4.2.12 WC: 191694 Opinions 1962-1963 Alan M. Dershowitz, Law Clerk” It is a treasured possession. A year in the life of! And what a year it was. My first case involved a man named “Daniel Jackson Oliver Wendell Holmes Morgan”—Quite a name! Any lawyer would be proud to have been named after. “Daniel Webster,” “Andrew Jackson” and “Oliver Wendell Holmes.” That’s what Mr. Morgan thought too. The only problem was he wasn’t a lawyer and that wasn’t his name! He was an uneducated, but slick, African American man whose parents were sharecroppers and who made his way to the District of Columbia, where he apparently bought a dead lawyer’s bar certificate in a junk shop. He started to practice law, and he did extremely well, beating real prosecutors in several cases involving street crimes. For more than a year, he went to court and argued to juries and judges. His reputation spread in the downtown area, as he kept winning difficult cases. Ultimately the feds checked him out, discovered that despite his name, he wasn’t a lawyer, and charged him with multiple counts of fraud, forgery, impersonating an officer of the court and false pretenses. He represented himself at trial, was convicted and sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison. The court appointed a lawyer named Monroe Freedman to argue his appeal. Judge Bazelon invited me to watch the oral argument. I was blown away by Freedman’s eloquence, erudition, command of the record and ability to further his argument while responding to hard questions. I had participated in moot court appeals as a law student, and I had done very well—even earning a job offer from one of the judges who was a partner at a Jewish law firm. But this was a different league. I remember thinking “I want to be like this guy,” and wondering whether I could ever be that good. The lawyer for the prosecution was also quite good, though not up to Freedman’s high standards. He was an African American named Charles Duncan, who, I later was told, was the son of th