As a neophyte lawyer, I would pester my father — a files-piled-to-the-ceiling practitioner — with anecdotes of my own nascent, incipient and meager, law practice. I was inexperienced, unassertive and with few cases. With time, I would begin to come into my own, aggressively defending — as I would reflexively say — “the victims of prosecutor overreaching in the extreme.” When you can’t successfully pound on the facts or pound on the law, you pound on the table.
I enjoyed it. But without the ability to build a name for myself, there was no future in it. Or maybe I was drawn in by the allure of prosecuting big time corruption cases. No matter the reason, I “changed sides,” and became a prosecutor in a brand new — in retrospect, inordinately zealous — corruption prosecution office. My father, although not displeased by the career change, seemed to despair over how easily I could abandon my supposed principles and morph from “Paul” into “Saul” — almost a reverse conversion along the Damascus Road.
