my paper to Anthony C.
Morella, who at the time was the general counsel at American University.
I knew Tony well from my years at American University and I wanted
Tony’s thoughts on my paper. I remember him telling me that he thought
it was a good job. And then I found out he gave the paper to a friend of his
on the Hill. He never asked me to do this, but I’m glad he did. This was in
the spring of 1975. All the news surrounding Watergate was bubbling.
Agnew had resigned in October of 1973, then the dispute in the Supreme
Court over Nixon’s tapes, the impeachment talk, and then Nixon resigned
in August 1974. Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and
Materials Preservation Act of 1974. And there was a lot of litigation about
what would happen to the tapes and who would get to hear them.
I got a call one day from a staff member of the Committee on
House Administration in the House of Representatives. He said a friend of
his had given him my paper and he’d like to talk with me about. Of
course, I knew that that friend was Tony Morella.
I eventually was hired as a staff person with the House
Administration Committee. I was hired largely because Congress had to
propose a set of regulations for the General Services Administration that
– 19 –
had custody and control of Nixon’s tapes and records. I guess it seemed to
the people at House Administration that I knew something about
presidential papers, so I was assigned to work with the General Counsel at
GSA to help draft these regulations. I worked very closely with Steven
Garfinkel, who was the GSA General Counsel, for over a year in drafting
these regulations. Steve was a great person to work with – he died in
2018. Our work was the ground floor for the passage of the Presidential
Records Act of 1978.
In addition to working with Steve on the regulations, I also spent
my time at House Administration following all the Nixon litigation that
was going on at the time. I got to meet and work with a lawyer named
Stan Mortensen, who represented Nixon in most of those cases. Stan and I
got to be good friends.
The Committee on House Administration also had jurisdiction over
disputes to election to the House of Representatives, and I was involved in
the investigation of several election disputes in 1976, one in Chicago and
one in Seattle. The election dispute in Chicago involved Congressman
Abner Mikva, who later became Chief Judge of the United States Court of
Appeals for the DC Circuit. The election disputes were largely about
ballot recounts, and far different than the highly partisan fights of today.
And of course, this was before Citizens United and the presence of dark
money in election issues.
– 20 –
And I had the best office in the city of Washington. I was on the
third floor of the Capitol building right in the center looking down the
Mall. I could see the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the Mall, but the
Washington Monument sliced right through the view of the Lincoln
Memorial. And I had a fireplace! I would sit in that office and wonder
about all the meetings over the years that took place in that office. It was
the best office I ever had in my career, and I have had some good offices.
MR. GOLDMAN: You have a view on the applicability of the statute you basically were
responsible for and President Trump’s arguments that he was entitled to
keep the papers?
MR. CAUSEY: The 1978 Presidential Records Act is quite clear about this. Once the
President leaves office, his White House papers become the property of
the United States, and GSA and the National Archives are the government
agencies that assumes custody of those records. GSA can issue regulations
for the release of that material to the public, which it has done. But I don’t
think the law permits a president to take classified records with him after
he leaves office, and certainly not to do that secretly with no one knowing.
That is why Archives kept asking Trump for the return of those records as
soon as it found out he had taken those records. To me, the issue was more
about how Trump refused to return those records when asked to do so and
how he maintained and exposed the records in Florida that created a
potential national security problem.
– 21 –
MR. GOLDMAN: Very good. Alright. So, you’re wrapping up things on the Hill, and you’re
thinking of being a real lawyer. What was your first step?
MR. CAUSEY: Well, something happened that changed my plans. I was starting to talk to
people, but then something happened in the election of 1978. At that time
in Congress, unlike today, chairmanships of committees would be
determined by seniority, both in the House and the Senate. If a chairman
of a committee or subcommittee lost an election or retired from Congress,
the chairs of committees would go to the next senior member on that
committee. In the midterm election of 1978, one of the congressmen who
was chair of one of the subcommittees on the Education and Labor
Committee either lost or retired, I cannot remember which it was, that
meant that Congressman Bill Ford of Michigan, who had been the
chairman of a subcommittee called Economic Opportunity, was elevated
to be chair of another subcommittee, and the chair of Economic
Opportunity would go to a new member. Bill Ford was a liberal Democrat
from Detroit. The congressman who became the new chair of Economic
Opportunity was Congressman Ike Andrews from North Carolina.
Although Andrews represented the Raleigh Durham area, probably the
most progressive district in North Carolina at the time, he was a
conservative Democrat. That worried the senior Democratic leadership of
Education and Labor. Carl Perkins was chair at the time. Bill Gaul was the
general counsel. People in Tip O’Neill’s Speaker’s office were very
worried about this. They didn’t want this conservative Democrat to be in
– 22 –
charge of all the liberal issues in Economic Opportunity such as Head
Start, the Juvenile Justice Act, and migrant farm workers. So, I was asked
if I wanted to become the general counsel and staff director for Ike
Andrews at Economic Opportunity. Thus, I would leave House
Administration and move to Education and Labor.
I remember the meeting when I was asked about this. I naively
said, “Well, I have never met Ike Andrews. I knew who he was because I
see him around, but I have never talked with him. Don’t you think I ought
to meet him and see if he like me and wants to me to be his staff director
and general counsel?” I remember that Speaker Tip O’Neil, was at this
meeting, piped up and said, “Oh, don’t worry. He’s going to like you a
lot.”
So that was one of my many lessons of politics on the Hill. I
became staff director and general counsel of this subcommittee at
Education and Labor. But it was a difficult job in that Andrews put on the
staff a young man from his district who thought he was the staff director. I
needed to have many quiet talks with Congressman Andrews about that.
But the work was very rewarding. We basically saved Head Start. I got to
go and spend a week in Idaho to live with migrant farm workers. We
reauthorized the Juvenile Justice Act. It was up for reauthorization, and for
some reason, Jimmy Carter decided to have a signing ceremony at the
White House. I was invited to the White House for the signing ceremony,
and that was a very memorable experience as well. I have a nice photo
– 23 –
taken that day with Carter at the signing ceremony outside the Oval Office
with one of the pens he used to sign the act.
By this time, well into my fifth year on the Hill, I then got a piece
of advice from a very good friend on the Hill. I was now staff director and
general counsel to a subcommittee. I was making the highest level salary I
could at my age and years of service on the Hill, so I couldn’t go much
higher as a staffer at the time. My friend said you better get off the Hill
because otherwise you’re going to be stuck here forever. And he said you
know all the people you see in the cafeteria who are in their forties and
fifties who’ve been here forever? They’ve gone nowhere but sideways.
They’re maybe good at their job, but they are here to stay. Get off the Hill.
So that’s exactly what I did. I joined a law firm by the name of
Donahue, Ehrmantraut & Montedonico, a small but well respected
insurance defense firm in the Washington area, which meant it handled a
lot of litigation, and I really wanted to be a trial lawyer.
MR. GOLDMAN: How did you connect with that firm in the first place?
MR. CAUSEY: Someone introduced me to Bill Ehrmantraut, but I cannot remember who
that was. Bill was the partner in the firm who did a lot of the medical
related issues. I think someone had mentioned my medical history to
Ehrmantraut, and he wanted to meet me. We met, and we started talking,
and at some point, he said I know you’re looking and that you want to do
trial work. That’s what we do. We do a lot of medical work. Why don’t
you come work for us. And I did.
– 24 –
MR. GOLDMAN: Very good. There’s a case I’d like to get into a bit involving a father who
was killed in an automobile accident. I think Chubb was the client for the
firm. Could you describe what happened in that case.
MR. CAUSEY: It was a very sad case but turned out to be a very significant case for the
law. There was a young man in his late twenties, maybe early thirties
visiting Washington on business. He lived in North Carolina, was married
and had two young daughters. He was in Georgetown one night with some
business associates at a bar. He’d been drinking, and as he was leaving the
bar, he foolishly and negligently walked across Wisconsin Avenue –not in
a crosswalk – about 6:00 at night and got hit by a car traveling north on
Wisconsin. The car was driven by a young woman who was driving her
father’s car. She was traumatized by the event. The young man was killed
at the scene as a result of the accident, and his family filed suit against the
woman. Chubb was the insurance company for the auto policy. Chubb
asked us to represent the driver, and somebody at the firm, either Joe
Montedonico or Bill Ehrmantraut, suggested I ought to handle the case.
So, I started working the case.
It was clear to me after looking at all the initial facts that the young
woman was not responsible for the accident. To me, it was clearly the
fault of the young man walking across the middle of the street inebriated
and being hit by the car. I remember Chubb said to me how are we going
to prove what happened? I said why don’t we reconstruct what happened
by creating a visual animation of the accident. We have enough
– 25 –
undisputed facts, location of the accident, eyewitnesses to the drinking, the
damage to the car that could suggest the speed and position of impact,
enough facts to create a visual reconstruction. We needed to show that the
driver was not speeding, was in her correct driving lane, and could not see
the man before he darted out into the street.
I had by that time started reading the very early literature about
computer animation and litigation. At the time there was a young firm in
Annapolis called FTI, which I believe stood for Forensic Technologies
International, I knew about them by reading the literature on accident
reconstruction. I said to Joe Montedonico that we ought to hire FTI to do a
computer animation of this accident to show that our client was not
responsible. Joe thought it was a great idea.
Now, to our knowledge no lawyer had tried to introduce computer
animation of a physical accident into evidence. I started doing some
reading. There was very little case law on the subject at the time, and I
learned about the new firm that was doing early computer animation.
I met with a small group at FTI to explore what could be done.
They came up with ideas such as film the scene from the driver’s
perspective, with the car driving the same way at the same speed past the
bar, to take all kinds of measurements, and examine the car and the
medical records. We did a lot of reconstruction work. With all this
information, FTI then created several computer animations views of the
accident from different perspectives, and it was clear from these that our
– 26 –
driver was not at fault and that there was no viable last clear chance
argument. Looking back at this many years later, and now being so
familiar with all sophisticated computer animation and AI that is being
used in litigation, what we created was very simple – but very new at the
time.
So, I disclosed to the other side in discovery what we were doing.
The lawyer on the other side was also a very experienced lawyer, Dan
Toomey, who was handling this case because he knew the family. We
knew each other at the time, and to this day, we’re still good friends. I
disclosed to Dan that I had FTI create a computer animation of the
accident, and I intended to have it introduced into evidence for the trial.
He said you can’t do that. How are you going to get it admitted. I said it’s
one of the interesting issues in this case. Here is what the standards are for
admitting this material. He said we’re of course going to fight it, which I
knew he would do. We gave him a copy of all our work product.
Dan filed a motion to exclude the animation. The case was before
Judge Joyce Hens Green, and she assigned the matter to US Magistrate
Judge Arthur Burnett. Judge Burnett held a two day hearing with
witnesses from FTI. Of course, I had to show how FTI created this
animation – presenting evidence of all the site visits, the technology of
creating all the animations, the qualifications of the FTI personnel who
created the animations, and all the physical evidence from discovery that
supported the animations. We had to deal with some hearsay and other
– 27 –
evidentiary issues, and Judge Burnett watched the animation several times
and asked a lot of questions of the FTI witnesses about how it was
produced and what equipment was used to make the animations and all of
the questions he should have been asking. He eventually ruled that the
animations we wanted to use were admissible at trial. To the best of our
knowledge, this was the first time a federal court in the District of
Columbia permitted the use of computer animation as evidence at trial.
MR. GOLDMAN: Did the plaintiff’s lawyer appeal that to the district court judge?
MR. CAUSEY: No. the animations were very compelling for our case. We settled within a
few days.
MR. GOLDMAN: Okay.
MR. CAUSEY: I’m pretty sure that we both thought Judge Green would accept Burnett’s
recommendation. Judge Green was a very thorough and thoughtful judge.
She was a wonderful person. She passed away about a year ago.
MR. GOLDMAN: I think this episode is a perfect example of cutting edge, the introduction
of the technology and how we tried cases. And as you say, FTI is now
publicly traded. A huge company. We use them for forensic accounting
and other services. A lot of other firms do too. So this was the beginnings
of FTI and your use of them in the beginnings of technology in the
courtroom.
MR. CAUSEY: I later used them in a lot of medical malpractice cases too. You are correct,
it was cutting edge for the courtroom.
– 28 –
Talking about FTI reminds me that I started to use FTI in other
matters around this time with another client when I was with
Montedonico. I was assigned a case by one of our insurance carriers to
represent a small construction firm in Ocean City, Maryland, called
Purnell Jarvis. At the time, Purnell Jarvis built about two thirds of the
condominiums in Ocean City. George Purnell and Richard Jarvis were
extremely interesting and very talented people. George was the brains of
the group, and I remember that he was a good friend of Jimmy Buffett,
and he even built a house for Buffett in Ocean City. Richard Jarvis was the
public relations end of the firm—he was large person with an equally big
personality. He was a race car driver in his spare time. Richard had little
use for lawyers, but George seemed to understand the need and role of
lawyers. Because George handled the business aspects of the firm, it made
it a little easier for me.
Well, anyway, I was assigned this case involving a construction
dispute at a condominium they had built. I think it was called the Atlantic,
but I am not sure of that. Anyway, the issue was about some alleged faulty
cantilevers used to support the balconies on the building. I used FTI do
create a simple animation about how the cantilevers would be designed
and installed into the structure to support the balconies. Again, it was very
primitive at the time, but I think it helped me settle the case. George was
so impressed that he asked me to be the lawyer to represent their business
in all their litigation, and they had a lot. There was a period in the mid
– 29 –
1980s that I had to drive to Ocean City about twice a month. And I
appeared in the Circuit Court for Wicomico County many times.
I remember a case I had involving a Purnell Jarvis condominium in
Ocean City. I remember the case so well because Federal Judge Royce
Lamberth and his wife Janice were owners of a unit in the condo and part
of the plaintiffs committee in the case. The case eventually settled, and
Judge Lamberth would remind me about the matter with a smile just about
every time I saw him. And I remember that just about the same time I tried
an age discrimination case before Judge Lamberth involving my client the
National Telephone Cooperative Association. We did not say anything to
each other during the case about the condo case, but I think Ocean City
was in the back of both of our minds. The NTCA case was a hotly
contested case, and the jury returned a verdict for NTCA in the case. I
think Judge Lamberth looked upon me as a much more serious trial lawyer
after that case.
MR. GOLDMAN: What happened to the Montedonico firm?
MR. CAUSEY: Well, let me first say that my trial mentor was Joe Montedonico. Joe was
an incredibly talented trial lawyer and most interesting person. His
descendants were the famous Love family from the Eastern Shore of
Maryland. And Joe was one of the few people at the time who drove a
shiny black Porsche. But at the same time Joe was an incredibly
disorganized person. He couldn’t find things that he was looking for, files,
his keys, his calendar, which of course was paper at the time. But you put
– 30 –
him in a courtroom, and he was phenomenal. I learned so much about
litigation and how to work a courtroom from Joe.
I was at the firm for a number of years, and then both Ed Donahue
and Bill Ehrmantraut passed away within a few years of each other, and
the firm started to dissolve with lawyers going in different directions. Joe
handled the case for one of the survivors of the 1982 Air Florida crash and
went on to do plaintiffs work and did very well. That case also was before
Judge Joyce Hens Green. So many of us who were younger started to
look around. I had some great trial experience by this time.
When I was with Joe, I watched him and the other senior partners
go about managing the firm. Steven Hamilton and Brian Nash and Frank
Canale and a few others taught me the business side of law practice.
Because Joe was so disorganized at certain things, a lot of us, even the
younger members of the firm, helped him make sure things in the firm ran
smoothly. I also learned a lot about law firm personnel issues. I thought it
would be interesting to have my own small litigation firm.
At the time, I knew a lawyer by the name of Jim Falk. Jim had a
small practice, basically a government contracts practice, because he used
to work for President Gerald Ford.
MR. GOLDMAN: Did he also work for him when Gerald Ford was Vice President?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes.
MR. GOLDMAN: Okay. So, they were very close.
– 31 –
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. And Jim was a very pleasant guy. He had a small practice and had his
two sons in his practice. I remember we were talking at some social event,
and Jim said, “You know, we don’t do litigation, but my sons are young
and want to do litigation. Can you come and join our practice, and can you
bring some litigation work? You can run the litigation side of the firm.
You’ve got insurance contacts and know the judges. You can perhaps get
some work from some of the insurance carriers.”
So, I joined Jim, and we renamed the firm Falk & Causey. We
were in the building on M Street where Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering was
located. We had an agreement with Wilmer Cutler to use their huge
library, which was phenomenal for a small firm like ours to have access to
such a great library.
However, for many reasons. it quickly became clear to me that this
was not the right move. Perhaps I was naïve in thinking I could help
manage a firm, or that I could fit into the so called family business. Except
for a few significant cases, I missed everyday trial work and being in the
courtroom. I soon learned that I did not want to be an administrator and a
law firm manager. So, I eventually said to Jim, this isn’t working for me.
I’m probably going to want to do something else. I think he understood.
Jim was a very nice person and I had become friends with one of his sons,
Jim Falk Jr. Jim Senior was an excellent business lawyer, but helping him
run a small firm was not for me.
– 32 –
MR. GOLDMAN: But while you were there, you had a very interesting case before Judge
Ellis, right? I wouldn’t call it cutting edge like we had with the discussion
on FTI, but it did involve recently enacted statute and whether in the case
there would be limitation of damages. Could you give us a description of
that litigation.
MR. CAUSEY: Sure. This is I think one of the most interesting cases that I ever handled.
Jim Falk knew a woman who lived in London. Her daughter was visiting
friends in the Northern Virginia and one weekend she developed a rash on
her face. The daughter, Susan, went to the ER at Arlington Hospital, and
because she was from England, she did not have health insurance. Susan
appeared at the ER in some distress. The hospital basically gave her two
aspirin and said call us if it gets any worse. Within 24 hours, she was
feeling terrible with a high fever. She had to be brought back into the ER
in an ambulance. She had developed septicemia and wound up being in
the hospital for six months. She lost sight in one eye and had to have one
of her legs amputated. It was a horrible medical mistake.
At this time, I think this was in late 1989 or early1990, Congress
had just passed a new law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and
Active Labor Act, or EMTALA. I think the Supreme Court just within the
past year decided an EMTALA case. Anyway, EMTALA provided that if
a patient presents to an emergency room, or if the patient is a woman who
is in labor, they must be treated under a standard of care even if the patient
does not have health insurance coverage.
– 33 –
Jim asked me to handle the case for her. We filed suit against
Arlington Hospital in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia,
where Arlington Hospital is located, claiming that Susan’s first discharge
from the ER without any examination or treatment because of her lack of
insurance was a violation of EMTALA. The Act was very new. At the
time there was only one similar case involving EMTALA that we could
find. The case was assigned to Judge T. S. Ellis. I knew the lawyers
representing Arlington Hospital because I had worked with many lawyers
in the area who represented hospitals and doctors when I was with
Montedonico. These lawyers were very good, and I think they knew the
hospital had made a mistake. The facts were largely undisputed, and the
real issue was damages. The EMTALA statute at the time, I don’t know if
this is still true today, had no cap on the amount of damages a successful
plaintiff could recover. The hospital took the position that because the Act
was silent on any limitation on damages, the judge had to apply Virginia
State law on damages. At the time, Virginia law had a $1 million cap on
medical malpractice cases. We took the position that the State law cap did
not apply because Congress could have put a cap in the federal law if it
wanted to cap damages; Congress could have said that the federal court
had to apply the state law on damages. The fact that Congress was silent
on any limitation on damages meant that there was no limit to what a
plaintiff could recover under the federal statute. This issue was the
problem in settling the case. The hospital was not going to pay the demand
– 34 –
we were asking for, which as you can imagine was significant given what
happened to Susan, and the case went to trial before Judge Ellis.
Here’s the most interesting thing about this case. I never met my
client, Susan Power, in person. I never met her but I did meet her mother
when I went to London with Jim Falk’s son to take depositions of doctors
and the mother, but I never met Susan because it was a very bad
experience for her, and she didn’t want to have to get personally involved
in the case or have anything to do with the case. This was a terrible
experience for her.
MR. GOLDMAN: There was no interest from any party to take her deposition, even
overseas?
MR. CAUSEY: No. I think they knew better than to take Susan Power’s deposition. There
really was no serious factual dispute in the case, and her deposition would
only add a greater level of emotional complication for them in the case.
This was going to be a fight over the language and meaning of the statute
regarding damages. The hospital lawyers knew that from the very
beginning, and this was their defense. So, I went to trial without a client,
the first and only time I’ve ever tried a case without my client with me in
the courtroom. To this day I have never met Susan Power. I hope she is
doing well.
Let me add this recollection. I remember the morning of the trial. It
was still in the old Post Office building on the GW Parkway in Old Town
Alexandria near the statue of the Confederate soldier that is facing south. I
– 35 –
think that it still there. We were all in the courtroom ready to start the trial
before the jury was picked, and Judge Ellis walked out into the courtroom.
He came out in his business suit, not in his robe, and he had a piece of
paper wrapped in his hand. He sat down, and he said I have here my ruling
on your cross motions on the damage issue. The thing I picked up was he
always kept looking and talking to the defense lawyers. He strongly urged
them to settle the case. I took that to mean he was going to rule in our
favor on the cap question. I think the hospital was worried about getting a
ruling from the judge against them on the damage question and that might
impair their ability to appeal if they lost before the jury, and that it would
set a bad precedent for other personal injury cases in Virginia. The
hospital refused to settle. Judge Ellis was clearly upset by that. He came
back on the bench in his robe, and we started the trial.
MR. GOLDMAN: How did Judge Ellis rule on the motion?
MR. CAUSEY: He issued a ruling in our favor when he came on the bench. I remember I
won almost every evidentiary motion at trial. And of course, back in those
days, a jury trial in the Eastern District of Virginia was at most two days.
So, we tried the case. I remember one of the things that I did that I
knew was a risk, but I thought it was going to help us. There was a nurse
on the jury venire panel, and I did not strike her and neither did the
defense. I think it later turned out that the nurse was very helpful to me in
explaining to the other jurors what the medical issues were in the case, and
I suspect the nurse also knew something about EMTALA. Of course, you
– 36 –
never know what the jurors talk about or think about. This is always part
of the thrill of trial work.
After all the evidence was presented in one day, the jury retired
and was excused for the night. They came back the next morning, and by
10:30 we had a note that there was a verdict. I remember I looked at the
defense lawyers. They looked at me. We both thought this is probably bad
news for one of us. The jury came back and not only found for Susan but
gave her a $5 million award. At the time, it was the highest plaintiff’s
negligence award in the Eastern District of Virginia. It was on the front
page of the Washington Post the next day. And of course, the Hospital
appealed.
MR. GOLDMAN: Yes. The $5 million versus $1 million. And limitation.
MR. CAUSEY: It was worth fighting over. They said we’re going to appeal. They took an
appeal to the Fourth Circuit and the court ruled in their favor by a 21 vote.
But Chief Judge Sam Ervin wrote a very strong dissenting opinion
agreeing with our argument, that if Congress wanted to put a cap on
damages, they could have done that. With Chief Judge Ervin’s strong
dissenting opinion, we thought we had a very strong case for a cert
petition to the Supreme Court. We got some advice from appellate lawyers
about what they thought. They all said this is worth filing. I filed my one
and only cert petition in my career. I thought it was a strong petition, but
the Supreme Court had never ruled on an EMTALA case. The Court
denied cert, I’m sure because at that time there was only one other
– 37 –
reported district court case on EMTALA, and there were no Court of
Appeals decision except our case, so there was no conflict among the
circuits. It was a federal statute, and they had jurisdiction in that respect.
But it turned out not to be a strong case for granting cert. The Supreme
Court needed another couple of cases from the circuits with a split, and we
didn’t have that. So, they denied cert. Now they’re accepting more and
more EMTALA cases. Thus, Susan Power, my client who I had never met,
only received $1 million.
MR. GOLDMAN: Very interesting case. Before we went into the case, you were discussing
your migration out of the Falk firm and the reasons why. Tell us where
you landed after that.
MR. CAUSEY: After I told Jim that I wasn’t really happy and that I wanted to go do
something else, and that something else was clearly going back to doing a
lot of litigation. A few years earlier when I was with Montedonico, I had a
case and I met a lawyer in the case by the name of Tom Jackson with a
firm called Jackson & Campbell that was started by his father Thomas
Searing Jackson and Earl Campbell, another lion of the bar. Tom Jackson
and I got along very well. I don’t remember what the issue in the case was,
or how it got resolved – we must have settled because it did not go to trial.
But I remember we got along well, and we later became good friends and
members of the Charles Fahy American Inn of Court.
By the time I was looking for a firm to resume trial work, Tom had
been appointed to the federal bench. We had lunch one day and I told him
– 38 –
that I was not happy with what I was doing and that I wanted to go back to
doing mostly litigation. He said why don’t you join Jackson & Campbell.
He recommended me to the people at Jackson & Campbell. We hit it off
well, so I then joined Jackson & Campbell. At the time it was a well
respected litigation firm.
I think it was a happy parting for Jim and me because I think he
realized that he didn’t really want to get his firm into litigation work. I
didn’t want to be doing the stuff that Jim and his sons were doing, so it
was an amicable parting. I went to Jackson & Campbell and was there for
a number of years.
MR. GOLDMAN: While at that firm, from the materials I’ve been reviewing, it looks like
you developed a niche practice, touching on art and related issues. And in
fact, you had one case involving the very famous Georgia O’Keeffe.
Could you tell us about that case?
MR. CAUSEY: This case was interesting for many reasons. By that time I had been
representing a lot of doctors and medical groups at Donahue, Ehrmantraut
& Montedonico and Jackson & Campbell. A group of doctors in Northern
Virginia come to me and said they bought some lithographs from James
Stieglitz, who was I think the nephew or grandnephew of Georgia
O’Keeffe, I don’t remember which, and that they were told by Stieglitz
that the lithographs were signed by Georgia O’Keeffe. They paid a lot of
money for them, but they now had questions about whether the signatures
were authentic. Of course, O’Keeffe at one point was married to Alfred
– 39 –
Stieglitz, so there was some possible legitimacy to Stieglitz’s claim that
O’Keeffe signed the lithographs. The doctors wanted their money back.
I first contacted Stieglitz, and I was surprised that he didn’t refer
me to his lawyer. That was a very early signal to me that something was
suspicious about all this. Stieglitz said I’m not going to pay them anything.
They’re legitimate, so sue me. So that’s what the doctors decided to do.
We filed suit against Stieglitz.
I knew I had to show that O’Keeffe did not sign the lithographs to
prove fraud against Stieglitz. There was only one way to do that, and that
would be to take her deposition. So, I made an overture to O’Keeffe
through her corporate organization and explained the situation and that I
needed to talk with her lawyer. I was a little surprised that I got a phone
call rather soon from a lawyer in New York who was very polite and
professional. He was with one of the larger New York firms; it may have
been Sullivan & Cromwell, I don’t remember now. He said he represented
O’Keeffe. I explained the case. He listened very quietly, and I said I want
to take her deposition. He said we’re not going to do that. She lives in
New Mexico. She’s old. She’s not doing well. He said send me a list of
questions you have, and I’ll get you the answers. I explained why that was
not going to work unless Stieglitz agreed and would settle the case. He
said he could not speak for Stieglitz. I repeated my concern that a signed
statement was not going to work because I could not prove my case with
any statement from her that was not under oath and subject to cross
– 40 –
examination. He said I’ll get you an affidavit. I said I don’t think I can use
an affidavit either because it wouldn’t be subject to cross examination. I
said I don’t think an affidavit is going to help me, although if you want to
get me one, I’ll certainly try to get in in the trial record. By this time, I was
concerned about what would happen if O’Keeffe died. He got back to me
a few days later and said I’ll let you take her deposition, but you only get
ten questions. No more than a half an hour. And no video, although that
was still rather rare to do back then. So, I went out to Albuquerque and
met the lawyer there. He was very patrician, older than I thought he would
be, maybe 60 or so, with thinning gray hair with a white shirt and vested
blue pin stripe suit. He had a car and a driver waiting for us at the airport
and we drove to her place at Ghost Ranch about two hours north of
Albuquerque. We did not talk about the case during the drive, other than I
remember he did seem interested in how I got the case. I got the sense that
he was not a trial lawyer. We discussed books, the beautiful scenery, and
New York City. I kept thinking it was a long way to go for ten questions.
MR. GOLDMAN: You wrote down in advance the ten questions?
MR. CAUSEY: No. I did not give anybody my ten questions. When we arrived at her
place, which looked like an old adobe hut and not very clean, there was
the lawyer already there who was of record defending her in the case in
Virginia. I remember on the court papers that he had an address in
Northern Virginia, but I had never met him. He was not very
communicative, and he drove back to the airport by himself. Except for a
– 41 –
few questions he asked during the deposition, he said very little the whole
time.
MR. GOLDMAN: You had them in your pocket?
MR. CAUSEY: I had the ten questions on my legal pad. They were very easy and
methodical. Did you paint these paintings? Did they get converted to
lithographs? Did you authorize them? Did you ever sign any of them? Let
me show you this one picture of one of the lithographs, did you sign this
one? She seemed to be very frail and very old and sat in a chair and her
hand was held the whole time by her companion, a very young man named
Juan Hamilton. But she answered no to the question on whether she signed
the lithographs, which was critical to my case. I recall asking one question
about her decision to create the lithographs, and the New York lawyer
objected and said that she would not answer any questions about any of
her business organizations or business decisions. And then the lawyer who
represented her in the lawsuit, who was also there but got there somehow
on his own, asked her a few questions, such as we heard you say you
didn’t sign these, but you know you’re up there in years and do you
clearly remember these lithographs, and things like that. Could it be that
your memory is not that good? The kinds of questions one would expect in
cross examination in this situation. Anyway, I had my ten questions and
got the answers I wanted, and the New York lawyer and I drove back to
Albuquerque in his car. I don’t think I ever spoke to the other lawyer
again. It was all a very strange experience.
– 42 –
A couple of days after I got back to Washington, I’m at my desk
and the phone rings. There’s a voice on the other end that says,
Mr. Causey, this is Agent So and So of the FBI. You’re handling a case
involving some lithographs sold by James Stieglitz. Is that right? Yes.
Why are you calling me? I’ll get to that in a minute. What do you intend to
do in this case? I said I don’t think I’m going to disclose that to you
because I’m not really sure what my clients want to do, but we’re probably
going to file a motion for summary judgment and then make a demand.
The FBI agent said, well, frankly, I’m calling to tell you your case is over.
I said what do you mean. He said the government is going to settle the
case with your clients. Here’s the amount we’re going to pay. It was an
amount that was well above what we were then demanding. I said why are
you doing this, and he said I can’t tell you that now, but take this to your
clients and see what they want to do and get back to me. Here is my phone
number. I noticed it was a New York area code, which I thought was odd.
Well, of course I called my clients, and they said absolutely, we
will take the money. It was a sizable amount. They said we don’t care who
pays the money. We want the money and get rid of the lithographs. I
called the agent back, and I said my clients would accept the money. I
asked the agent again why he was involved in this in the first place, but by
now I was beginning to figure it out.
After the case was over, I learned that the FBI was doing a sting
operation using Stieglitz to try and catch people involved in large art fraud
– 43 –
in New York. They were looking for really big ticket art fraud, and they
were using Stieglitz as the sting. Our little four doctors got in the way and
were mucking up Stieglitz’s cover. To this day, I do not know if the FBI
knew what Stieglitz was doing selling these lithographs to my clients. He
may have been doing that on his own without telling the government. I
don’t know. I am sure when the FBI found out about our case involving
the O’Keeffe lithographs, it said let’s get rid of this case, otherwise, it’s
going to mess up our fraud operation in New York.
MR. GOLDMAN: How were they getting in the way?
MR. CAUSEY: There’d be a public record with the lawsuit involving Stieglitz, and maybe
even a trial. Stieglitz would probably have to testify at trial under oath. I
was going to ask all about his relationships, and they didn’t want a public
record of Stieglitz testifying about that stuff. So that’s why they stepped in
and said we’re going to stop this case.
MR. GOLDMAN: Who cut the checks?
MR. CAUSEY: I am pretty sure it was the US Treasury, I don’t know remember now.
MR. GOLDMAN: So you never dreamed that the government would be involved, and at the
end of the day, it was the government that paid your clients.
MR. CAUSEY: Yes, funny things sometimes happen in litigation.
MR. GOLDMAN: Your perseverance to pursue the O’Keeffe deposition, you got what you
needed from her. You were off to the races.
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. I remember another interesting art case involving a gallery here in
Washington if I can discuss that for a few minutes. There was a legal
– 44 –
dispute over the sale of a painting by the famous artist Albert Bierstadt.
The gallery had sold a sketch of a boat that Bierstadt painted when he was
in Alaska and turned out that there was a significant amount of restoration
work on the sketch, what some in the art world call overpainting. The
purchaser claimed that there was more than 50 percent overpainting, and
that that made the painting no longer a Bierstadt, and that the gallery
engaged in fraud in selling the painting as a Bierstadt. The purchaser filed
suit and the question was to what amount of overpainting rendered the
painting as no longer attributable to Bierstadt.
In defending the case, I retained Linda Ferber, who at the time was
the leading Bierstadt expert in the country. She had written the definitive
book on Bierstadt. We had to reach an elaborate agreement with the owner
on how Ferber could do testing on the painting to enable her to have an
opinion on the overpainting. Ferber eventually examined the sketch, used
all kinds of testing available at the time, and concluded that there was
about 40 percent overpainting, but it was her opinion that one could still
refer to the sketch as a Bierstadt. It was questionable whether she would
be able to state that last part for purposes of trial, because that court might
say that was an issue for the jury to decide. But it was Ferber’s view that
the painting was a Bierstadt originally and that there was only about 35 or
40 percent of overpainting and that the sketch was still a Bierstadt.
MR. GOLDMAN: Who does the overpainting?
– 45 –
MR. CAUSEY: Restorers, museums, people like that. Maybe whoever the painting passed
to after Bierstadt’s death wanted to clean it up, touch it up a little bit.
Sometimes when they clean it up, they sometimes mess it up, and it has to
be repainted or restored in that spot. You never know.
MR. GOLDMAN: Very interesting.
MR. CAUSEY: So, we settled that case not long after Ferber issued her opinion. Ferber’s
opinion on issues involving Bierstadt were well respected in the art world.
And the lesson for trial lawyers here is that having the right expert is very
important to preparing and presenting your case. Anyway, nobody in the
art world at the time wanted this case to be tried. There had never been a
case about when an artist’s work no longer remains the artist’s work due
to subsequent work on the painting. No gallery or museum wanted to have
a case about that issue to be decided by a jury as a matter of public record
because it would upset the entire art world of painting. A museum might
not be able to say that its Picasso was still a Picasso, or its Thomas Cole is
still a Thomas Cole.
MR. GOLDMAN: Right. Usually the core issue is whether it’s a fake or if it’s real.
MR. CAUSEY: Not that it is a fake, but that the content of the picture had been changed so
much that one can no longer claim it was painted by the original artist.
That’s a very different issue from the painting being a fake. Everyone
eventually agreed that the painting was originally painted by Bierstadt –
there was a dispute early in the case that the sketch was not a Bierstadt at
all because Bierstadt never went to Alaska. But Linda Ferber put an end to
– 46 –
that argument by showing that Bierstadt indeed went to Alaska for a brief
period of time. But there was a lot of pressure to settle the case, and we
did, and everybody, I think, was happy that we did not have to go to
verdict on this significant are issue.
MR. GOLDMAN: You’re coming along at Jackson & Campbell, and at some point, you
parted ways. How come?
MR. CAUSEY: I was there a number of years, but at some point a noticeable number of
partners, particularly younger partners, and, I thought very good,
aggressive partners, were unhappy with the senior managers who had been
running the firm for many years. I would never get a clear answer from
any of them as to why so many younger lawyers were leaving, and I didn’t
want to press the point. If they wanted me to know, they would tell me,
and one did. I was also becoming concerned myself about the fact that
some of the senior partners were, in my opinion, preventing the growth of
the firm because they didn’t want to let go, and that’s probably why some
of the younger lawyers left. They were very conservative in their approach
to law practice and litigation. I didn’t think the firm was doing the level of
litigation that it could do. I did a lot of medical malpractice litigation. I
didn’t like the way it was dealing with a lot of expert witnesses, and I got
into a serious dispute with some partners, not all partners, about how I
handled an expert in a case. I thought their position was rather silly and
not at all in accord with the facts, but it was an unpleasant disagreement. I
mentioned it to Judge Tom Jackson and he agreed with me and asked me
– 47 –
why I wanted to stay at the firm. I thought it was interesting that the
person who urged me to join Jackson & Campbell now suggested I leave
the firm. There were other partners at the firm that asked me privately why
would you want to stay at this firm.
So, I thought that was good advice and I decided that I just didn’t
want to stay there, and I joined another established firm in Washington
called Peabody & Brown, a smaller firm. I knew many of the partners
there. Chuck Edson who is still a good friend – was a partner who was
well known for his work on affordable housing. It had a good litigation
practice. Somebody at the firm had mentioned to me why don’t you think
about coming with us because we know you’re not happy with Jackson &
Campbell and you have a good reputation among the court and lawyers.
So, I joined Peabody & Brown.
I was with Peabody & Brown about a year when the firm merged
with Nixon Hargrave of New York, and we became Nixon Peabody,
which is now an international firm.
MR. GOLDMAN: Another big firm experience. So you weren’t that interested in merger
politics in the aftermath. So, you move. You moved on to the Red Cross,
your next step?
MR. CAUSEY: Well, yes, but let me mention a few things about Nixon. I remember
vividly the morning our managing partner came in and told me we’re
going to merge with Nixon Hargrave. My immediate reaction was oh my
goodness, I don’t want another big law firm and mergers. I had done a lot
– 48 –
of work representing lawyers and law firm merger issues. Not acquisition
issues, but law firm divorce issues. In one case, I represented a group of
lawyers who were in the Washington office of a big New York firm, and
they want to break off and be on their own in DC. It was rather messy. So
I knew something about law firm mergers and divorces, and I knew law
firm mergers usually never worked out well. When I was told that
Peabody & Brown was merging with a big New York firm, I wasn’t real
happy about that.
But the merger went forward. It turned out after about a year or so,
I was right. The merger was not working well. Virtually everybody from
Peabody & Brown was unhappy about it.
Another thing that happened around this time was that I had been
serving on the DC Bar Board of Governors for a three year term that was
expiring in 2000. Many people suggested I run for DC Bar President. DC
Bar politics is a strange environment. Although I was well known in the
Bar, having served on the Board and on as Chair of the Board’s Litigation
Section, and because my three year term as a member of the Board of
Governors was expiring, I had to decide whether to stop being involved in
Bar politics or run for President of the Bar. That was the year that John
Nields also was running for President of the Bar, and he had more public
notoriety among less active members of the Bar because of his service as
Chief Counsel of the Iran Contra congressional investigation. John won
– 49 –
that election and went on to serve a distinguished year as Bar President.
But I decided that my Bar career was over.
So, I decided it was time to do something completely different. I
was still a partner at Nixon Peabody, but I applied to be a judge on the
D.C. Superior Court. I submitted my application and went through the
process. This was in 2001. I remember I was in Providence, Rhode Island
for a deposition. I was in my hotel room, and I got a call that night from
the head of the Judicial Nominating Committee saying that the Committee
was going to recommend me to the White House for a seat on the Superior
Court. Although I was pleasantly surprised, I figured that I could leave the
active practice of law and the increasingly unpleasant world of law firms
and go on the court and still be involved with litigation every day.
The Commission referred my name to the White House. It was the
Bush White House at the time. I received a call from counsel at the White
House saying the President was going to nominate me for the Superior
Court. I thought my career was now going to play out on the bench. What
is the phrase I said earlier, that timing is everything? I was now going to
learn that the hard way.
What I didn’t realize was, unlike the Clinton White House, which
did background checks on all the people that the Judicial Nomination
Committee referred to the White House for judicial appointments on the
District of Columbia courts, and then White House selected a nominee
after looking at all the background checks, the Bush administration, I
– 50 –
guess for economic reasons, decided to make their pick for the bench and
only then have the FBI do the background check on the person selected. I
didn’t think much about that at the time.
While I was still at Nixon, 9/11 happened. I remember watching
the plane hit the second tower on the television in the Nixon law library.
At the time I had begun my FBI background interviews for the Superior
Court. I had two or three of them when 9/11 happened. I remember my
next interview. The agents said we’ve got a problem. We’re pulling most
of our agents who do background checks to do 9/11 terrorist work, and we
don’t think we’re going to complete your background check in time. The
reason that was important was because the White House had to submit my
name for confirmation within 90 days of my selection by the Judicial
Nominations Committee for me to be appointed to Superior Court. I
wouldn’t have a background check, and the White House was not going to
go through with the process of nominating someone without completing
the background check. So essentially, that was a huge problem.
As I said, I was at Nixon Peabody when this was occurring, and
word started to get out that I was going to go on the bench, and my
clientele started to evaporate. Clients started to go elsewhere else because
I wasn’t going to be at the firm much longer. I told the firm that it looks
like I’m not going to get the background check, and the White House said
we’re going to have to renominate you. That likely was going to take
possibly another year. The firm asked what are you going to do here at the
– 51 –
firm during that period? I now had few clients because they were all
leaving because they thought I was going on the bench. And besides,
Nixon was not the best firm for sharing litigation among its partners.
There were too many lawyers and too few cases, certainly in the
Washington office. But the clients were all very nice – many would call
me and say that we are happy about you going on the bench, but we need
assurance that the lawyer we use for our work will be there when needed.
A hard lesson about don’t count your chickens.
MR. GOLDMAN: I’m just trying to think about a client’s mentality. Wouldn’t they be
inclined to stay with you? It’s an upside that you’d eventually be a judge
in their view.
MR. CAUSEY: That is not what I felt was happening. Because the word was spreading of
my possibly going on the bench, some of my effectiveness as a trial
lawyer was going to be limited with opposing counsel and with the courts.
So, I finally said to Nixon Peabody, look, this is not really working out,
and the firm agreed. Nixon was a very bottom-line firm, and it already was
top heavy with lawyers, particularly in litigation. They did not want to
keep a partner in litigation whose client base was declining, even if the
appeared that that person would soon be a judge.
MR. GOLDMAN: When did they fill the seat on the court?
MR. CAUSEY: I think it was probably the next year. It’s interesting you ask that question
because I don’t even know who took that seat.
– 52 –
But it’s funny how things work out. While all this was going on,
one day I got a phone call from Mary Elcano, a good friend and a partner
at Sidley Austin. She had just been named General Counsel at the
American Red Cross. It’s really kind of funny how things happen. Timing
is everything. Mary didn’t know about my situation at Nixon. She said
look, I’ve just become general counsel at the Red Cross, and I can’t
believe how much litigation this organization has. We have over a
thousand active cases. I said that can’t be. You’re the Red Cross. She said
I didn’t realize it until I got here either, but the Red Cross is a big
business. We’re a huge corporation. She said we have over 30,000
employees, we have about 50 chapters around the country, we have a huge
budget, we own over a thousand vehicles, we have a large blood collection
and distribution operation, we are intertwined with the federal
government, and there were a thousand active lawsuits on going, big and
small. She said, I don’t have anybody here who knows anything about
litigation, will you come and be assistant general counsel for litigation.
Litigation was the magic word, and I said yes.
MR. GOLDMAN: Yes. Talk about the company and the types of cases. There’s one in
particular that gained my interest, and that was the case against Johnson &
Johnson. We can talk about Katrina after that or before because it’s
chronologically that way.
MR. CAUSEY: Let’s talk about the Johnson and Johnson case first, because it turned out
to be one of the largest and most significant cases I handled during my
– 53 –
career as a trial lawyer. As I am sure everyone knows, Johnson & Johnson
sells their Band-Aids and medical products with a red cross on the
product, and it never occurred to me before I got to the Red Cross why
Johnson & Johnson had a red cross on their products; I thought it was just
a recognized medical symbol. The story of the case began with Clara
Barton, who started the Red Cross. She was living by herself in her early
90s in a little house in Glen Echo, Maryland. The house is still there as a
National Historic Site. She got a knock on her door one day from a young
lawyer. He said he wanted to buy the rights to use the red cross. She
signed a piece of paper for this lawyer that “sold” to Johnson & Johnson
for $300 the right to use the red cross on its new products. The lawyer was
former Solicitor General and Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald
Cox’s father.
During the past two decades the Red Cross would get a letter just
about every year from J&J telling the Red Cross to cease and desist using
the red cross because they owned the rights to the red cross. We, of
course, thought that claim to be ridiculous and basically ignored the letter
every year. Who are they kidding. Johnson & Johnson telling the
American Red Cross that the American Red Cross could not use the red
cross. One might say it was a bit of corporate overreach.
Then Katrina struck the Gulf Coast area in August 2005. As a
result of that, there was a sharp increase in demand for emergency kits.
The Red Cross had been selling emergency kits for years, and they
– 54 –
became very much in demand after the 9/11 attacks. Johnson & Johnson
also sold an emergency kit, largely through stores like Walmart, Home
Depot, and CVS. In 2007, we received J&J’s letter saying we had to stop
using the red cross on our emergency kits because we were infringing the
exclusive rights of J&J to put the red cross on its kits, thus allegedly
causing confusion among consumers in the marketplace. We decided it
was time to push back over this issue of who owned the red cross. We
reminded J&J that the American Red Cross is chartered by Congress and
that we got our rights to own and use the symbol of the red cross through
that charter. We told J&J that you may have an agreement scribbled by
Clara Barton – which we thought was subject to challenge anyway – but
we’ve got a charter from Congress, so the Red Cross is going to keep
using the red cross.
So essentially we had Johnson & Johnson telling the American
Red Cross that it could not put the red cross on its emergency kits. We
wrote J&J back and said that the American Red Cross would continue to
use the red cross on all products we sell, including emergency kits.
In August 2007, J&J filed suit against the American Red Cross in
the Southern District of New York. We hired Hogan & Hartson to
represent us, and we went through a long period of discovery with J&J. I
think we produced over a million pages of documents in those early days
of computer review and production of documents, so it was quite an effort.
– 55 –
We had a large team at the Red Cross working on this. And we learned a
lot about the early days of the Red Cross.
The case was assigned to Judge Jed Rakoff in New York, which
we thought was a good thing. Jonathan Abram at Hogan was the lead
counsel working with us. After the close of discovery, we decided to file a
motion for summary judgment. That surprised Johnson & Johnson because
this was truly a bet the company case and they thought we were going to
settle the case to avoid an adverse judicial ruling on this huge question of
red cross use. Johnson & Johnson then filed a cross motion.
MR. GOLDMAN: Was their position that the Red Cross couldn’t use the red cross at all?
MR. CAUSEY: By the time we got to this stage of the case, that had become their
argument. I think they were hoping that making that broader claim would
encourage us to settle. Judge Rakoff scheduled oral argument for I think
on January 2 – it was certainly some time in very early January. We all
thought that he figured we would all be in New York anyway because of
New Year’s Eve. Or maybe it was just what had become my experience
that judges would sometimes schedule argument on inconvenient days –
early January or around holidays – to encourage the parties to settle. I
don’t think that was the case with Judge Rakoff. I believe he did not want
the Red Cross to settle because he, like the Red Cross, thought J&J’s
claim was extremely weak and he did not want to see the American Red
Cross give up its use of the red cross in this way.
– 56 –
Anyway, we all go up there to the Southern District of New York
on January 2. Judge Rakoff comes out. He brings all his law clerks and
office staff out. There’s a large crowd in the courtroom for an argument on
a motion for summary judgment. We could tell from Rakoff’s questions
and comments that he was looking favorably on our position. He heard
about three hours of argument and then took the case under advisement.
Within a week or two he ruled in our favor in what I recall was about a
30page opinion and we continued to sell our emergency kits. I later heard
that Johnson & Johnson soon stopped selling their emergency kits. But it
was truly a bet the company case.
MR. GOLDMAN: At the time of Rakoff’s opinion, there’s so much at stake for Johnson &
Johnson. What was your thinking? Did you have any idea why they would
not take a shot and appeal to the Second Circuit?
MR. CAUSEY: Well thanks to Hogan, we had done some reconnaissance work on
Johnson & Johnson, and we learned even back then, this was almost
twenty years ago, that Johnson & Johnson was in a very precarious
financial position. They were having severe financial problems. Even in
this past year, Johnson & Johnson has stopped basically all its
philanthropic giving because it doesn’t have the money anymore.
MR. GOLDMAN: Why not spend the money for a first rate appellate firm and get a brief into
the Second Circuit?
MR. CAUSEY: Judge Rakoff’s opinion was very strong for the Red Cross. I guess that
J&J thought it did not have a strong appellate argument. And the case had
– 57 –
received a lot of press and I don’t think the public looked favorably on
what it was doing.
MR. GOLDMAN: I assume Judge Rakoff wrote a bulletproof type of opinion.
MR. CAUSEY: He did. He wrote an airtight opinion.
MR. GOLDMAN: Let’s talk about the events during and following Hurricane Katrina. All the
firms in town know of the tremendous work the Red Cross performed
during that disaster, but it also involved some litigation that you were part
of. Could you tell us about that?
MR. CAUSEY: Sure. When Katrina happened, I think it struck New Orleans on
August 28, 2005, it was a Category 5 hurricane. Everybody knows the
story of Katrina and New Orleans. I was not directly involved with the
disaster relief operations at the Red Cross, which were enormous, unless
there was some litigation issue that came up in connection with our relief
efforts. And that happened during Katrina.
Mary Elcano, the General Counsel, told me a couple of days after
Katrina that I was going to have to go to Louisiana. She said we’ve got
some litigation problems.
As a result of the storm, the Red Cross set up hundreds of shelters
in the Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi areas. What was happening
after Katrina was that local law enforcement, mostly Louisiana State
Police, local police, and to some extent in Alabama and Mississippi, were
going into all of the American Red Cross shelters we had set up. As I said,
we had hundreds of shelters throughout Louisiana and the area that would
– 58 –
feed and house, provide cots, provide clothing for people, who were now
homeless. Thousands of people were in these shelters. The local police
were coming into the shelters and they simply started asking people to see
their identification. We later learned that there were a lot of undocumented
people that had sought shelter, and we were told by the people running the
shelters that they were being intimidated and harassed by the police.
People started to leave the shelters. Our people who were running the
shelters told Red Cross managers in Washington that this was a huge
problem. How should we deal with this?
So, Mary sends me down there, and we wind up filing lots and lots
of motions in the federal and state courts for injunctive relief saying that,
in addition to the legal arguments, this action was preventing people from
seeking shelter, and despite their status, given the results of the storm, they
needed shelter as human beings no matter who they were or their
immigration status. We would have a hearing one day and get an order
later that day or the next day. The courts consistently ruled in our favor.
Of course, it really upset the local police and made relationships between
the police and the shelters that much more difficult. But we did the right
thing.
I remember every time I presented this argument, I always used the
first opening line. I was the moving party, so the court would say,
“Mr. Causey, we’ll hear from you,” and my line was, “Thank you, Your
Honor. If you don’t grant the relief the American Red Cross is seeking
– 59 –
here, many people will not go to shelters, and many people will die.” That
would always get the judges to sort of sit up and look at me and say,
“Mr. Causey, that’s very persuasive. Tell me more.” I would then explain
how the shelters worked and why they were important and why they saved
lives. We won every one of those motions.
So that was my litigation work at the Red Cross during Katrina.
Nothing was ever appealed. Everything got resolved, and law enforcement
did not move people out of the shelters. I remember the Sunday after I
came back and I was in our Disaster Center at our headquarters in
Washington, and about 10 am, President George W. Bush showed up
unannounced and toured the Center and shook everyone’s hand. That was
the third president’s hand I had the pleasure of shaking, Carter, Clinton,
and Bush.
MR. GOLDMAN: A great organization. I know firsthand that you had a strong inhouse team
in litigation. Tell us about the steps that led to moving on from the Red
Cross.
MR. CAUSEY: Well, one of the things – this is a predicate to that story. One of the things
that I got when I went to work for the Red Cross was a security clearance
because we had to do a lot of work with DOD and FEMA that involved
national security issues. So, I now had a security clearance. A very good
friend of mine, who at the time was working in the Office of Professional
Responsibility at DOJ, told me they were conducting some serious
investigations and that she needed someone who’s got strong litigation
– 60 –
experience. OPR would investigate allegations of ethical misconduct of
Department of Justice lawyers about their handling of certain litigation
matters. She asked me if I would consider leaving the Red Cross and
coming to DOJ. The job required a security clearance, and I already had
one from the Red Cross.
So, it was another chance for me to do something different and unique and
challenging.
MR. GOLDMAN: What was the conversation like with Mary?
MR. CAUSEY: I don’t have a strong recollection of that now. I’m sure I went to Mary and
said look, I’ve got an offer from DOJ. She may very well have said you
better take it because it would be a great opportunity for you. I’m pretty
sure she wanted me to stay at the Red Cross because she also had me
rewriting a lot of the administrative policies of the Red Cross and doing a
lot of the administrative legal work. But I know I had a great opportunity
to do something else, and with a security clearance, I could easily go to the
Department of Justice. The Red Cross was a great organization, great
people, but I was a little burned out after Katrina and wanted to do
something different.
MR. GOLDMAN: Were you heavily involved in providing blood and testing blood, the blood
servicing side of the organization?
MR. CAUSEY: No. Not in the taking of blood, which was a big part of the business side of
the Red Cross. It was a big part of our operation, but occasionally we
would get lawsuits involving the taking of blood or other related issues.
– 61 –
Every now and then, I would get a blood related case. But it was a big part
of the business side of the Red Cross. You donated your blood to the Red
Cross. Hospitals that were starting to collect blood would pay people to
sell their blood. People were donating their blood to the Red Cross, not
selling it. That became, and I suppose still is, a major issue in the blood
donation world.
MR. GOLDMAN: Would you test the blood before letting others use it?
MR. CAUSEY: We would test it. That was a very involved process that I was occasionally
involved with because there were some litigation issues that came up
about the testing. The blood collection was nationwide, so the procedure
for handling blood was not as standardized as it should have been. We had
standards, but we found out that if blood was taken in California, it was
done a little bit differently than if it was taken in New York, and that
created some issues.
And let me add now that we are talking about it regarding the Red
Cross search for synthetic blood. The Red Cross spent a lot of money to
develop synthetic blood. For some scientific reason that I never fully
understood, developing synthetic blood was impossible to do. Labs all
over the world were working on it. But the Red Cross spent a great deal of
time on this, and I know that the lawyers in our business departments
devoted a lot of work on this. Someday somebody will break the secret of
synthetic blood. That may be a byproduct of AI, and hundreds of millions
of lives around the world will be saved.
– 62 –
MR. GOLDMAN: Did you take a break between the Red Cross and the Department of
Justice?
MR. CAUSEY: I think I went right to DOJ. One of the great things about OPR was we
worked in the Main Justice building. It was both the same and yet very
different work for litigating cases in court. You needed to know and apply
the rules of professional responsibility and how to conduct discovery, how
to ask questions like in a deposition or at trial, and how to write reports
that were like judicial opinions.
There were about 20 or 25 of us in the office. An ethical issue
would be raised, and we would begin an initial process to decide whether
the complaint was worthy of a full investigation, and if it warranted a full
investigation, two lawyers were assigned to do the investigation work. We
would travel all over the country quite a bit. There was a lot of traveling
with the job. I had investigations in Alabama, Chicago, Miami, Denver,
Los Vegas, among other places. We would go to the sites where the cases
were and interview people and eventually write a report and we would
either recommend some kind of discipline or find no grounds for
recommending discipline. Depending on the matter, sometimes it went up
to the deputy attorney general for review, and sometimes it got to the desk
of the attorney general. Of course, I cannot talk about the specifics of
these investigations, but each one raised a different ethical question or
issue.
– 63 –
It was very interesting work, a lot of interesting legal and
professional responsibility issues. While I was at OPR I had been teaching
as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center for many years and
because of my work at OPR, Georgetown asked me to teach one of the
professional responsibility courses. And I did that for many years at
Georgetown.
So, I really enjoyed my work at Justice. But let me tell you one
thing that happened while I was at Justice. It’s not litigation related or
anything like that, but an interesting story none the less. I was in the Main
Justice Department building in August 2011 when the earthquake occurred
in DC. As you may know, inside the Main Justice building there are long
corridors. At the end of each corridor, there are big metal doors that are
always open during the day and night. But if there’s anything that shakes
the building, the security system in the building immediately closes those
doors, and when those doors close, they slam shut with a loud bang. I
remember when that earthquake happened, I was walking down the hall
going to somebody’s office and the doors suddenly banged shut.
Everybody thought there’s a terrorist attack on the Justice Department, so
we had our procedures for such an event. We all did what we were
supposed to do, and we were later told that there’d been an earthquake and
that’s why the doors shut. Other than some very interesting investigations,
that’s probably going to be my strongest memory of being at the
Department of Justice.
– 64 –
MR. GOLDMAN: Was the work of OPR confined to ethical issues associated with DOJ
attorneys? Did you have other offshoots from Justice personnel that would
come under the purview of your investigations?
MR. CAUSEY: We had jurisdiction over ethical issues involving attorneys with the FBI,
DEA, ATF, the agencies within the Department of Justice.
MR. GOLDMAN: You had issues involving people at all those places?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes.
MR. GOLDMAN: When you uncovered problems, what were the options for how it would be
resolved? Disciplinary dismissal? Referral? What was the end result of
your investigations?
MR. CAUSEY: Well, if we decided to investigate a complaint, the two lawyers assigned to
the investigation by the head of OPR go out into the field and interview
the person who was the subject of the complaint and all other relevant
witnesses to compile an investigative record. We would always conduct
the interviews as a team – one lawyer would ask the questions and the
other would take notes and observe. From that record, the team of two
lawyers would draft a report that explained the findings and conclusions.
If we decided that there was no ethical violation, we would just make a
very short one page recommendation to the head of OPR that there was no
factual basis for a recommendation of an ethical violation, and the matter
would be closed. If we thought there were facts supporting an ethical
violation by the subject of the investigation, the team of two lawyers we
would write a report that would get vetted through the office, including
– 65 –
other lawyers who were not directly involved in the investigation, who
would review the report, and a final report would be submitted to the head
of OPR for review. If we thought there was merit to a finding of unethical
conduct, we would recommend disciplinary action based on a range of
discipline from findings of severe misconduct to less severe misconduct.
The investigating lawyers could not impose any discipline on the subject
of the investigation. That would be a recommendation from the head of
OPR. Then based on that finding, there was a list of various sanctions that
could be imposed based on the findings of the investigation.
MR. GOLDMAN: It was an elaborate process. What were the types of sources that led to
investigations in the first place? I assume you received tips, whistleblower
type communications come in?
MR. CAUSEY: Suggestions of ethical violations came from many sources. Opposing
counsel would occasionally say we think the government overstepped
here. A lot of complaints from opposing counsel. Some were very
carefully crafted, almost briefs, submitted to us saying here’s why there’s
been a serious violation and you should investigate it. When lawyers got
involved like that, to some extent they were negotiating for their clients
with DOJ. Our focus was very limited – we investigate and make factual
findings, look at what the ethical rules provide, including the Rules of
Professional Responsibility and the DOJ manuals, and then make a
recommendation of a violation. It was very methodical but interesting
work.
– 66 –
I learned a lot about the organization and operation of the various
U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and the way lawyers at FBI, DEA, and ATF
operated within the Department of Justice.
After I was there for three years, I decided it was time to retire. By
this time I was in my early sixties, and I had had a full and fascinating
career. But I still had one more thing to do. I retired to work on a book I
was writing. But then I happened to answer another phone call. A lawyer
by the name of Irv Nathan called me. Irv had just been appointed Attorney
General for the District of Columbia. He had been counsel to Nancy Pelosi
at the Speaker’s office in the US House of Representatives for a number of
years and had an illustrious legal career before that. Like me, Irv also was
from Baltimore. We had known each other a long time. We were huge
baseball fans, always talked about the Orioles.
But Irv called me one day. I remember I was walking down the
street and my cell phone rings. Irv says, Bill, how are you doing. I thought
he was calling to schedule a lunch or something. I said fine. He said I want
you to come work for me. I said Irv, I just retired, and I am writing a book.
He said oh well, I still want you to come to work for me. He had just
become DC Attorney General. He realized that he had a couple of really
big exposure lawsuits that were filed against the District of Columbia that
he had to resolve. Because they involved significant money issues that
would affect the DC budget, he had to get these cases resolved. He knew
my experience with litigation and some of the bigger cases we’ve talked
– 67 –
about and many other things I had done. He said I want you to come and
help me get rid of a couple of these big cases.
MR. GOLDMAN: The District did not elect its attorney general then, right?
MR. CAUSEY: Right. We now have an elected attorney general. Irv was the last appointed
AG.
MR. GOLDMAN: Did he succeed Nichols?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes, I believe so.
MR. GOLDMAN: So that may explain some of the big cases that were still on the docket.
MR. CAUSEY: Perhaps. But I told Irv I had just retired to write my book. He said look,
give me about a year to 18 months. I think I have three or four big cases. I
finally said okay. I wound up being at the DC Attorney General’s office
for about six years.
But we did get all the big cases resolved, including the really big
case that he was most worried about. There’s an interesting story about
that case. In 2001, there was a huge demonstration at Pershing Park on
Pennsylvania Avenue across from the Willard Hotel. Thousands of people
were down there demonstrating, and there was a large police presence.
The DC Police called in police from all neighboring jurisdictions. Federal
law enforcement was there. To make a long story short, when the
demonstration got a little out of hand, the police told everybody to
disperse. The demonstrators did not disperse, and the police then encircled
the crowd, the entire block. A lot of people got arrested. Five students at
GW Law School filed suit. The lead plaintiff’s last name was Chang, so
– 68 –
the case was called Chang v. United States. That was because they listed
the federal law enforcement groups first on the complaint and then DC and
everybody else. Everybody in the case knew that DC was going to be the
lead defendant because it was DC MPD that made all the arrests. So, it
was a huge case. The case had been assigned to US District Judge Emmet
Sullivan. The five plaintiffs were represented by Jonathan Turley.
MR. GOLDMAN: Were they students of his?
MR. CAUSEY: I don’t know if they were students of his. We later learned that he
basically solicited the five plaintiffs by putting up a notice on the bulletin
board at GW that said if anybody got arrested at Pershing Park and wants
a lawyer to call him. Turley, of course, has become television
commentator, mostly on FOX News.
Irv asked me to look into the case and try to get it settled. The
depositions of all the parties had been taken. It was pretty clear it was a
serious case with a lot of exposure for the District. There was a serious
issue about whether MPD did what was called trap and arrest, so we took
the case very seriously. I said to Irv, the District is probably going to have
to pay some significant money to get this case settled. He said I want to
get it over with, but I don’t want to pay a lot of money, so do what you
can.
So, I put a team together at OAG to work on this case. We worked
on it for about a year. We interviewed again a lot of the police who were
involved. We had a status conference before Judge Sullivan. I said, “Your
– 69 –
Honor, to move this case along a little bit, we need to get it before a
mediator.” He sat up and said good idea. Who do you recommend? I said
obviously I’ll talk to Mr. Turley about it and see if we can reach an
agreement, and if not, perhaps the court can assign it to one of the
organizations in town that does professional mediation.
Turley did not want to have anything to do with mediation. I think
it made him realize that this case was getting near a conclusion, He then
surprised everyone by saying that he wanted to take a whole new bunch of
depositions. Of course, he did not need any new discovery, but he wanted
to keep the case going. Judge Sullivan did not want Turley to turn the case
into a show, so he assigned the case to US Magistrate Judge John Facciola
to conduct any additional discovery. Judge Facciola knew by reputation
that Turley was intimidating and sort of a bully type, and the judge wanted
to have some control over Turley’s behavior. I was not happy with the
additional discovery but pleased that Judge Facciola was going to preside
over any additional discovery in open court. That would put some controls
on Turley.
So, we started doing depositions in front of Judge Facciola that
added nothing to the case. But this time, Turley had to be more
professional and to a large extent he was. We got all his new and
unnecessary discovery done. In fact, I think what Turley did actually
strengthened the District’s case, and I think Judge Facciola thought so too.
When Turley’s new deposition diversion was over, I went back before
– 70 –
Judge Sullivan and suggested again it was time to get the case before a
mediator. Judge Sullivan agreed. He assigned it to a mediator who was a
recently retired federal judge.
MR. GOLDMAN: Who did he assign it to?
MR. CAUSEY: Jim Robertson. He was a retired federal district court judge in DC, and he
was a former president of the DC Bar.
MR. GOLDMAN: How do you do that? Unless he had Turley’s consent?
MR. CAUSEY: I think by this time Turley realized he had exhausted his churning of the
case in front of Magistrate Facciola, and I think he was afraid Magistrate
Judge Facciola was going to write a report to Judge Sullivan that was not
very favorable to his case. It may be that Turley agreed with Judge
Robertson, I just don’t specifically recall.
Anyhow, we start mediation before Jim Robertson, who, as you
probably know, was a terrific mediator. I had him as a mediator in a
number of cases, and he was always very good. Well, I could tell after our
first mediation session that Robertson was seeing right through Turley.
Robertson knew why this case was not settling. So that enabled me to
make a recommendation to Irv Nathan. I said to Irv, “I’ve got a proposal
on how to resolve the Chang case. I said we ought to pay a sizable amount
of money, but let’s make sure that Turley doesn’t get most of the money,
which is why he has kept this case going. Let’s get most of the significant
money directly to the plaintiffs.” I knew the plaintiffs were recently
graduated from law school, probably were carrying large school loan
– 71 –
debts, and had just started new jobs. So I suggested to Irv that if we offer a
lot of money directly to the plaintiffs, they might well accept the offers,
and Turley will have nothing to say about it. He can’t keep his clients
from wanting to settle the case. He can hem and haw and argue with them
and tell them why they shouldn’t settle, but I doubt that Turley had talked
with them for months. In the end, I strongly believed each of the five
plaintiffs would take the money.
MR. GOLDMAN: Unless they have an agreement with counsel on a contingency basis.
MR. CAUSEY: That’s possible, but that is their private issue to fight over.
MR. GOLDMAN: That’s right.
MR. CAUSEY: We had a small amount in our offer for Turley’s fee, and we knew he
would balk at it. But if the plaintiffs wanted to pay Turley any more
money, they could take any amount out of their award and pay it as an
additional fee for Turley. I was confident the plaintiffs would not do that.
So, Irv asked what I thought was the amount we should pay. I gave him a
number. Irv thought the number was too much. I told Irv you are not going
to settle this case and get rid of it unless the District pays a significant
amount, and this is the best moment that you will ever have to settle this
case. So Irv approved it, and it eventually was approved by the Mayor.
We went back before Robertson, and I laid the proposal in front of
him. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with what we were
offering the plaintiffs, but Robertson said that he thought the amount for
attorneys’ fees was too low. We did not have a lot of money specifically
– 72 –
designated for attorney’s fees in the settlement offer. I said that that is
between the plaintiffs and Turley. If they want the District to pay Turley a
higher fee, they can reject the offer and we are back to square one, or they
can pay him more out of their portion of the settlement. But I felt the
plaintiffs were eager to settle the case. Robertson said alright, I’m going to
let you put your offer before the plaintiffs and they can decide.
By this time, the plaintiffs were all over the country starting their
young legal careers. I made a private suggestion to Robertson that he, and
not Turley, convey the offer to the plaintiffs. If you let Turley do that, I
said, Turley will not convey the offer correctly. It won’t get conveyed
fully or properly. Robertson agreed with my suggestion, and he conveyed
the offer to the plaintiffs.
As expected, Turley hemmed and hawed about it, but Robertson
had also figured this case out by this time. Robertson put the offer to the
plaintiffs, and they accepted. Turley was quite upset.
But the case settled, and I think Irv was very pleased that the case
was over. I don’t think he was happy with what we had to pay because he
had to account for that to the mayor, but he was happy that the case finally
got resolved. I think MPD also was pleased the case was over. There’s no
doubt about it that the case had not settled before this because of Turley,
and I don’t think anything inappropriate or unethical was done by the
District. Everything was done with the court’s knowledge and the
mediator’s approval. It was just Turley who was unhappy that he wasn’t
– 73 –
going to get a big fee check from DC unless his clients gave him
something from their settlement amounts. That was their business, and
they may have done that. I don’t know, and I don’t need or want to know.
So, we got rid of the Chang case. I had a couple of other cases I
was working on that finally got resolved before Irv left office. One
involved a significant lawsuit over the food service program in the DC
Public Schools. Then Irv’s term ended, and Karl Racine was elected AG. I
was thinking that now I can finally retire and write my book, but Karl
asked me to stay on. I agreed to do that and continued to work at OAG for
two more years. I finally retired in December 2016 for the second time. I
spent the next two years writing my book.
MR. GOLDMAN: You taught trial practice at another school, didn’t you?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. Before I taught at Georgetown, I taught at American University with
Tony Morella, who I had mentioned earlier. Tony and I taught together for
about three years, then I moved to Georgetown.
MR. GOLDMAN: There’s a room named after Mr. Morella at the law school at American,
right?
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. There is a room named after him at the law school. He was a big
force at AU law school. He was general counsel to the University. He
helped me get on the Board of Trustees at American University for two
years. Gene, I think I was on the board when you were there at AU.
MR. GOLDMAN: The room is a practice courtroom at the law school or something like that.
– 74 –
MR. CAUSEY: Right. He was a big influence in the law school. So, before I talk about the
book, let me just if I can take a few minutes to talk about my teaching
experience at Georgetown.
I taught at Georgetown University Law Center for 34 years. As we
just noted, I started teaching as an adjunct at The Washington College of
Law at American University for several years with Tony Morella and then
I moved to Georgetown in 1983. I taught a wide range of courses in
addition to professional responsibility, which I have talked about. As I
mentioned before, I mostly taught in my early years at Georgetown a trial
practice course. I remember at one point, Dean Judy Areen came to me
and said we really think the trial practice course would be more relevant
for our students if you taught it with a woman. More and more women
were becoming law students. I think now at Georgetown more than five
percent of law students are women. I said that was a great idea. I have a
recommendation. I recommended Sally Gere, my wife, who ran the civil
litigation training at the Department of Justice for a while, called the
Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute. So, Sally and I taught trial practice
together for a couple of years. One year we both received the award for
being the top adjunct professors at Georgetown. We had a wonderful
awards lunch that was well attended by students and other faculty and by
Assistant Dean Carol O’Neill, who gave us the awards. Dean O’Neill was
a strong force at Georgetown. Sadly, she died of cancer a few years later.
– 75 –
Dean Areen also came to me with two other ideas during my
teaching career at Georgetown. One time she told me that Georgetown had
a lot of students who become law clerks for federal judges, and
Georgetown was getting some feedback from the judges that our students
did not have a full understanding of federal criminal procedure. She asked
me if I could develop a small seminar just for students who were going to
be law clerks. I developed a course and taught it for four or five years. It
was a small seminar of about eight to twelve people each year. It was a fun
course to teach. The students were very engaging and very smart. I think
those students really liked the course. There’s a great textbook available
that I used that tracked a fictitious drug case from the law enforcement
investigation and arrest to the filing of an appeal, beginning to end, and for
the entire semester we talked about that case and how that case was
handled by the defense and by the prosecution. For the last class of the
semester, I had top prosecutors and defense attorneys come in and talk to
and answer questions from the students. For several years the head of the
Federal Public Defender Office, A.J. Kramer, came to that last class. It
was a very effective course. I later learned that Georgetown got really
good feedback from some of the judges of the students that I had taught in
that course.
Georgetown also had a problem involving graduating students. The
law school said it had a number of students who need two or three credits
to graduate, and we can’t let them dangle for another semester. I was
– 76 –
asked if I would create a quick summer course of two credits that they can
take in June and then let them finish in the summer and graduate before
the fall. I said sure as long as I can pick the topic for the course. So, I
developed a course on law and literature. One of the reasons I was
interested in literature was that at the time I was a member of the Board of
Directors of PEN/Faulkner and I would meet and get to know many
authors who talked to me a lot about the writing process and literature.
One of the novels I used in that seminar was Snow Falling on Cedars,
which includes a great trial scene. David Gutterson was the author who I
got to know through PEN Faulkner. I taught this six week seminar for
several years each summer. The students were supposed to be only the
students who needed the credits, but after a while, students who didn’t
need the credits wanted to take the course. So in the last few years I taught
that seminar I wound up with about fifteen students in the class.
I spent my last several years at Georgetown teaching the evening
course on evidence. I very much enjoyed that course. But unlike my
several smaller seminar courses, my evidence lecture class had about 70 to
80 students. The students seemed to like the course. I still have the
evidence casebook and materials that I used for that class.
So, I really enjoyed my teaching experience at Georgetown at
night while I was working on cases during the day. I had a complete and
full legal career involving many different clients, law firms, organizations,
and getting to know and teach many students at Georgetown over 34 yeas,
– 77 –
some of whom I still keep in touch with today. I would not change a thing.
Funny that I mentioned at the beginning of this oral history how I wanted
to be a teacher when I was much younger. And I basically ended my
career as a teacher.
MR. GOLDMAN: So, I want to focus in our remaining time not just on the book, but your
historical interest in the space program in general and then homing in on
Mr. Houbolt with the resulting book that you wrote and was published.
We can wrap it up today by talking about your interest in the space
program, the technicalities of what led to the moon landing, and the person
responsible.
MR. CAUSEY: Let me do that. And then before we close, I also want to quickly mention a
couple of the organizations that I’ve been involved with.
The book I mentioned earlier was a book about a man named John
Houbolt. I’ve been a docent at the Air and Space Museum for about
twenty years. I’ve had the good fortune to meet a lot of the astronauts and
engineers during these last twenty years at the Air and Space Museum
who worked in the Apollo program. Houbolt was the engineer who
basically figured out and then convinced NASA how to send astronauts to
the moon and back. Not much was known about Houbolt when I first
started reading about him in the mid1990s. I was encouraged by a
professor named James Hansen, who knew Houbolt, to write a book about
Houbolt and his experiences. When I was at the point where I started to
think about a publisher, Hansen, who had written many books on the space
– 78 –
program and was working at the time with Purdue University, encouraged
me to submit my manuscript to Purdue. I submitted my finished
manuscript to Purdue and its publishing arm accepted it and published the
book. Purdue did a nice job of putting together the book. I found writing
my book on John Houbolt was far more difficult than writing a legal brief
or memo. I was conscious of writing for a much larger audience. There is
now an exhibit at the Air and Space Museum on the Mall on John
Houbolt, which I talk about when I give my tours. Occasionally somebody
on the tour will say you know so much about Houbolt, why don’t you
write a book about him, and I say I already have, and in fact, if you’re
interested, it’s in our bookstore here. Occasionally, they’ll find me an hour
later and they would ask me to sign the book.
So, the book was a fun and different experience. It was completely
separate from practicing law and teaching, completely different, although
giving tours is really another form of teaching and storytelling, but then
again, so is presenting a case or writing a brief. And I think being a docent
at the Air and Space Museum helped me fill out my career.
Finally, let me mention some of the organizations I have been
affiliated with during my career. As I mentioned earlier, I was on the
Board of Trustees of American University for two years, after I graduated
in 1971, and one of the board members I served with was a leading
Supreme Court lawyer named Barrett Prettyman who was at Hogan &
Hartson. The Federal Courthouse is named after Barrett’s father, Judge
– 79 –
Prettyman, who was Chief Judge of the DC Circuit. Barrett was big
influence in my life and was a wonderful mentor for me in the law.
I have served on the board of the DC Circuit Historical Society, for
which we’re now doing this oral history. I was on that board for many
years, and I did five oral histories for the Historical Society, including
Judge Aubrey Robinson and Dan Gribbon, I took the oral history of Judge
George Revercomb, who was a district court judge. I took that oral history
at Sibley Hospital about a week before Judge Revercomb died of cancer. I
also took Ed Campbell’s oral history, who started Jackson & Campbell
with Tom Jackson’s father. And I took the oral history of Earl Silbert, who
was the chief Watergate prosecutor and a great member of the DC Bar.
That was a fun oral history. we devoted an entire session out of four
sessions to talking about Watergate. And this was before Mark Felt was
revealed to be Deep Throat. Earl later told me that the revelation of Felt as
Deep Throat even surprised him.
As I mentioned, I’ve also served one term on the DC Bar Board of
Governors, which was a great experience. Sally, my wife, later served two
terms on the Board of Governors, and now I’m thankful that I didn’t win
the DC bar presidency in 2000 because I now realized what a chunk of
time it would have taken to do job well.
Very early in my career I was on the Rules Advisory Committee
for the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Services. I had met in the early
1980s Chief Judge Robinson Everett, and he had asked me to be on the
– 80 –
rules committee. I served on that for a couple of years. That was
fascinating to learn about the procedures of the Court of Military Appeals,
now known as the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces,
and to learn that system of justice as compared to the procedures used in
federal and state courts for civil and criminal cases.
I also was on the board of the Council for Court Excellence for a
number of years. And I was in the Charles Fahy American Inn of Court,
which was only the sixth one created in the country. There are now, I
think, hundreds of them around the country.
So, I was involved in a lot of very interesting things that were law
related. I met a lot of very fascinating people who were very helpful and
influential in my career. I think I’ve had an interesting, fulfilling, varied
career. I had a chance to try some important cases, meet a lot of fine and
excellent lawyers, and some not so fine or excellent, and serve on some
boards that had significant impact on people in the District. One of them
was the Fred Abramson Scholarship Foundation, which gives scholarships
to DC public high school students. I had my very first job interview with
Fred Abramson when I began looking at private law firms. Fred was a
great mentor to many people. He and I developed a good relationship
before he tragically died at a very early age.
MR. GOLDMAN: I think that’s a lesson from everything you’re saying is not only the
professional interactions with the friendships that grew out of them, which
you savor today.
– 81 –
MR. CAUSEY: Yes. Absolutely. I’ve enjoyed my eclectic career. It has been a lot of fun. I
learned a lot, tried some interesting cases, taught hundreds of law students.
and met many fascinating people. I don’t think there was much I would do
over again or do differently. There are ups and downs in any career. I had
my ups and downs, but all in all, I found it to be a very fulfilling
experience, and I’m happy to share it with you.
So, Gene, I want to thank you and I really appreciate the time
you’ve devoted to doing this.
MR. GOLDMAN: My pleasure.

A-1
Oral History of William F. Causey
Index
Abram, Jonathan, 55
Abramson, Fred, 80
Adult Congenital Heart Association (ACHA), 3
Agnew, Spiro, 18
Andrews, Ike, 21
Areen, Judy, 74-75
American University
library issue, 10
Barton, Clara, 53-54
Bierstadt, Albert, 44
Blalock, Alfred, 2
Buffett, Jimmy, 28
Burnett, Arthur, 26
Burr by Gore Vidal, 13
Bush, George W., 59
Byrnes, John Carrol, 7
Campbell, Earl, 37
Campbell, Ed, 79
Canale, Frank, 30
Carter, Jimmy, 22
Causey, William – Personal
Adult Congenital Heart Association (ACHA), 3
Air and Space Museum docent, 77-78
American University, 7, 9, 18
Board of Trustees, 78
Young Democrats President, 8
birth, 1
Blue Baby, 1, 2
District of Columbia C Circuit Historical Society Board of Trustees, 79
University of Maryland law school, 11
Causey, William – Professional
American Red Cross, 52-55, 57-58
American University, 73-74
Board of Directors of PEN/Faulkner, 76
boulevard rule (Maryland), 15
Charles Fahy American Inn of Court, 37, 80
Council for Court Excellence, 80
Department of Justice, 60, 62-64, 66, 74
Department of Defense, 59
A-2
District of Columbia Bar Board of Governors, 48, 79
District of Columbia Public Schools food service program, 73
Falk & Causey, 31, 37
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 59
Economic Opportunity, 22
general counsel and staff director, 22
GeorgetownUniversity Law Center, 63
teaching, 74
House Administration Committee, 18
Johnson & Johnson, 52-56
Juvenile Justice Act, 22
Office of the Attorney General (OAG), 68, 73
Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), 60, 62-65
Peabody & Brown, 47-48
Presidential Records Act, 16, 19-20
United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Services
Rules Advisory Committee, 79
Superior Court nomination, 49
Chang v. United States, 67-68, 70, 73
Citizens United, 19
Donahue, Ed, 30
Donahue, Ehrmantraut & Montedonico (law firm), 23
Dutton, Fred, 4
Edson, Chuck, 47
Ehrmantraut, Bill, 23 -24, 30
Elcano, Mary, 52, 57
Ellis, Thomas, 32-35
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), 32
Ervin, Sam, 36
Everett, Robinson, 79
Facciola, John, 69-70
Falk, Jim, 30, 32, 34
Falk, Jim Jr., 31
Federal Public Defender Office,, 75
Felt, Mark, 79
Ferber, Linda, 44-45
Ford, Bill, 21
Ford, Gerald, 30
Forensic Technologies International (FTI), 25-28, 32
Foster, Dulany, 11-14, 16
Fourth Circuit, 36
Fred Abramson Scholarship Foundation, 80
FTI See Forensic Technologies International
A-3
Garfinkel, Steven, 19
Gaul, Bill, 21
Gere, Sally, 74, 79
Green, Joyce Hens, 26, 30
Gribbon, Dan, 79
Gutterson, David, 76
Hamilton, Juan, 41
Hamilton, Steven, 30
Hansen, James, 77
Hogan & Hartson, 54, 78
Houbolt, John, 77
Humphrey, Hubert, 8
Jackson & Campbell, 37-38, 46-47, 79
Jackson, Thomas Searing, 37
Jackson, Tom, 37, 46, 79
Jarvis, Richard, 28
Johnson and Johnson, 53-56
Kaplan, Joseph H. H. (Joe), 5 , 7, 11
Katrina (Hurricane), 52-53, 57, 59-60
Kennedy, Robert, 4
Kennedy, Ted, 7
Kent State, 9
Kramer, A.J., 75
Lamberth, Royce, 29
McCarthy, Eugene, 6
Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), 68, 72
Mikva, Abner, 19
Montedonico, Joe, 24-25, 28-29, 33, 37-38
Morella, Anthony C. (Tony), 18 , 73-74
Mortensen, Stan, 19
Moylan, Charles, 5, 7
Nash, Brian, 30
Nathan, Irv, 66-68, 70-73
National Telephone Cooperative Association (NTCA), 29
Nields, John, 48
Nixon, Richard, 8-9, 11, 52
litigation, 19
tapes and records, 18
A-4
Nixon Hargrave, 47, 50
Nixon Peabody, 47, 49-51
Novello, Angie, 4
NTCA See National Telephone Cooperative Association
O’Keeffe, Georgia, 38 -39, 43
O’Neill, Carol, 74
O’Neill, Thomas (Tip), 21
Perkins, Carl, 21
Power, Susan, 34, 37
Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, 18
Prettyman, Barrett, 10, 78
Purnel, George, 28
Purnell Jarvis, 28-29
Quint, Peter, 17
Racine, Karl, 73
Rakoff, Jed, 55-57
Red Cross, 47, 52-53, 55-57, 59-62
synthetic blood., 61
Revercomb, George, 79
Robertson, James “Jim”, 70 -71
Robinson, Aubrey, 79
Sarbanes, Paul, 5, 7, 11
Silbert, Earl, 79
Snow Falling on Cedars, 76
Stieglitz, James, 38-39, 42-43
Sullivan, Emmet, 39, 68-70
Supreme Court of the United States, 4, 15, 18, 32, 36, 78
Taussig, Helen, 1-2
Toomey, Dan, 26
Trump, Donald 17, 20
Turley, Jonathan, 68-72
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 56
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, 33-36
United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, 54, 56
Venable, Baejter & Howard (law firm), 5
Venetoulis, Ted, 7
Vietnam, 4, 9
A-5
Washington Post, 36
Watergate, 18, 53, 79
White, Ted, The Making of the President 1960, 14
Williams, George, 10

B-1
Oral History of William F. Causey
Cases and Statutes
Cases
Chang v. United States, 246 F.R.D. 372 (D.D.C. 2007) 67-68, 70, 73
Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), 19
Johnson Johnson v. the American Nat. Red Cross, 552 F. Supp. 2d 434 (S.D.N.Y. 2008), 52-56
Power v. Arlington Hospital, 800 F. Supp. 1384 (E.D. Va. 1992), 33-37
Statutes
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, 42 U.S. Code § 1395dd, 32-34
Juvenile Justice Act, Pub. L. No. 93-415, 42 U.S.C. § 5601 et seq.), 1974, 22
Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, Pub. L. 93–526, 88 Stat. 1695,
16-17

William F. Causey, Esq.
Biographical Sketch
William F. Causey has a career that spans law, teaching, and public service for over 45 years. Bill’s work has
ranged from being the general counsel of a subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives, to work as
Assistant General Counsel for the American Red Cross, to serving in the Office of Professional Responsibility
in the U.S. Department of Justice. Bill also worked in private practice with an international law firm, and with
the Office of the Attorney General for the District
of Columbia before retiring in 2017.
Bill taught for 34 years as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, teaching courses in
evidence, professional responsibility, trial practice, federal criminal procedure, and a popular seminar on law
and literature. Bill also has served on numerous nonprofit and governmental boards, including the D.C. Bar,
the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, the Abramson Scholarship Foundation, the Historical Society for the District
of Columbia Circuit, the Adult Congenital Heart Association, and American University.
Bill has served as a docent at the National Air and Space Museum for the past 20 years. His book John
Houbolt: The Unsung Hero of the Apollo Moon Landings, was published by Purdue University Press in 2020
to critical acclaim. Bill and his wife Sally live in Washington, D.C.
C-1

D-1
Eugene I. Goldman, Esq.
Biographical Sketch
Eugene Goldman is a senior member of McDermott, Will & Emery’s White Collar and
Securities Defense Practice. He represents domestic and international clients before the
Securities and Exchange Commission in financial fraud, auditor misconduct, insider trading and
other securities enforcement proceedings. Eugene also advises registered broker-dealers and
investment advisers on compliance, change of control and related regulatory issues. He has
testified before Congress on securities law issues and is the lead author of The PCAOB Mission:
Improving Audit Quality via Enforcement, Standards & Inspections, 287 Securities Practice
Portfolio Series (BNA 2014).
Eugene served as Senior Counsel at the SEC’s Division of Enforcement and law clerk to the
Honorable Stanley Sporkin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He has served
as a Presiding Judge at Georgetown Law Center’s Greenhalgh Trial Advocacy Tournaments and
at the Law Center’s White Collar Crime Mock Trial Invitational.
Upon his appointment by the Governor of Virginia, Eugene served a four-year term on the Board
for Professional and Occupational Regulation, Commonwealth of Virginia.
Eugene received his JD from the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University (Law
Review) and his BA from the American University (Recipient of the Kinsman-Hurst Award
presented “to the senior who made the greatest contribution to the University in a four-year
period.”).