Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

     Somewhere in my memory is a portrait of a coronation scene in which the English queen, Elizabeth I, is given a jeweled rod and a golden orb, and is told as she holds them while the crown is gently placed on her head, "Administer Not Justice So Thy Forget Equity." At the bottom of the portrait is written in old English script, "All Fleshe is Grass."
     That is my first recollection of the notion of another division of the Law called Equity or Chancery, where cases were heard that didn't fit within the various common law writs. Then again, there is Dickens's novel, Bleak House, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce goes on for hundreds of pages over one hundred years, all in chancery. I've begun Bleak House several times and never gotten beyond fifty pages. Dickens wrote that being in chancery was like being stung to death by a single bee. 
     Also, there was my professor of English Constitutional History at the University of Michigan, Professor William Leslie, who taught us about the rigid confines of the ancient English common law writs of Trespass. Now, fifty years later, I still remember some of their names: Trespass Vi Et Armes (with force and arms), Trespass Quare Clausum Fregit (trespass to land), Trespass De Bonis Asportatis (to carry away goods). He always taught with a gentle, non-mocking scholar's smile, a man who loved his subject, who drew chalk spikes upon the board, the spikes radiating down from a square drawn around the title, "The Writs of Trespass." These spikes radiated down to sub-categories that were titled "Equitable Remedies," with names like Restitution and Reformation.
     I can still see his slim fingers drawing these various remedies, his back turned to us, his shoulders hunched in the old sports coat he always wore. Later he wrote me a letter of reference for admission to graduate study to Glasgow University, a letter to a colleague there, which I never mailed. 
     But all this about equitable jurisdiction would be rather meaningless to my client Stefania Muzek when she came to my Chicago law office perhaps thirty years ago to hire me as her lawyer to file a lawsuit against a banker named Peter Buffino. 
     I had met Stefania at least ten years earlier. She was the sister of Casimir Zymak, a veteran criminal trial lawyer. I met Casimir in the 

1950s when I was a law clerk at a small firm in Chicago, Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran. I sat second chair with him in a murder case. He was a short, stocky man with fine, flaxen hair, a smooth face, always serious; he had a deep voice with a Polish accent as he cross-examined. I remember during some particularly damaging testimony from one of the state's witnesses, he leaned over to me and said, "Go and open the vindow." I walked across the courtroom and pulled open one of the old windows. When he stood up to begin his cross-examination, he said in his deep voice, "My colleague has just opened the vindow to let some fresh air into this courtroom." Then he smiled at the jury. Casimir had the innocent face of a boy, but he could pounce upon a witness with the ferocity of a cat. He loved to drink and had two or three wives, one of whom had been Miss Century of Progress at the World's Fair in Chicago in the thirties and was constantly suing him for alimony and child support. At the end of his life, he was penniless and destitute, entirely dependent on his sister Stefania. I remember his funeral cortege. Stefania directed that it pass the Criminal Courts Building at Twenty-sixth and California, where Casimir had spent his life in the courts. The procession paused for a moment of silent tribute. 
     Stefania resembled Casimir, only she was tall and slender. Her hair was blonde, dyed blonde; she had a tiny nose and her blue-green eyes were, it seemed to me, always brushed with sadness. She dressed immaculately with trim, expensive suits, and often a fur stole, usually blonde mink to match her hair and complexion and she was quite striking and beautiful. She was in her mid-fifties when I met her. She always wore jewelry, a gold pin or a cameo at her breast, the incised profile of an ivory-pale, young woman with the high-coiled tresses of an Italian princess.
     When she came to my office she'd been retired for ten years. She and her deceased husband had owned a tavern on Milwaukee Avenue, a well-known Polish tavern, owned and run by her mother before her. I met the mother only once, a stern, sharp-faced woman, thin and angry, with a red wig. She was the tiny bone in both Casimir's and Stefania's throats that choked them all their lives.
     Stefania also had a young son, about twelve or thirteen, Franciszek, she called him Frankie. He was a handsome young man, hair slicked back in a carefully combed pompadour, always dressed by his mother when he came with her to the office in a jacket and striped tie, overly polite and quiet. She was now the matriarch and he had taken her place as the child, although he was never permitted to work in the tavern. Later Frankie became a Chicago cop, tough and vicious. He was on a robbery detail for years on the Northwest Side and was murdered before he was forty.

     Frankie was a student at a Catholic high school, and with tuition and the cost of support of her brother Casimir and paying off his debts, Stefania's savings were being depleted. This was in perhaps 1970 or 1975 when she first called me. She said that she was worried and that there was something she wanted to talk to me about. She thought she had grounds for a lawsuit. She'd been thinking about it for a long time. She said she'd sold the tavern some years ago and she'd bought a home in Lincolnwood, an affluent, almost suburban area on the Far North Side. Casimir was now dead and she and Frankie lived in the house alone. She'd made several investments, but she'd put her money almost entirely in the hands of a man named Peter Buffino, who was a vice president of a bank in her old neighborhood. He had become her financial advisor.
     At her first appointment at my office, she came carrying two brown accordion folders and sat with her mink stole hanging over her shoulders. Her eyes filmed as she told her story. She had a slight tremor in one hand that she disguised by holding it under her purse. Peter Buffino, she told me, had been her mother's banker. When Stefania took over the tavern from her mother, Buffino put Stefania into some real estate deals. She bought an eight-flat building and then a ten-flat that he found for her. He asked for nothing, but she rewarded him with a $5,000 finder's fee on the two buildings. She paid him in cash. 
     She trusted him. He was a sort of father-advisor, an Old World gentleman, bald, with a wisp of hair brushed across the dome of his head. He smoked cigars and had a small, gray mustache. He was short and heavy and wore gold-rimmed glasses and always the same thin, black knitted tie with a dark suit and vest. She could barely remember her own father. He'd owned a small trucking company that delivered beer to taverns. She had a memory of helping him roll heavy, silver metal kegs down the outside chutes of taverns. He died when she was ten. 
     When she sold the tavern and moved away from Milwaukee Avenue, she also sold the two buildings that Buffino had found for her. She had quite a lot of cash and she went to him again. As she told me her story, her face colored with the flush of memory and she took her fur off, put on her reading glasses and removed her savings passbooks from the accordion folders. She put the passbooks down on my desk. She had three savings accounts.
     She showed me entries of a series of withdrawals in each passbook over the past five years: typically $5,000; $10,000; $5,000; $8,000; $12,000. Then, she pointed to the deposits coinciding with each withdrawal: $5,800; $10,950; $5,850; $8,950; $13,000. Each withdrawal had been returned with a profit. Buffino would come across customers, 

mostly small businessmen, who needed money quickly, but couldn't make a loan through the bank. They either had poor credit, were over-extended, or simply didn't want the bank to know they needed funds. Buffino acted as a sort of bank within the bank and used several favored customers' money to make these loans. On Stefania's loans, he was paid nothing in return. He asked for nothing. All the interest was given to Stefania and each time a note was paid off, she would bring the note to the bank and he'd personally cancel it for her. This always was done in a formal manner. He'd compliment her on her hair or her dress or her beautifully manicured nails and stand up, put down his cigar and leave his desk to walk her down the stairs and through the banking aisle. 
     Stefania soon learned to love the bankers' world. She loved being out of the tavern business and dealing quietly in the halls of Chicago finance, making neighborhood deals, a woman financier of growing sophistication. She commanded respect, this beautiful, smartly dressed woman, as she walked smiling down the bank aisle past the clerks to go up the stairs to meet Buffino. 
     She also liked the money. She had no pension. The interest on her savings accounts was too small to give her enough income. She quickly became accustomed to having an extra $1,000 a month coming in on the loans he made for her. She had almost $300,000 in her savings accounts and another $100,000 in CDs. She was very careful with her money. She'd been brought up poor, and although she cultivated refined tastes, she lived simply. She never traveled. She had no romance in her life. She didn't need a man. Her one husband was dead and she wasn't interested in marriage. She wanted to make money and add to her retirement fund. She'd worked for many years and she wanted to leave Chicago. She would send her son to a good college and then retire to Florida to a condominium in Naples or maybe on the east coast north of Miami. Occasionally she liked to go to the track, Arlington Park, with her girlfriends with clubhouse passes. In Miami, it could be Gulf Stream or Hialeah. She liked to gamble. She knew that life itself was a gamble. 
     After this series of small loan transactions, Buffino called her one afternoon and asked her to come into the bank. He told her that he had a major deal for her that he couldn't talk about on the phone. 
     When she met him at his desk, she could see that he was excited about something. His eyes were alive and his fingers played with the gold chain on his vest as he sat back and rocked in his leather chair. He told her that an owner of bank stock, another officer, wanted to sell his stock and retire. It was a minority interest of 10 percent of the outstanding stock. The price was $250,000. Buffino couldn't buy it because he'd signed an agreement that prohibited him from owning more than 20 percent of the bank's stock. He'd already reached his limit. If Stefania 

would buy the 10 percent, the $250,000 she'd put up could turn into $500,000. The bank would soon be sold. The big downtown banks were constantly coming around with offers. So far, they'd all been refused. She'd also earn good interest. Dividends on the bank stock were paid quarterly. If she bought the shares, she and Buffino would then control 30 percent of the stock, the largest voting block of shares. It was a shrewd deal. He would guide her in voting her shares. She would be his ally and he could count on her. Her vote, that's all he wanted. No money. All the shares would be hers, and when the bank was sold, she'd be taxed on her profit as a capital gain. Also, while they were waiting for the bank to be sold, he'd still lend her other money out monthly on small deals and she'd collect interest. To facilitate this, he asked that she cash in her CDs and deposit the funds in her savings accounts. That she leave her passbooks with him and sign a series of blank savings withdrawal slips that he would keep in his desk. This would make it much easier for both of them. When he made loans for her, she wouldn't have to come into the bank and sign each withdrawal slip. He'd keep them all in his desk drawer and when he had a customer for a loan there'd be a much faster turnaround.
     Then she told me she thought that Buffino had defrauded her and she wanted to file a lawsuit against him. She'd been thinking about it for a long time. When Buffino bought the bank stock, he registered it in his own name, not in hers. Later, he claimed she'd loaned him the money to buy the stock for himself, not for her. He used the withdrawal slips that she'd signed in blank to pull the money from her accounts. He said the deal was a loan, a private loan to him, not a purchase by her. He said he couldn't borrow the money from the bank, so he came to her. He told her he delivered all the dividends on the stock back into her accounts as interest on the loan. He showed her the passbooks, registering the withdrawals of $250,000 from her accounts and repayment in full of $250,000 and interest. She showed me the entries in her passbooks. The bank was sold a few years later. He got $500,000 for the shares he bought with her money. 
     Stefania looked up at me after telling me this story.
     "I want to sue the son of a bitch. Do I have a lawsuit?"
     "I think you have a lawsuit."
     "How much will it cost me?"
     "Stef, I don't know. You'll have to sue him in chancery for an accounting. It could take a long time, Chancery suits go on forever."
     "Just tell me how much. I want to sue the cheating bastard. I don't care how much it costs."
     "Stef, I really don't know. At least $25,000 and you won't get your fees back."

     "Go ahead. Do you want a retainer?" She took out her checkbook and wrote me a check.
     So the lawsuit in chancery began. Stefania Muzek v. Peter Buffino.
     The case was assigned to Ernest Langenfeld, Master in Chancery. Each judge in the chancery division had his own master in chancery. The appointment as a master was considered a political plum. You didn't have to resign your practice. You could earn fees as a master and still practice law. Cases would be assigned to the master by the judge on a discretionary basis. Typically, suits claiming fraud and seeking an accounting would be assigned to a master because the hearing would be long and would take too much of the judge's time. At the conclusion of the hearing, the master would file his report with the judge and with the parties. The master's fees would be paid in full by the litigants before the master would issue his report. The whole procedure was another form of the Chicago system's built-in cronyism and patronage. It's now been abolished. There are no more masters in chancery. 
     Under the old system, the lawyers appointed by the judge were usually pals of the judge or political appointees of the ward committeeman or of a powerful alderman. As the old-time Alderman Paddy Bauler said of Chicago politics, "We don't want no one that nobody sent." In other words, no Ivy League lawyers or fancy law school graduates. The masters I knew were lawyers who were members of the elder Daley's machine. Typically, they were large, red-faced Irishmen, who wore gray homburgs, belted camel's hair coats, had immaculately shined shoes and lunched with their political pals at the Bismarck Hotel in the ornate dining room or at the Chicago Athletic Club. I once tried a case before a master, an old-time Daley machine politician, a tiny Jewish man, a bald, crochety gnome, who was almost stone deaf. He "listened" to the testimony with his hearing aid shut off and often clipped his nails. The masters I knew were hard, tough men who had little patience with a lawyer who quoted law, offered cases or made objections. 
     Ernest Langenfeld, the master appointed to hear Muzek v. Buffino by Judge James J. Duffy of the Chancery Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, was a rare exception. He was a Columbia Law School graduate. His diploma from Columbia was framed on his wall. Master Langenfeld was a lean, ascetic man, white-haired, with a hawk nose and heavy black-framed glasses. He had the demeanor of an elderly law professor. His offices on La Salle Street were his chambers. He had a long, glass-topped, heavy counsel's table where the lawyers and their clients sat side-by-side, facing the master, whose desk was on a slightly raised dais. Above his desk were two golden framed etchings, one of the Goddess of Justice, a beautiful, stern-looking woman dressed in a gray toga and holding her scales. The other etching was of a pale, young, 

barefoot woman wrapped in an American flag in a torn, gauzy gown, "The Justice Seeker." The master was tall, about seventy, and always had the manner of a gentleman. He was patient and courteous. He didn't interrupt the lawyers. He heard their arguments in a dignified manner. Most importantly, the rumor was that he was honest and couldn't be fixed by political influence. 
     Before the trial began, I took Buffino's deposition. Then Buffino's lawyer took Stefania's deposition at his office. Buffino's lawyer was in his mid-thirties, a University of Chicago graduate. His name was Ira Feurstein. He was with a Chicago firm, Webb, Smith and Glotz, a firm of fifty lawyers that represented Buffino and his bank. Ira Feurstein wore horn-rimmed glasses, had a thin mouth, black hair and was quite tall. He was very sardonic and doubted that my client was telling the truth. He sat at her deposition, chewing on the frame of his glasses, tapping his copy of the complaint with a yellow wooden pencil and sniffing occasionally, as if he regarded my pleading as less than fragrant. He felt that it was a cause of action based only on jealousy and revenge.
     As he ended his deposition, he suddenly turned to Stefania. "Excuse me, Mrs. Muzek, I have just one more question. Isn't it true that after Mr. Buffino paid you back his loan, you asked him to go the opera with you?"
     "No, that isn't true. Did he tell you that?"
     "That you bought tickets to La Traviata and when he wouldn't go with you, you tore the tickets up and threw them in his face."
     "Objection. How is this relevant?"
     "Oh, it's very relevant. It shows that there was a romantic friendship here. It wasn't just banker and client."
     "Objection. There's no foundation. Also, it's still not relevant."
     "Do you want to certify the question?"
     "I noted my objection, what's your next question?"
     Before Feurstein could ask her another question, Stefania interrupted him.
     "I didn't buy the tickets. I never go to opera. All old Italian guys love opera. He bought the tickets and asked me to go with him. I told him, 'Mr. Buffino, I don't go out with married men. Particularly married men who've cheated me out of a quarter of a million dollars.' I tore the tickets up and threw them at him."
     She grinned at me impishly and Ira Feurstein sat up and removed his long legs from his desk. He gave her a half-smile and tapped his yellow pencil on his forehead. 

     When we left his office, Stefania walked ahead of us out into the corridor. Feurstein pulled me back and said to me quietly, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." 
     
     But when the hearings began before Master Langenfeld, Ira Feurstein was replaced as Buffino's laywer by James Van Gelder, an older lawyer, an expert in chancery litigation. He was in a small partnership with his son, Van Gelder and Van Gelder, which I suppose in today's jargon would be referred to as a boutique firm. But then it was simply known as a good, small law firm. James Van Gelder had an excellent reputation. He was a stolid, square-faced man, a quiet man, with blond hair, slicked back, graying and growing sparse over a large forehead. He looked like a stern Dutch burgher or merchant in a painting by Rembrandt or Vermeer, staring out at you from the portrait without expression. He was a gentleman and a tough adversary. 
     I remembered Professor Leslie's chart of the branches of Equity. Underneath the branch known as Restitution grew smaller branches. Among them were an action to impose an Equitable Lien, an action for an Accounting or for imposition of a Constructive Trust, Reformation, Injunctive Relief and others that I have now forgotten. There was a sub-category called Tracing which permitted you to trace the funds, if you could identify them, into the hands and the accounts of the defendant.
     I could certainly trace the bank stock into the hands of Buffino, but the stock had been sold. Still I could veer off into a branch that was called Unjust Enrichment and trace the fruit of that branch, the $250,000 profit, which then could be returned to Stefania.
     After eight months of hearings, once weekly in his chambers, the hearings ended and the master was ready to issue his report. Both parties paid their share of master's fees before he issued his report. Stefania's share of the master's fees and costs came to $8,000. She'd been a competent witness, occasionally tearful, but always determined and direct. She impressed the master with her honesty. He believed her. He didn't believe Buffino. The trial came down to that, the credibility of the witnesses. He weighed the testimony of the parties and found her more credible. Master Langenfeld found for Stefania and prepared a report awarding her the $250,000, Buffino's profit, plus interest. He found no evidence of a loan to Buffino. He also found the withdrawal of $250,000 from her accounts at the time the shares were acquired and registered in Buffino's name coincided with the purchase of the shares.
     I remember asking Buffino in cross-examination why he kept her passbooks and signed withdrawal slips in his desk drawer.
     "Because she asked me to do that for her," he answered.
     "She asked you."

     "Yes."
     "Why would she ask you to do that?"
     "She said her legs hurt her. She was tired of coming into the bank all the time to sign. She had bad arthritis."
     "So you did this just to accommodate her?"
     "Yes."
     "Did you do it for any other customers?"
     "No, just her."
     
     Van Gelder immediately filed a lengthy Motion Objecting to the Master's Report. There were again oral arguments with a briefing schedule. His motion was denied. Then the master's report was filed with the referring chancery judge, James J. Duffy. Van Gelder then filed a Motion Objecting to Confirmation of the Master's Report. Another briefing schedule was set and oral arguments were heard.
     Stefania sat all through these arguments holding a handkerchief with a rosary hidden in it. She had won in chancery. She'd been vindicated. But at every step, every hearing, she learned that her victory was only temporary. It could be set aside in a moment by a new order signed with a gesture of the judge's hand. If the right political pressure could be put on Judge Duffy by Buffino, the master's findings would be reversed. All the scholarship, the oral arguments, the memoranda and briefs, all the legalism could be swept aside by one phone call to the judge by a person with the proper clout. That was the Chicago system. Buffino would have outsmarted her and defeated her. The case had cost her over $35,000. So as she sat secretly fingering her beads, she prayed that the judge would have enough backbone to stand up for his master against Buffino's clout. That the motto painted on the wall of the courtroom in neat block letters, "IN GOD WE TRUST," would come true for her.
     She won her case. The judge affirmed his master's report in all respects. A money decree was entered in her favor against Peter Buffino in the amount of $250,000, plus interest and costs. 
     I knew that judges seldom reversed their master's findings, particularly the Report of a Master in Chancery as well respected as Langenfeld. It was probable that Buffino would try to exert influence on Judge Duffy, but I didn't think that Van Gelder would resort to that, or, if his client went around him, I didn't think he'd remain with the case. So I expected Stefania to win and I waited for a call from Van Gelder to settle the case. 
     I didn't receive a call. It never came. Instead, I received a notice of appeal. Van Gelder had appealed and filed a bond.
     Another year passed before the case was heard by the appellate court. I tried to explain to Stefania that this was the law's delay. There 

was always delay. That the appeal would be costly, perhaps another $10,000 in attorney's fees. There would be another $2,500 to prepare the transcript, to pay court reporters' fees and to certify the record. Printing costs for the briefs, another $2,500. A total of, perhaps, $15,000 added to the $35,000 in costs and fees she'd already spent. I felt she had a good chance of winning. Both the master and the judge had found for her. She and Buffino were the only witnesses and their credibility had been weighed by the master and no error found by the judge, both veteran jurists.
     On the day of the hearing before the appellate court, Van Gelder called me. He wanted to meet me and make an offer. We walked together across the icy plaza of the Daley Center, in the shadow of the huge Picasso sculpture that looked like a mammoth rusting vulture watching over us with its wings folded. Van Gelder offered me $25,000.
     I immediately refused. It wouldn't even compensate Stefania for her attorney's fees. He shrugged and raised his eyebrows and walked away from me. I took an elevator up to the courtroom and told Stefania about the offer before we were called for oral argument. She just shook her head and took her seat behind the lawyers' podiums.
     It was a three-judge panel. I don't remember their faces. I can barely remember being in the room. It was at the top of the Daley Center, about forty floors up. In the corridor, outside the courtroom, through the big glass windows, you could see the contours of the frozen lake and the wisps of smoke along the shoreline rising from the steel mills in Gary. There were very few questions from the bench during oral argument. Nothing was said to indicate what any of the judges thought of the case. Eight months later the decision came down. The decree was reversed and remanded. Stefania lost. She was awarded nothing and ordered to pay all court costs. She had lost her case in chancery. I had lost it. Her $250,000 award was reversed.
     The court wrote an opinion, the senior judge on the panel, Martin Gladstone, found for the defendant, Buffino, and the two other panelists concurred. The opinion held that both the master and the judge had erred in weighing the credibility of the witnesses. Her testimony was found not sufficiently credible to justify an award. Judge Gladstone also invoked the ancient equitable doctrine of laches, the equitable equivalent of the statute of limitations. She'd slept on her rights, he wrote. She'd not filed her action quickly enough and had waited over five years before filing suit. If she'd filed an action in law for fraud, instead of filing in chancery, she would have been barred by a five-year statute of limitations. So, she was barred in equity by laches. In any event, he held that her testimony was clouded by emotion and was untrustworthy. The court found that there was a relationship between the parties, but it 

wasn't a confidential relationship, it was advisor and friend, nothing more. Buffino had not violated Stefania's confidence. There was no fraud or misrepresentation. She had not proven facts egregious enough to justify an imposition of an equitable remedy in the Chicago courts. She'd lost no money. On the contrary, she'd made a profit on every loan, including the loan to Buffino. "He who comes into Equity must have clean hands," Judge Gladstone wrote, citing another ancient maxim of Equity. Therefore, despite her beautifully lacquered nails, Stefania was found to have had unclean hands. 
     I filed a Motion for Rehearing and then a Petition for Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court. Both were denied.
     I buried the memory of Stefania's case until later in the 1970s, when I had an appeal from the U.S. District Court in Chicago to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. A client of mine had been killed in Chicago in the 1968 Martin Luther King riots. He'd been a black dishwasher at a restaurant where I occasionally had lunch. On the night of Martin Luther King's death, my client had been caught looting and shot dead by the Chicago police. It was that night that the elder Mayor Daley issued his infamous order, "shoot to kill arsonists, shoot to maim looters." Unfortunately, the Chicago police reversed the order and killed my client, a looter, instead of just maiming him. The family came to me too late, more than one year after the man's death and the case was barred by the one-year Survival Act for a Wrongful Death Action. He had been dead for more than a year. I filed the lawsuit anyway, hoping that I could sustain an argument. The case was dismissed in the federal district court in a five-minute hearing before a judge who was a political pal of Mayor Daley. He heard my argument standing up behind his bench, looking at his watch, on his way to lunch at the Standard Club. 
     I can't remember the theory I argued before the federal court of appeals panel. I think I argued that my client's sole heir at the time of his death was a minor daughter and as a minor, she couldn't be barred by the one-year survival statute. The argument was denied. I do remember James Van Gelder was a judge sitting on that panel. He'd been appointed to the federal bench and served in the district court and then was elevated to the court of appeals. He was dressed in a black robe and looked even more like a Dutch burgher in a painting by Rembrandt except he wasn't wearing a lace collar or a tall domed hat. He didn't acknowledge me when I argued the case. I didn't acknowledge him, although we both recognized each other. He didn't recuse himself. I didn't ask that he be recused. I do remember that I angrily repeated Mayor Daley's edict of "shoot to kill arsonists, shoot to maim looters," but Van Gelder's face remained frozen, as did the faces of the other members of the panel. In six weeks an order came down upholding 

the dismissal. One of the court's law clerks called me and told me the appeal had been denied.
     Perhaps ten years later, James Van Gelder died. Stefania had died the year before. I saw Van Gelder's obituary in the Chicago Tribune. It made me think again of Stefania and her case in chancery. Now, all the principals were dead, Master Langenfeld, Judge Duffy, James Van Gelder, Stefania, Buffino, and even Ira Feurstein, the young lawyer who originally represented Buffino. Martin Gladstone, the judge of the Illinois Appellate Court who wrote the opinion was also dead. 
     I was the only survivor, and for some reason, I began to look up the biographies of the lawyers and judges in the case. The firm I was then with saved copies of old legal directories, Sullivan's Law Directory, an annual listing with short biographies of lawyers in Chicago and Illinois. We kept the old Sullivan's directories in our office vault. The dusty, yellow books, all in a row, looked to me in the weak vault light like a row of yellowing gravestones, almost a cemetery of lawyers. There were fifty volumes stacked in two rows. 
     It was interesting to trace Van Gelder from year to year. He'd gone with his father's firm right out of law school and stayed with him in a partnership most of his career. After the father died, Van Gelder's son joined the firm and several years later, Van Gelder went on the federal bench. 
     Ernest Langenfeld had followed almost the same path. He practiced with his brother for many years and Langenfeld's son later joined them.
     I traced the listing of Ira Feurstein, the young, sardonic, University of Chicago graduate who represented Buffino at the depositions and withdrew in favor of Van Gelder. He'd been graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 and had joined Webb, Smith and Glotz in Chicago. He was a partner with the firm until his death two years ago. Webb, Smith and Glotz now had over two hundred lawyers. 
     I then looked up Martin Gladstone, the appellate judge who'd written the opinion. Martin Gladstone had begun to practice law in a partnership with his brother in the 1940s. 
     It was difficult to read in the weak light of the vault. I found a small stepladder and stood on it and held the book up closer to the light. 
     Gladstone left his brother and joined the firm of Webb, Smith and Glotz in 1953. This was the same firm that Ira Feurstein had joined in 1964. Martin Gladstone left the firm in 1959 when he went on the bench and later moved up to the appellate court. Was it possible, though, that Judge Gladstone had once represented Buffino and his bank? Was that the nexus? The tiny, hidden, defective jewel in the case? The judge who wrote the appellate opinion and Buffino's original lawyer had a connection. They'd both been members of the same law partnership. 

Could the case have been fixed by Buffino behind Van Gelder's back? I still believe Van Gelder was too clean to have done it. He probably was never told. He was a distinguished member of the trial bar and became a federal judge. He didn't have to be told. Buffino knew Stefania would never accept $25,000 but the offer was made anyway to keep Van Gelder from becoming suspicious. The connection was made without him. Should I have vetted all the lawyers and the judges on the panel back for twenty or thirty years? Perhaps I would have seen the connection. I don't think so. But was that really the connection? Was that the flawed jewel hidden deeply in the recesses of the case? I think so. I now really think so. Buffino had reached far back to a judge who was a former member of the bank's law firm to apply the clout. I didn't realize it then. Now it's too late to do anything about it other than write this story. So Chicago justice was administered in chancery, after all. Stefania's beautiful hands were too clean for her lawsuit in chancery in the Chicago courts. 
     "He who seeks Equity must do Equity," is another famous, ancient maxim in Equity. I am the only survivor and there is no one else alive to affirm or deny my story or to do Equity for my client Stefania Muzek.