Category: News Feeds

For many lawyers and court watchers out there, talk about “flipping” circuits is misguided. There aren’t “Republican” judges or “Democratic” judges, there are just judges and you can’t really tell how a court is going to rule based on the party of the President who nominated the judges.

The people who say this are wrong. No, you can’t tell in every case, because thankfully the circuits still decide most cases on a randomized panel of judges. And sure, when blue slips were a thing, the Senators from each state had a lot to do with the partisan rabidness of the circuit judges who ended up getting nominations.

But blue slips are dead. Republicans killed them. The Trump administration has done nothing but nominate arch-conservative, FedSoc approved judges since they took office, and those judges come with a political agenda. When they can link up with judges nominated by previous Republican presidents, they can produce reliably conservative outcomes. If Democrats ever get back in power, they’d be wise to do the same exact thing.

Trump has already “flipped” the Third Circuit. He’s made serious inroads on other circuits. Now, he’s posed to fully flip the Eleventh Circuit. A giddy Ed Whelan took time out of his search for the real attempted rapist to explain this in the National Review:

Eleventh Circuit judge Stanley Marcus has announced that he will take senior status on March 2, 2020, or upon confirmation of his successor (whichever comes first). Marcus was appointed to his seat by President Clinton in 1997.

Counting active judges by the party of the appointing president is an admittedly crude and imperfect measure of the ideological makeup of a federal appellate court. (Marcus, who was appointed to the federal district court by President Reagan in 1985, was not viewed as a liberal.) With that large caveat, I’ll note that the Eleventh Circuit is currently divided 6-6 between appointees of Republican presidents and appointees of Democratic presidents. So when President Trump fills Marcus’s seat, the Eleventh Circuit will flip to a 7-5 majority of Republican appointees. At the outset of the Trump administration, it had an 8-3 Democratic majority (with one vacancy). So that’s an impressive swing.

One administration, not even in power for three years yet, has flipped the federal circuit for Florida, Georgia, and Alabama — three places where nonwhites historically have a difficult time securing things like voting rights and equal treatment under the law — from 8-3 Democratic to 7-5 Republican, with a majority of those Republicans being Trump judges.

If Democrats can’t explain to voters the importance of the federal courts, they will deserve everything these judges are about to do to keep the South unwinnable for nonwhites.

New Vacancy Sets Up Eleventh Circuit Flip [National Review]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Few African leaders polarised public opinion, especially in South Africa, to such an extent as the former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. He died in Singapore on Friday at the age of 95.

Mugabe’s struggle against colonialism, his reconciliation efforts and pan-African vision, as well as the massacres of Ndebeles, the Gukurahundi, in the early 1980s and his Machiavellian manipulation of politics to stay in power for 39 years are all part of the complex legacy of the once-revered Mugabe.

Yet the elephant in the room remains his land redistribution efforts. Was it a heroic battle against the neocolonial west that could have worked out, given more time and resources? Or was it merely a ploy to stay in power despite an ailing economy, unleashing violent expropriation and the implosion of the agricultural sector?

Land reform remains outstanding in many African countries, particularly in Southern Africa and this question is used by populist politicians on both sides of the divide.

During that memorable news conference on July 29, 2018, on the eve of the first elections since his ousting, Mugabe was asked about this decision, in the early 2000s to give free reign to his feared war veterans and others to occupy land held by white commercial farmers.

A frail but combative Mugabe, in dark glasses, told local and international media that it was all part of the fight against British colonial rule and against the “settlers” in Zimbabwe.

It was agreed at Lancaster House in 1979 that people should get their land back, a decision supported by the former British premier Margaret Thatcher and the United States, he said.

“We had started quite well. We provided education for all, we assisted people with resources to develop the land. In some cases, we fell short but we certainly did our best.

“I don’t see where we have erred. We didn’t send away the whites, we took away their land and naturally they thought they had to go away somewhere,” he said.

At 94, having just lost power to his erstwhile companion Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe was particularly eloquent on this issue, even if parts of the one hour-and-20-minute news conference was somewhat incoherent.

As is well-known, ZANU-PF bigwigs and army generals grabbed much of the land, and the economy went downhill from there.

A new study by the Institute for Security Studies on Zimbabwe’s economic future shows just how bad it has become, despite Mnangagwa’s promises of a new Zimbabwe “open for business” 18 months ago.

Today, two out of five people in Zimbabwe are undernourished. While from 1980 to 2004, Zimbabwe had the fourth largest economy in Southern Africa, with a GDP of US$18.6bn in 1998, it was roughly half of that by 2008 at US$9.3bn.

One statistic that would have Mugabe turn in his grave is that average incomes in Zambia are now almost double those of Zimbabweans.

Zambia’s first leader Kenneth Kaunda was there when Mugabe raised so much hope in the early 1980s and must have looked on in trepidation at the decline in his neighbouring country.

What went wrong?

Leaders at the recent summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Dar es Salaam again blamed sanctions for Zimbabwe’s economic demise, even though this is a debate fraught with disinformation.

SADC, and the former mediator Thabo Mbeki, never openly criticised abuses, including the rigging of elections in Zimbabwe and are unlikely to do so now.

One thing is abundantly clear, Mugabe overstayed his welcome and ZANU-PF turned into a self-serving and corrupt ruling party under his watch.

My last personal recollection of Mugabe was seeing him at the African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa in February 2016 when he came up to the stage and announced that Zimbabwean farmers are donating 300 head of cattle to the AU budget, which was largely donor funded.

It drew polite applause from leaders and officials on the floor.

Many of them had clearly moved on to bigger things and were aware that modern, commercial agriculture was needed for African economies to stay afloat in a globalised world.

Mugabe was caught up in a time warp of his own.

** Liesl Louw-Vaudran is a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.

Post published in: Featured

That depends, many would say, ethnically no – my roots are in Scotland and Ireland and I suppose I could trace my ancestry even back to somewhere in northern Europe. My skin is what we call white – sort of pink and brown but nothing of the browns of Africa.

When I took my family to Europe for the first time in the early seventies, we travelled all over and even spent some time in Britain. But it was when we visited Scotland and Ireland that we felt most “at home” in a strange way. Travelling through Scotland in the mountains, there was a distinct feeling for me that somehow, this was where my roots lay – even though my family fled Scotland more than a thousand years ago. They were driven out of that country and travelled to Ireland during the conflicts with Robert the Bruce.

But there was no doubt that in Europe, we were strangers. It was no longer home for us as a family and when we landed back in Harare, we collectively concluded that this was really “home”. This is not an easy transition. We came as colonisers, we stayed and subjugated the people we came live amongst. We imposed our languages and our cultures and brought with us our legal systems, economic organisation and our religions. The cultures and norms of the people who already lived here were simply brushed aside as being “primitive” or even irrelevant to the new dispensation. Where colonisation was not by negotiation we simply took what we wanted by force.

But we were always a tiny minority whose will was imposed by force on a much larger population. As the people among whom we lived became more educated and imbibed skills and experience from their colonial masters, so the demand for a greater say in the affairs of State began to escalate. The outcome was inevitable and when the pressure became too great to resist, either the Colonial power in one form or another ceded power and control to an administration drawn from the indigenous population or the latter went to war and eventually took power from their colonial or settler masters.

Because those in power during the period of colonisation did little to prepare for the inevitable, the transition was, in most cases a disaster. The first post-independence government felt that they had the right to govern as they had brought liberation to their people. This attitude of entitlement would curse those countries so affected for many decades to come with real change only occurring once the “liberation generation” died out. Africa seems to be slowly emerging from that period of our history, as country after country sees a new generation emerge and take over without the impediments and baggage of the past.

For those of us who settled in the countries that went through this process, the transition to a majority rule government was extremely painful. We had lived as a privileged minority with control over the majority, many of whom served us in our homes and offices. I grew up in just such a situation – not knowing the people among whom I lived except as shadows that called me “Baas” or Nkosaan (little Lord). The man who carried me to school on the back of his bike was not a friend but at the same time was very much a member of the family.

Many westerners who had never lived in Africa found it impossible to understand these paternalistic relationships that evolved into lifelong loyal associations where the individuals involved might even give up their lives for the families they worked for. We would go on holiday to the coast, walk out the door leaving our staff in charge and with complete confidence that our trust was well founded. We were never disappointed.

For a young white like me growing up in Africa and having deep roots in the continents soil, life was pretty good. We got an excellent education at school, played sport with a passion and then went on to University or College before coming home to join the family firm or farm. We were never more than 3 per cent of the population but we saw no need to learn the local language or to even fraternise with the local population. Unbelievable as it may seem to many, we could go through our childhood without ever really meeting a black man or woman as an equal.

We would not compromise and inevitably we found ourselves fighting a war. The Americans called it a “low intensity guerrilla conflict” but we killed each other with great enthusiasm. After much wasted time and resources, after winning all the battles, the settlers lost the war and had a newly elected majority government imposed on them by the major powers, both regional and international. The most feared and even hated leader in the form of Robert Mugabe came to power.

He stunned everyone by making a dramatic “let’s forget the past to build a better future” speech and those whites who elected to stay, settled down with a wait and see attitude. For my own family we had long since decided that whatever faced us we were Africans and we would stay and try to make the new dispensation work. After the first five years, three quarters of the white population had left the country and those that remained were more or less settled down to life under a majority Government.

Mr Mugabe died last night in faraway Singapore and will not be mourned by many, but he did bring dignity, opportunity and self-reliance to the great majority in Zimbabwe. This is now a very different country to what it was and no black Zimbabwean would say they have not gained a great deal from the sacrifices of those, like Mugabe, who dedicated their lives to achieve a better life for the subjugated majority.

But for those of us who have adopted Africa as our home and tried to carve out for ourselves and our families a life on the continent, the struggle goes on to find out who we really are and where we belong. We see a steady stream of young African whites coming back to the country in which they grew up, unable to shake off the feeling that wherever their parents had taken them they were not at “home”. I know the feeling, some call it the African bug, but it is more than that, it is a discovery that somehow the rich soils of Africa have got between our toes and nowhere else on earth can really compete.

But that is our struggle and only time will tell if we have won or not and that judgement lies with our compatriots who are now almost all black or brown Africans with fuzzy hair. More subtle, but just as problematic is the question of roots for the young generation in Africa. They do not remember the struggle years, they are better educated and sophisticated than the generation before them. They speak French, English and Portuguese as first languages and they have often studied abroad and come home with a completely different culture to the one their parents grew up in.

Mugabe once called this generation a people “without a totem”. In Africa this might mean a lost generation or a generation without any understanding of their heritage. I agree with him that this is a sad development as we need to accept, as Africans, that we are different, not inferior. African culture has many features that are superior in many ways to the cultures of the developed world. Roots are important because they give us a sense of who we are and it distinguishes us from other versions of the human race. For me I am deeply proud to be accepted as a Zimbabwean in every way, because that is what I feel I am.

Post published in: Featured

Grace Mugabe could now face prosecution for crimes committed while her husband Robert was in power following his death today aged 95.

The 55-year-old former secretary, who is known as ‘Gucci Grace’ for her fondness for luxury shopping, enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in a desperately impoverished country.

Grace, who was by her husband’s side when he died in Singapore, had been given immunity along with Mugabe by military authorities in Zimbabwe in November 2017.

Mugabe and Grace wave at guests after their wedding ceremony at Kutama in August 1996

Then US First Lady Hillary Clinton is escorted by Mugabe and Grace in Harare in March 1997

Robert Mugabe and Grace Marufu get married by Archbishop Chakaipa

But current president Emmerson Mnangagwa then told the BBC in January 2018 how he had not granted either of them immunity, although they would be ‘left in peace’.

He said they got a ‘lucrative’ retirement package, adding: ‘The new administration will do everything possible to make sure the family lives in peace, undisturbed.’

Among the crimes that Mr Mugabe and his government were accused of – and denied – were human rights abuses such as killing and raping opposition activists.

In March 2018, police began to investigate claims Grace fronted a poaching and smuggling syndicate which illegally exported elephant tusks, gold and diamonds.

She has not been charged over the allegations, but Mr Mnangagwa sanctioned the probe after Australian photographer Adrian Steirn uncovered ‘very strong’ evidence.

Mugabe cuts his 80th birthday cake helped by his wife Grace, right, his daughter Bona, 2nd right, and his sons Robert Jnr, upper centre, and Chatunga in Kutama in February 2004

Robert Mugabe and his second wife Grace through the years

Mr Steirn spent four months investigating wildlife trafficking and posed as a customer for contraband ivory to infiltrate the illegal poaching networks.

He filmed sources claiming Grace smuggled ivory poached in national parks out of Zimbabwe by exploiting her airport security screening exemption as First Lady.

Then in December last year, South African prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for her for allegedly assaulting a model in Johannesburg in 2017.

Mugabe’s decline in his last years as president before he resigned in November 2017 after a 37-year rule was partly linked to the political ambitions of Grace.

She was a brash and divisive figure whose ruling party faction eventually lost out in a power struggle with supporters of Mr Mnangagwa, who was close to the military.

Mugabe’s sons Robert Jr (left) and Chatunga (right) gained a reputation for a playboy lifestyle

President Mugabe’s sons pour champagne on thousand dollar watches

In November 2017, Mugabe’s son Chatunga he was pictured on social media appearing to pour a £200 bottle of champagne over a watch which he claimed was worth £45,000

Grace was Mugabe’s second wife and they married in 1996, having two sons and a daughter. He married his first wife Sally Mugabe in 1961 but she died in 1992.

Mugabe’s sons Robert Jr and Chatunga gained a reputation for their playboy lifestyle, and were evicted from a flat in South Africa in 2017 after it was damaged in a party.

That same year, Chatunga was pictured on social media appearing to pour a £200 bottle of champagne over a watch which he claimed was worth £45,000.

Robert Jr had dreams of a basketball career but US sanctions meant he could not play in America, and he launched a clothing label in December 2017 called xGx.

Mugabe met Grace in the early 1990s when she was one of his shy young typists, but she became an ambitious politician who also wanted to become president.

Mugabe and his wife Grace greet supporters at a national Heroes Day rally in Harare in August 2014

Speaking in 2013, she said: ‘He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. I didn’t know it was leading somewhere. I was quite a shy person, very shy.’

Before Mr Mnangagwa took over as president, Grace had been calling for his removal as they fought to take over from Mr Mugabe, who had ruled since 1980.

Mr Mnangagwa was Grace’s sworn enemy – and his aides even accused her of trying to poison him with ice cream from her dairy farm in 2017, which she denied.

In 2014, when it appeared former vice president Joice Mujuru was in line to succeed Mugabe, he fired her following public rallies at which Grace derided Ms Majuru.

When Ms Majuru was removed, Grace became head of the Zanu-PF Women’s League, giving her a seat at the party’s top table.

She used her political platform to take on Mr Mnangagwa and famously said at a rally: ‘They say I want to be president. Why not? Am I not a Zimbabwean?’.

Grace had become deeply unpopular among much of the Zimbabwean public due to her alleged corruption and volatile temper by the time Mugabe was ousted.

But at first she stayed out of politics and was known for her spending, including buying rare diamond jewellery and Rolls-Royce limousines for her playboy sons.

Grace owns vast tracks of land in Mazowe, some 20 miles north east of Harare, and is also believed to own houses in South Africa, Dubai and Singapore.

But last December, it was claimed Grace – whose property portfolio is worth more than £50million – had not paid her farm workers for three months.

This came after about 400 illegal gold miners invaded one of her farms in March 2018, and allegedly uprooted lemon trees, digging shafts and put gold ore on lorries.

The reports of her lavish spending and explosive temper earned her the title ‘Dis-Grace’ – and eyebrows were raised in 2014 when she gained a PhD in three months.

Robert Mugabe addresses party members and supporters gathered at his party headquarters to show support to Grace becoming the party’s next Vice President in November 2017

Her spending was an uncomfortable contrast with an economic crisis which left most of the 16 million population mired in poverty and unemployment.

And she has faced allegations of violence in the past decade. In Singapore in 2009, a photographer said Grace flew into a rage when he tried to take her picture.

Richard Jones said she ordered her bodyguards to hold his arms back while she punched him repeatedly in the face. Grace denied the assault.

In August 2017, Grace was accused of beating the ‘hell out of’ a young South African model who was partying with her sons in Johannesburg.

According to Gabriella Engels, Grace burst into a hotel room where she was talking with friends and whipped her with an electric cable as bodyguards looked on.

Grace said she acted in self-defence after Engels tried to stab her with a knife. In December 2018, South African prosecutors issued the arrest warrant.

The Mugabes’ $1BILLION property empire: How ex-President and his wife gathered assets including 25-bedroom mansion in Harare, Hong Kong villa and stolen farms while Zimbabweans starved

Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace built up a huge personal fortune and property empire while their countrymen suffered in the starvation and grinding poverty that his brutal regime brought about.

Mugabe, who died in Singapore today at the age of 95, owned a lavish 25-bedroom mansion in Harare and a luxury villa in Hong Kong while his playboy sons lived in luxury in Dubai and South Africa.

Leaked diplomatic cables estimated the family wealth at more than $1billion, including six residences and a series of farms around the country.

The controversial land seizures which the Zimbabwean President claimed would distribute land to poor black people also boosted the Mugabes’ own property empire, while causing economic crisis.

The Mugabe mansion in Harare’s Borrowdale suburb became known as the Blue Roof house (pictured) for its turquoise tiles imported from China

Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace (pictured together in April 2017) built up a huge personal fortune and property empire while their countrymen suffered

A look at Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule of Zimbabwe

The Mugabe mansion in Harare’s Borrowdale suburb became known as the Blue Roof house for its turquoise tiles imported from China.

Set in extensive grounds, the property had 25 bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms and spas, massive reception rooms and a series of offices.

It was rarely pictured and there were severe penalties for taking photographs of the presidential home.

Originally built to house the ruling white elite during the colonial era, it is now home to Zimbabwe’s leadership and Mugabe’s successor Emmerson Mnangagwa also has a home there.

The Mugabes also had use of the official State House.

One U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks said that ‘the full extent of President Mugabe’s assets are unknown, but are rumoured to exceed $1billion in value’. That was in 2001.

The cable also revealed that an engineering firm chaired by Mugabe’s nephew had won a contract to build a new airport terminal in Harare.

The Mugabes bought a £4million villa (pictured) in Hong Kong in 2008, just as his reign appeared under threat in a controversial election

Mugabe and Grace pose for a photo after a press conference at their residence in Harare in July 2018

The Zimbabwean President was thought to have made millions of U.S. dollars from the deal.

On top of that, the Mugabes bought a £4million villa in Hong Kong in 2008, just as his reign appeared under threat in a controversial election.

They purchased the three-storey villa after Mugabe’s 20-year-old daughter began studying at the University of Hong Kong, according to reports at the time.

That year Mugabe lost the first round of the presidential vote against his long-time rival Morgan Tsvangirai.

But Tsvangirai dropped out of the second round after a campaign of violence against his supporters and Mugabe sneaked back into power.

Grace Mugabe was known for her shopping and holiday trips to Asia, including Hong Kong and Bangkok, and earned the nickname ‘Gucci Grace’.

The former first lady set up a school and ran a dairy farm in Mazowe, projects that she said would boost Zimbabwe’s devastated economy but were widely seen as an attempt to build a business empire for personal gain.

Mugabe’s sons Robert Jr (left) and Chatunga (right) gained a reputation for a playboy lifestyle

Zimbabwe’s ex-president Robert Mugabe dies aged 95

Land reform was supposed to take much of the country’s most fertile land – owned by about 4,500 white descendants of mainly British and South African colonial-era settlers – and redistribute it to poor black people.

Instead, Mugabe gave prime farms to ruling party leaders, party loyalists, security chiefs, relatives and cronies.

Robert Mugabe was reported at the time to have given 15 of the stolen farms to himself.

Grace is also believed to own houses in South Africa, Dubai and Singapore.

But last December, it was claimed Grace – whose property portfolio is worth more than £50million – had not paid her farm workers for three months.

Mugabe and his wife Grace greet supporters at a national Heroes Day rally in Harare in August 2014

In November 2017, Mugabe’s son Chatunga he was pictured on social media appearing to pour a £200 bottle of champagne over a watch which he claimed was worth £45,000

In the last months of Mugabe’s rule the family’s lavish ways became outlandish, even to Zimbabwe’s jaded public.

Grace Mugabe pressed a lawsuit against a Lebanese diamond dealer in which she charged she had paid him for a 100-carat diamond but he only gave her a gem of 30 carats.

One of the couple’s sons posted images on social media of himself pouring champagne over his diamond-encrusted watch.

The first family’s antics made uncomfortable viewing in a country which Mugabe’s regime had reduced to a basket case.

The farm seizures helped ruin one of Africa’s most dynamic economies, with a collapse in agricultural foreign exchange earnings unleashing hyperinflation.

Inflation reached billions of per cent at the height of the crisis before the local currency was scrapped in favour of the US dollar.

Periodically, we like to highlight some of the best legal profession memes out there. As usual, these come to us from the Facebook group “Law School Memes For Edgy T14s” and we’re not going to credit the people putting up the post (unless you reach out and want to be named) because we assume ultimately you’d rather not have an Above the Law post with your name on it come up during interviews.

Without further ado:

Brutal.

Plus we have some back-to-school messages from the 2Ls out there:

Smithers is exactly the sort of guy who would market a law school.

I disagree… how in the world is 2L harder. By the time you hit 2L, you should already have gotten the “thinking like a lawyer” thing down so everything should be second-nature. Still, I appreciate the Thomas meme.

That’s more like it.

“Law School Friends: Hey, lets get together and do something NOT law school related.

Law School Friends: Lets play a board game!

Gunner:”

If you’re wondering, yes, this exists.

Thanks to all the geniuses over at the Edgy T14s group. Have a good weekend everybody.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

After years of faithless Congresses legally but unconstitutionally ceding power to the presidency, we have arrived where we are today ― a president who spends unappropriated funds, raises taxes, defies courts and changes immigration laws on his own.

— Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst at Fox News, warning Republicans about the dangerous precedent being set by Donald Trump as he uses emergency powers to reallocate military spending to his border wall, spending Congress specifically refused to authorize earlier. Napolitano went on to note that while the GOP may support Donald Trump’s actions now, they “will weep over it when a Democrat is in the White House.” He also said, “When Congress lets presidents write their own laws, then he’s not a president. He’s a prince.”

Summer’s over, and leaves are changing and so forth. Maybe you got some time off and enjoyed traditional summer activities like kayaking and base jumping. But now that you’re well rested, it’s time to buckle down, get to work, and make those changes that you’ve been putting off.

Fall is both metaphorically and practically a time for change. Metaphorically, the autumnal equinox approaches, bringing with it the traditional wiccan festival of Mabon, a time to reflect on the previous year and celebrate the harvest. Practically, you’re back from vacation and have a clean four-month sprint until the winter holidays.

YOU CAN WORK HARDER

For the junior attorneys out there, this is a great time to commit to working harder to round out the year. As I’ve written about before, junior attorneys have the advantage that, due to both age and the nature of junior-level lawyer work, they can generally grind out their work on pure energy and inertia. And due to miracles of modern science, they can often work for days on end with little to no sleep.

As you get older, you’ll find that the one thing that you’ll regret more than anything is not working hard enough. You never want to look back and see that you didn’t fully apply yourself, that you didn’t leave blood on the floor in whatever you did. During my best year as a junior, I broke 3,300 hours, and it was glorious and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. If I have any regret about that year, in which I also studied for and passed the California bar, it’s that I didn’t work more.

The Gladwellian 10,000-hours rule may have been discredited, but at the end of the day, as I’ve written, you get out what you put in. Even if you completely phone in your legal career, you’re still going to spend a third of your waking life doing it. Do you really want to just muddle through in pathetic mediocrity, rather than lay it all out there for a chance at greatness? Yes, maybe you’ll take it too far, but even the absolute worst case scenario is you go out with your boots on, and when people remember you, they think, “Damn, he was hardcore and worked like a maniac.” As the Marines say, do you really want to live forever?

So to the junior attorneys out there, my advice to you for the fall is this: Work as hard as you possibly can the rest of this year. Set yourself an ambitious goal, like 400 hours a month, to round out the year. You can easily maintain that for four months. Never complain about it, just go out there and pull all-nighters like a maniac and don’t even tell people you’re doing it. Because you are a machine. Nothing can stop you. You are the Vanilla Ice of law.

YOU CAN WORK BETTER: TAKE THE CHANCE TO MAKE CHANGES

Fall can also be a time to commit to working better and to making positive changes in your work life. After a break is a great time to start whatever it is you were putting off. This can be anything: Maybe you have a new management technique you want to try; a new commitment to doing something differently; or maybe you want to work on an auxiliary to your work life, such as working out more so you’ll feel healthier and more focused in the office.

Whatever it is that you’ve been putting off, just do it now. Invoke the spirit of Mabon and the harvest, or Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, or whatever metaphor you like. As the great philosopher Nike teaches us, just do it.

Matthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is a partner at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

The king is dead, and we were wrong. He had not discovered the secret to eternal life; he was not the Bionic President. Robert Mugabe was an ordinary mortal like the rest of us, albeit one who shaped and twisted an entire nation in his image, and now he’s gone to join the others in the Great Presidential Palace in the Sky. The devil had better watch his back.

“I have died many times – that’s where I have beaten Christ. Christ died once and resurrected once.” – Robert Mugabe, on his 88th birthday.

Robert Mugabe presided over an independent Zimbabwe for close on four decades. Thirty-seven years to be exact, until he was unseated through military intervention in 2017. It wasn’t all bad. But it was mostly bad, and the history books that he loved to read will judge him harshly.

He was, from the very beginning, an enigma, a jumble of contradictions that somehow fuelled rather than felled him. He was the Anglophile who hated Britain; the freedom fighter who denied basic rights to his people; the pan-African visionary turned archetypal African dictator; the teacher who refused to learn from his mistakes. He was charming, and he was cruel. He was loved and then reviled.

But one thing never changed. L’ État, c’est Mugabe. Mugabe was Zimbabwe. Now he’s gone, and Zimbabwe has an opportunity to create a new identity.

ACT I: THE REVOLUTIONARY

“The people’s votes and the people’s guns are always inseparable twins.” – Robert Mugabe, in a 1976 speech.

Mugabe’s secret was that he was always the cleverest person in the room. His formidable intellect took him from a modest background into some of the best schools in the land – the best black schools, of course, because he was a second-class citizen in colonial Rhodesia – and then to the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, which was then a production line for extraordinary Africans. Nelson Mandela studied there, as did Oliver Tambo, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda.

At Fort Hare, Mugabe studied alongside Robert Sobukwe and Leopold Takawire, and their revolutionary zeal rubbed off on him. Afterwards, he taught for a few years – in northern Rhodesia, and then in Ghana, where he met his first wife – but the dye had already been cast. Mugabe was a freedom fighter, a fluent exponent of the language of pan-Africanism.

His struggle began on his return to Zimbabwe in 1960, where he immersed himself in the underground opposition, eventually taking a senior leadership in the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). In 1964, he was arrested for “subversive speech”, and imprisoned for a decade without charge – a guest of Ian Smith’s brutal regime.

Smith was typically cruel, denying Mugabe permission to attend the burial of his three-year-old son in 1966. This detail is important: later, when their roles were reversed, Mugabe allowed Smith to serve as a member of the Zimbabwean parliament in a powerful gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. Mugabe was not always a tyrant.

In prison, he studied. Through distance learning, he earned first an undergraduate and then a Master’s degree in law from the University of London, respectively his fifth and sixth university degrees. He had already done another three through correspondence after Fort Hare, and there would be another Masters in his future. This would make him, by quite some distance, the best-educated president on the continent, and possibly the world.

But he was cunning too, exhibiting a ruthless, Machiavellian streak from which none were safe. From prison, he manipulated party processes until he was elected Zanu secretary-general in 1974, side-lining better-known and arguably more accomplished rivals.

After his release later that year, he fled into exile, clutching a portable typewriter as he crossed the border into Mozambique. Even then, he knew that words were his most potent weapon. While the bush war raged around him, Mugabe waged his own personal war against potential rivals both within the party and broader resistance movement. The infighting was vicious, violent and at times deadly, but Mugabe was good at it. By the time Smith was forced to the negotiating table, Mugabe had the party under control and was perfectly positioned to succeed him.

ACT II: THE STATESMAN

“Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.” – Robert Mugabe, undated.

Ironically, modern Zimbabwe was born in London, in stately Lancaster House. It was there that the United Kingdom brokered talks between Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and the resistance to white rule; there that the road map to a second independence was created. Elections followed soon after in February 1980, with Zanu – which by now had merged with the Patriotic Front, to create Zanu-PF – winning by a landslide.

For Mugabe, these were halcyon days. For a man with such a thirst for knowledge, what greater privilege could there be than to use that knowledge to create a nation? He set to work creating perhaps the finest education system in Africa and turned Zimbabwe into a breadbasket for the region. Things were looking up, and he was celebrated by his peers and feted by the international community. Mugabe was a bona fide African hero, and he relished the attention.

But all was not as rosy as it seemed in the new republic. Mugabe’s authoritarian streak did not disappear now that he was in power. Quite the opposite, in fact. Joshua Nkomo, another liberation legend, was the highest-profile victim of the prime minister’s growing megalomania. Intimidated and fearing for his life, Nkomo fled into exile in 1983.

Much worse was to come. In Shona, there is a word for the early rains that come before spring, the rains that wash away the useless chaff and give the crops space to grow. That word is gukurahundi. In a message lost on no one in Zimbabwe, it was also the code name of Mugabe’s military operation to pre-empt resistance from the Ndebele community. The Shona were the healthy seeds, to be nurtured, while the Ndebele needed to be washed away.

To do the washing, Mugabe deployed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade. Over the course of five years between 1983 and 1987, they purged “dissidents” in Matabeleland and surrounds. Sometimes these were former war veterans, sometimes members of Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). Sometimes they were civilians, chosen for no obvious reason except that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and belonged to the wrong ethnic group. No one knows exactly how many people died because no records were kept. The state did not bother to count its victims. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 8,000 people. The Ndebele themselves say it was closer to 30,000.

Not that anyone outside of Zimbabwe seemed to care. While the Ndebele were dying, Robert Mugabe was forging his reputation as an international statesman. It was only later when his regime started killing white farmers, that he began to be treated like a pariah by the international community.

ACT III: THE DICTATOR

“This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be Hitler tenfold.” – Robert Mugabe, in a 2003 speech.

Mugabe’s transition from freedom fighter to despised despot was slow, and uneven. To each their own moment of revelation, when the scales fell from their eyes and they realised that Zimbabwe’s president had begun to resemble his Rhodesian predecessor.

Perhaps it was gukurahundi. Perhaps it was earlier, when Mugabe murdered and betrayed his comrades in his desperate bid to get ahead. Perhaps it was when he sent Zimbabwean foot soldiers to fight and die in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while he and his generals grew fat off smuggled minerals. Perhaps it was when he authorised the seizure of white-owned farms, and encouraged his thugs to take the land by force. Perhaps it was when he printed money to buy loyalty, tanking the economy in the process. Perhaps it was when he stole the 2002 election, or when he beat and bullied the opposition out of an outright victory in the 2007 poll.

Perhaps it was all of these things. Or perhaps it was none of them. For even now, with everything we know about what Mugabe did, he could draw a crowd. He could stand up at the African Union, aged 92, and rail against imperialism and homosexuality, and receive a standing ovation. When he was on form, he was charming, and eloquent, and he knew how to work an audience. A consummate, charismatic politician. There’s no question that his support was dwindling. But equally, there’s no question that his support remains more substantial than his opponents would like to believe. Some of the grief on display in Zimbabwe will be real.

The celebrations will be too, however. For too long, Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe as his personal fiefdom, abusing the state and its resources to keep himself in State House, no matter what the cost.

Of course, it wasn’t the money that motivated him – his second wife, Grace, was the big spender – but the power.

And so these last few years must have been torture. As the vultures circled, and his age became more apparent, his authority dwindled into nothing. He wasn’t calling the shots, not in the state or the party, and his orders were no longer obeyed without question. Kept in position while rival factions sought to further their own agenda, by the time he was ousted he had been reduced to a stumbling figurehead. This sudden, precipitous demotion, from all-powerful to near puppet, was a shock to the system, and surely hastened his demise.

The king is dead. Yes, there will be mourning. Some will miss him. But most will mourn the devastating, perhaps irreversible damage he’s done to the country that he promised to cherish and serve so many years ago.

Robert Mugabe’s death is no tragedy; but his life, ultimately, was. DM

Robert Mugabe: The life and times of the former Zimbabwe leader (Supplied by MSN)