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September 2020 Millar's JurisDiction - A Left-Handed Compliment

by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

I am left-handed. At least mostly. I write with my left hand. I throw with my left hand, kick with my left foot, but used to bat baseball and play tennis with my right hand. That probably explains why I could never figure out how to hold a golf club. It probably explains a lot of other things as well, but I would rather not digress.

I am not sure of the source of the idiom “left-handed compliment,” but it has been defined as an insult in the guise of praise. It has been traced back to 1600, which, I guess, means that people have looked askance at us left-handers for over 400 years.

Other than my grammar school years where the school used chairs with large curved right-hand “desktops” so I had to turn sideways to write, it hasn’t been a burden so I have no complaints. And if anyone gave me left-handed compliments, I don’t remember them. Nor do I recall hearing left-handed compliments as a rhetorical device in oral arguments, so what I am about to describe is a first, at least for me.

And, hopefully, a last.

The formerly Hon. Paul H. Senzer was, until recently, a part-time Justice of the Northport Village Court in Suffolk County, New York, where he served since 1994. He also maintained a separate law practice. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct filed a complaint seeking his removal.

The complaint alleged that he “repeatedly used degrading and profane language in communication with his legal clients, whom he represented through his separate law practice.” The charge principally arose from his representation of two clients in a Family Court proceeding in which they sued their daughter to obtain visitation of their grandchild. During the course of the proceedings, he allegedly sent his clients numerous emails in which he complained about another litigant, opposing counsel, and the presiding referee, which sounds to me like he pretty much covered the waterfront.

The Commission appointed a referee (presumably not the same referee from the family law case) to make findings of fact and conclusions of law.

According to reports, Mr. Senzer referred to the daughter as a “bitch” and an “asshole” and called her and her ex-husband “scumbags.” However, it was what he called his opposing counsel that garnered the most attention: “eyelashes” and “a [insert a really bad four-letter word starting with “c” here] on wheels.”

It didn’t help that he had received a prior “caution” from the Commission for “sarcastic and disrespectful comments to litigants.”

The Commission concluded that his removal from office was appropriate because while he made the comments while acting as an attorney—as opposed to being on the bench—his conduct “was inextricably [connected] . . . to the judicial system.”

The case ended up recently in the court of appeals where his defense was essentially a claim that the communications were private and did not warrant removal from office.

What got my attention, more than the language itself, were the oral argument statements attributed to his lawyer. He allegedly argued that the phrase “[----] on wheels” was a “term of art” meant to refer to a particularly aggressive (and presumably female) lawyer and that it could be seen “as a left-handed compliment.”

I can hear the responding silence as though I had been in the courtroom.

That brings me to Millar’s Corollary #37: “Sometimes a bad argument is worse than no argument at all.”

Needless to say, the court of appeal took it not as a compliment but as a “gendered slur,” and ordered that the “determined sanction should be accepted . . . and Paul H. Senzer removed from his office . . . .”

All of this makes me wonder:

What does a right-handed compliment look like?

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is Of Counsel with the firm of Friedman Stroffe & Gerard in Irvine. He can be reached at rmillar@fsglawyers.com.