The Molly Maguires

In 1970, my mother asked me to accompany her to see the movie The Molly Maguires, featuring Sean Connery who played the character of John Kehoe, “The King of the Mollies”.  It had been almost 100 years since the Reading Railroad, which owned substantial interests in coal mines as well as railroads, employed its private Coal and Iron Police and the Pinkerton Detective Agency to crush labor agitators among the oppressed Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania.  There was often trouble in the coalfields.  Irish miners had no rights.  Attempts to organize and strikes were crushed by violence and starvation.

The Reading Railroad corrupted the criminal justice system in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, supplanting the local authorities.  The Railroad, a private business, “investigated” alleged crimes with its private police force and prosecuted criminal cases itself.  It rallied ethnic and religious hate against Irish Catholics to obtain convictions and hung twenty Irishmen, including Sean Connery’s character John Kehoe.

Kehoe’s lawyer was my mother’s great uncle, Martin L’Velle, and he was no push over.  L’Velle was sergeant major of his infantry regiment in the Army of the Potomac and he won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House.  It did not matter.  The Reading Railroad rigged the system against the Irish coal miners so Kehoe and nineteen other Irishmen died on the gallows. Carbon County Pennsylvania judge, John P. Lavelle (no relation to Martin L’Velle) condemned the corruption of the criminal justice system writing, long after the events, that:

“The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.”

A century after John Kehoe was hung, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp, gave the final and posthumous victory to John Kehoe and his lawyer my great great uncle Martin L’Velle .  Kehoe was pardoned.  The governor remarked that the Molly Maguires "were martyrs to labor and heroes in the struggle to establish a union and fair treatment for workers.  It is impossible for us to imagine the plight of the 19th Century miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite region and that it was Kehoe's popularity among the miners that led [the Reading Railroad] to fear, despise and ultimately destroy him".

Martin L’Velle is the first lawyer in my family in America but since his time there have been many others.  My cousin Francis McGill graduated from law school in 1956 and there is an endowed scholarship at Villanova Law School in his name. My brother Raymond graduated from law school in 1965.  After his service in the Marine Corps in World War II, my uncle Joseph Burke practiced law in Schuylkill County Pennsylvania.  His father, my grandfather, Patrick Henry (PH) Burke registered as a student of the law in 1899 and was admitted to practice in 1906.  He practiced law in Shenandoah Pennsylvania, where most of the scenes in The Molly Maguires took place.  PH’s older brother Martin was admitted to practice in 1892.   There are very memorable examples in American history of how lawyering was a way up and out of poverty and misery and so it was in my family.

PH, my grandfather, did not have a college education and he did not go to law school.  After elementary school, he got his higher education in the coal mines in the late 1800s.  As a breaker boy, PH worked long hours, six days a week, in very unhealthy conditions, picking slate from the coal as it speed down the chutes under his legs.   He dug himself out of these miserable conditions to become a lawyer and eventually became the president of the Miners National Bank of Shenandoah Pennsylvania.  

I became a lawyer in 1973, almost one hundred years after the events portrayed by Sean Connery in The Molly Maguires.  I am continuing the line begun by Martin L’Velle.  After me, there have been many more lawyers in my extended family.  Neither of our children are lawyers but our son-in-law Richard Parry is admitted to practice in the United Kingdom, in Grand Cayman and in California.  

I am proud of my family’s lawyer predecessors and of all of the many lawyers in my family who are practicing law today.  I am grateful for my career, my place in the line of lawyers going back to Marin L’Velle and the Molly Maguires.  I recognize the privilege that I live in a land, with all of its imperfections, that is still striving for a more perfect justice, under the law.

I want to thank our readers for the self-indulgence and the diversion of this personal reminiscence and I hope that you will share a little of the joy in my remembering.

Content prepared by Edmond McGill. © Edmond McGill, 2017

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This message and the information presented here do not create or evidence an attorney-client relationship nor are they intended to convey legal advice or counsel.  You should not act upon this information without seeking advice from a qualified lawyer licensed in your own state or country who actually represents you. In this regard, you may contact The McGill Law Office and then representation and advice may be given if, and only if, attorney Edmond McGill agrees to do so in a written contract signed by him.

To Arbitrate Or Not To Arbitrate, That Is A Question.

It’s entirely up to you.  You can agree to binding arbitration or not.  It might be a personal contract for medical services or for the purchase or sale of a house.  It might be a business transaction where you are the executive with signing authority for your company.  Do you agree to binding arbitration?  Do you give up the right to litigate any dispute that may arise later regarding the contract?  How do you decide?  Are there advantages to binding arbitration?  Are there disadvantages to litigating, to using the court system to resolve disputes?  Well, yes, there are advantages and disadvantages in both systems.  

Some businesses routinely require the parties with whom they contract to agree to binding arbitration.  They figure that they will be advantaged by arbitration if there is a fight.   They don’t want a jury trial.  They don’t want a judge who might be overturned by an appeal.  They want the streamlined system of arbitration with an all powerful arbitrator to decide the case as judge and jury with no oversight by an appellate court.  They are willing to pay for the arbitrator’s time.  Courts charge filing fees and impose some other charges but you do not have to pay for the time of the judge as you do for an arbitrator.  

Particularly when representing claimants, I prefer litigation.  I believe that my client has more power, more advantage with the right to a jury trial and when the judge is subject to the oversight of appellate courts.   Arbitrators have far more power than judges.   As a practical matter, arbitrators’ decisions cannot be reversed on appeal for errors in managing the case.  Arbitrators’ decisions can only be overturned for the most outrageous behavior such as for taking bribes for throwing a case.   This immunity from oversight, combined with the fact that an arbitrator makes the jury’s decisions as well as the judge’s, just concentrates too much power in one person for my liking.

In making the decision, perhaps one consideration should be whether you believe you or your company is more likely to be a claimant or a defendant should a dispute take place.  It may be that the reason some enterprises require their contracting partners to sign arbitration agreements is because they believe they will have the advantage should a claim be made against them.  Just for starters, a claimant might be inhibited from going forward by the burden of paying for the arbitrator’s time.  The judge is free, sort of.  Perhaps the enterprise requiring the arbitration agreement thinks that it is also an advantage, in defending claims, that the arbitrator’s power is not moderated by a jury or by appellate review of the arbitrator’s decisions.

Sometimes, you will be presented with a binding arbitration agreement and the choice is to sign the agreement or forgo the contract altogether – take it or leave it.  In such cases, if the service is important and valuable to you, you will likely sign the agreement without much analysis of the advantages and disadvantages between arbitration and litigation.  In other situations, where closing the agreement is not absolutely conditional on acquiescing to arbitration, perhaps you should consider whether you or your company would more likely be a claimant or a defendant, should a dispute occur.  Claimants might be better off with juries and judges and appellate review.  It is sometimes just the possibility of a jury trial and the possibility of appellate review that gives a plaintiff sufficient advantage to settle a dispute on very acceptable terms.  On the other hand, if you believe that you or your company would more likely be defending a claim, perhaps the advantage is in agreeing to binding arbitration.

Consider your decisions.  Get good legal advice.  Proceed with confidence.

Content prepared by Edmond McGill. © Edmond McGill, 2017

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This message and the information presented here do not create or evidence an attorney-client relationship nor are they intended to convey legal advice or counsel.  You should not act upon this information without seeking advice from a qualified lawyer licensed in your own state or country who actually represents you. In this regard, you may contact The McGill Law Office and then representation and advice may be given if, and only if, attorney Edmond McGill agrees to do so in a written contract signed by him.