A practice across party lines
James K. Horstman wrote for lawyers who have to defend a civil case alongside other defendants. In a paper coauthored with Lori Iwan, he examined how counsel can work together when the interests of their clients diverge. The paper identified him as a Chicago partner concentrating on appeals and insurance coverage in state and federal courts.
In my Hancock County case he appeared for the plaintiff. Talmadge Brenner joined him for the appeal. Their opponents also brought lawyers from two Illinois cities. An appearance sheet tells you which side an advocate represented in that particular dispute. A list of practice specialties cannot tell you that.
What did the receipt settle?
I signed a receipt when the painting I had delivered was returned to me. The trial court ultimately treated the return as grounds for judgment against me in the dispute over the Nauvoo Temple stones. The legal question turns on the purpose of the handover. Receiving an object back proves possession. It takes evidence of agreement to prove that the recipient accepted it in settlement of another obligation.
Horstman argued my appeal. Paragraph 16 of the 2014 opinion says the record showed a desire to renegotiate, yet no new offer had been presented to me. The Third District reversed and sent the case back. That distinction between a physical act and its legal consequence is the part of the decision I recommend to other collectors.
The lawyer led away in handcuffs
Six years before he argued my case, Horstman represented Allison Smith, a lawyer whose client had demanded a jury in a dispute over damage to a truck. His case appeared on the calendar of a courtroom that heard trials without juries. Smith asked the judge to take it off that calendar. At the end of the morning she was in the Daley Center lockup. The judge found her in direct criminal contempt and imposed a fourteen-day sentence.
There was no transcript of the exchange. The judge had set down her findings in thirty-two numbered paragraphs. Smith prepared a written recollection of the hearing that another judge certified for the appeal. In September 2008 the First District read the two accounts together. It concluded that the findings did not establish an intent to obstruct the proceedings, reversed the contempt order, and directed that Smith’s conviction be expunged. Horstman is the lawyer listed for Smith in the reporter’s appearance sheet.
That opinion is worth putting alongside my own. A visitor in the gallery could have seen the handcuffs put on. Years later the judges in my case could see on video the delivery of my painting. In both instances the hardest question was what the act proved. A lawyer earns his place in the court of appeal when he can show precisely where a finding outruns its evidence.
I write about the work lawyers perform before a public tribunal because litigation over Mormon property belongs both to religious history and to civic history. The public can read the opinion for itself. I exercise the same freedom of the press in writing about counsel as I do in writing about officeholders. What an advocate puts before the courts can matter to a community long before anyone stands for election. The editor’s judgments here are mine.
Sources
- Horstman and Iwan, strategies for multiparty litigation
- Hajicek v. Nauvoo Restoration, Inc., counsel on appeal and ¶¶ 4, 14–16, 20–21
- University of Illinois, Illinois Newspaper Project, Nauvoo Neighbor, OCLC 10550112
- Illinois Appellate Court, Petrakh v. Morano, No. 1-07-1737 (2008), pp. 2–5, 10–14
- Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church, vol. 1, Nauvoo Neighbor entry
- University of Illinois, dates of the Nauvoo Neighbor