Judge Andre Davis, retired Fourth Circuit Judge and Baltimore City Solicitor, continues his conversation with Kramon & Graham's Steve Klepper about mentors and role models. In this episode they discuss Judge Davis's experience teaching at the University of Maryland Law School, judicial politics in Maryland, his appointments as judge in the District Court of Maryland, Circuit Court for Baltimore City and then the US District Court, and his relationship with his former law clerks. Steve Klepper is the head of the appellate practice at Kramon & Graham. 

00:00:00 Teaching at the University of Maryland Law School

00:07:14 The decision to become a judge in the District Court of Maryland

00:19:45 Judicial politics in the 1980s and appointment to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City

00:26:23 Becoming a US District Court judge

00:35:49 Judge Davis's relationship with his former law clerks: "family, family, family"

00:37:25 Thoughts on name changes for Maryland's high courts and hopes for the future

00:40:07 Judge Davis's memories of Steve's mentor and colleague Max Lauten

Speaking With Experts is produced for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to provide legal or professional advice or to constitute any type of sponsorship or endorsement.

Welcome. This is Steve Klepper, the head of the appellate practice at Kramon and Graham here in Baltimore, and I'm pleased today to continue our conversation with retired Fourth Circuit Judge and City Solicitor Judge Andre Davis as we continue talking about the topic of mentors and role models. Now, you left to go back to University of Maryland School of Law, right?

Yes.

How did that come to happen?

Well, mentor Clinton Bamberger. Clinton, of course, just another one of the giants of Maryland law, argued Brady v. Maryland before the Supreme Court, first director of the Legal Services Corporation, et cetera, et cetera. Clinton and I got to know each other. I don't remember exactly how, but he was at that time very much involved at the law school. He was not a formal tenure track professor, but he was teaching at the law school, was very close to Larry Gibson. And I think the word got back to him that I was thinking of leaving the law firm and I was teaching as an adjunct at the time. I had been teaching at the at the law school for two or three years as an adjunct criminal procedure. And Clinton reached out to me one day and said oh, and Judge Murnaghan actually Judge Murnaghan actually, during the clerkship, actually wrote to a couple of law schools without my knowledge. I don't think he talked to me in advance. He just sort of dropped these letters on me at some point during the clerkship and said, I want you to know I've written to Dean X and Dean Y that you'd be a great professor. Kind of blew my mind. And of course, Judge Murnaghan knew that I was teaching part time at Maryland, so it may well have been Murnaghan who contacted Clint Bamberger at Maryland. And of course, Michael Kelly is also another mentor that I should have mentioned earlier. He was the dean of the law school at that time. So it all came together, and Clinton urged me to take a chance and accept an appointment to the law school faculty on the tenure track. I really wasn't looking forward to spending countless hours writing law review articles that nobody would ever read. But this was at a time when Mike Kelly, the dean, was moving Maryland to another higher tier of law schools. And to do that, among the things you have to do is you have to have faculty who write law review articles that nobody ever reads. And so I said, okay, I can do this because I love teaching. Yeah, I absolutely love teaching. So that's what happened, I think my first year, I was appointed as a visiting professor, and then I got a full tenure track appointment as an assistant professor. The year after that or during that year.

Did you publish law review articles no one read during that?

I did not. It's interesting you asked that question. Again, Bill Reynolds still a mentor. My office was right next to Bill's, and Bill was something of a prolific writer and a good writer. He's a great legal scholar. And so I commits with Bill from time to time. Bill, I think I'm going to write on Fourth Amendment stuff. That's what I'm really interested in, and I need some motivation. And Bill said, don't try to do too much at once. You know, why don't you write something smaller to get started? Because I hadn't been on Law Review in law school. I'd done Moot Court and done it well, but I had not been law review. And I said, well, okay. He said, write a book review. I thought perfect. Get get the juices flowing a little bit. And so I don't know exactly how it happened, but I don't know if you know Thimbleriggers>

I don't.

Of course you don't. Thimbleriggers is a history of the Marvin Mandel prosecution, Written by a journalist, fairly prominent journalist, although I can't remember his name as I sit here, at The Sun Papers. And again, I don't know exactly how it happened. Probably Bill Reynolds made it happen somehow. But I was given the assignment of writing a book review for Thimbleriggers and it was published. Where was it published?

I'm sure your Senate questionnaire, it's in there.

I don't remember where it was published. I imagine it was published in The Sun, but I don't remember. Anyway, I was getting into the mode, and I spent a lot of hours in the library, and I had a topic, and I believe I did one of these faculty presentations. In the academy you develop your ideas and you develop your journal articles by doing oral presentations to your faculty members. And I'm pretty sure I did one of those on some obscure Fourth Amendment issue. This was at a time, of course, again, this is 1984 to 1987. And so the Supreme Court is really in the midst of what I call creating the drug war Constitution. The court was deciding every term, as I know you know, Steve, from your practice. The court was deciding all these cases that were not only cutting back on some of the Warren Court criminal procedure protections, but really creating just terrible, terrible law as a part of the quote unquote "war on drugs" that just created a lot of what we saw in the George Floyd case and some of the other cases, by which I mean the court's decisions back in the '80's and the '90's created the slippery slope for police officers that created militarized policing and encouraging police officers to exceed the bounds of constitutional propriety. And that's what we're left with. Anyway, so I was full of and. . .

And yet three years around the time most people are applying for tenure, you become a judge.

Well, right, I became a judge.

When did you decide in this process, you know what? I'm going to become a state district court judge?

Again, a moment in time that I remember very well. Up through 1986, I had no aspiration, no interest in becoming a judge, and I really mean that. I had clerked for two of the greatest judges the law has ever seen, judge Kaufman and Judge Murnaghan. And I saw close up what truly good judging is really all about. It's hard work. Not that I have anything against hard work. I love hard work. But I wanted to be an advocate. That's what I wanted to be, a trial level advocate in particular. And I knew that the law got in the way of justice. And when that happens, a judge has to turn their back. Judges have to turn their back on justice. Not to be too poetic about it. That's the truth. So I was not remotely interested. But here's what happened, Steve. I was teaching, and I love teaching. As I said, I was teaching civil procedure, federal civil procedure and criminal procedure, legal profession, professional responsibility, and some other things. I later taught fed jurisdiction and so on. And so here's the thing. When you teach federal civil procedure and this was a full year six credit course, soup to nuts. When you were in law school it was probably one semester. This was a two semester. And so here's what happens back then when you taught civil procedure. The civil procedure casebooks were focused on civil procedure, of course, but the actual cases in the civil procedure casebook ran the gamut of everything from property law, estates and trusts, corporations, torts, you name it, because the cases in the casebook were there for the particular procedural wrinkle or lesson to be learned, but the underlying substantive law was there also. And what I discovered pretty quickly because and you'll remember this, the battle between first and second year law teachers and law students is a battle royale. And law students have, as a part of their mission to demonstrate, one, that they're smarter than the teacher, and two, that the teacher really doesn't know what he's talking about. And to be perfectly blunt about this, back then, even in the early 80s, black teachers in law schools, all law schools, whether it was Harvard or Maryland or in between, black teachers had real challenges from particularly white students. There was an illegitimacy around the idea that this black lawyer, this black law professor, actually knows what he's talking about.

Well, I mean, you hadn't even published any articles.

I hadn't published a thing. Later published Thimbleriggers law review, book review. So I share all of that to say what I ended up doing was becoming "an expert." Air quotes. Okay, people can't see this, but I'm doing air quotes. An expert in every area of the law that there was. Now, of course, I was not an expert, but when I was teaching from the casebook and the case involved a duty of care owed by some common carrier. So the case involved some accident between a bus and a taxicab right. Arising under Nebraska law. Right. It just happened to be in federal court and there was some aspect of procedure. Well, I spent a lot of time researching common carrier liability. Because when I went in that classroom the next day or next week and this knucklehead on the front row who raised his hand and said, well, Professor Davis, I don't understand why not asking about the procedure, but about the underlying tort claim or the underlying issue of corporate law under Idaho law. So all of that taught me that I could learn anything. I already knew that, but I proved it to myself.

But as a black law professor in the 1980s, you didn't have the luxury of just knowing your subject matter.

No. I needed to know everything. And what happened one day, that moment in time that I talked about was, you know what? Teaching and judging are the same thing. Now, that sounds weird. Even sounds a little weird to me today. But honestly, that was how I came to view myself. Hey, I could be a good judge.

I could be a good judge.

I mean, explaining to people why they lose exactly.

And explaining to people why they win and why they would have lost but for this, this and this.

And you're not morally superior because you've won. It's just that this is under these facts as I found them or a jury found them. This is why you win.

You are exactly right. And so I saw the District Court of Maryland as a place where I could perform public service. Yeah, it's a hackneyed phrase, but it's where most Marylanders, the vast majority of Marylanders will encounter the legal system. At the District Court of Maryland. Speeding ticket, landlord tenant. You sue your dry cleaners because they screwed up your prom dress. Whatever it is, I wanted to be in that arena. And again, I was thinking about my time at the Housing Authority.

Yeah.

So I knew what goes on at the district court. And by the way, the first lawsuit I ever brought was about a year after I'm sorry.

No, please.

I got to share this story because it's important in my life. About a year after I graduated, I was here in Baltimore working. I think I was still working in retail, but I may have been at the Housing Authority by then. But I had a car that needed some work. And it was a stick shift. It was a manual drive.

I drive sticks. I know how to do that.

Yeah. Okay. And I took it to a place for some repairs. I think it was a Volvo 242 boxy 1972 Volvo stick shift. And I took it up to Reisterstown Road, and they said it would only take an hour or so. I could wait for it. So there happened to be a fast food restaurant across the street from the place. So I said, Well, I'll go over here and have this.

This is reading like a law school exam, hypothetical. Find the important information.

This is the course of my life. Long story short, I'm sitting there in the fast food restaurant, probably reading the morning paper or something, and I watch as the guy from the automotive place try to drive my car into the service bay, and he doesn't know how to drive a stick, and he burns up the clutch. Literally.

I've had that happen. The stench.

There you go. There you go. I'm a witness to the destruction of the clutch in my 1972 Volvo 242.

So it's, probably totaled at that point.

So when I go to pick it up, they tell me the car is broken. Anyway, long story short, they won't take responsibility, so I sue them. I sue them pro se small claim to get it repaired. I think it was like $242. I sued them for $242 at Fayette and Gay, and they settled on the courthouse steps.

That's great. And then come 1995, you're suddenly like, wait, I have to summarize this from my Senate disclosure list. All litigation you've ever been a part of. Little did you know.

I think I left actually, no, I did include that.

I'm certain.

I think I did include that.

I cannot imagine that the White House Counsel's Office would have failed to have figured that out anyway.

In living memory, to my knowledge, I am the only full-time law professor ever to be appointed to a Maryland court. Directly to the Maryland directly to a Maryland court. Schaefer obviously heard from a lot of people who thought very highly of me, and I remember there were lots and lots of applicants for that seat, including one other law professor, in fact, really from the University of Baltimore. And I was very honored, of course, when I got the call that he was going to make the appointment. And I remember my mentor, a number of my mentors at the law school thought I was making a serious mistake, including Larry Gibson and Clint Bamberger, I'm sure.

All when has this ever been a path to greatness, right?

Exactly.

And this is before Judge Bell had gone from District Court to Circuit Court to Court of Special Appeals.

Actually, no, Judge Bell, who was one of, I didn't know Judge Bell at the time, but I was inspired by Judge Bell. Judge Bell was appointed, as I recall, in 75. Is that right?

Was it the People's Court then?

No, I think it had become the district court, but Judge Bell made a name for himself. I don't know how much of his history, you know, but he got a lot of publicity when he refused to convict prostitutes. It got a lot of media attention. I don't remember the details, but he became someone that I admired from some distance, quite a bit. But I'll never forget Clint Bamberger. I said to Clint Bamberger, who, what are you doing? What on earth are you doing? And I remember saying to Clint Bamberger, it's a very moving conversation. I said, Clinton, I know I will enjoy the District Court of Maryland, and by the way, I don't want to preside over a death penalty case.

Yeah.

And you know what he said to me? He said, Andre, I wouldn't want to send anybody to the Baltimore City jail.

Yeah.

That was so eye opening. It was truly eye opening. It chastened me. I thought I was avoiding. . .

Here you were making bail decisions that will change people's lives.

I was so glad when he said that to me, because it really don't think anyway, it turned out to be the greatest three years of my life.

And then you applied to become a circuit court judge again, Governor Schaefer, quite reluctantly. . .

Quite reluctantly. It was lots of politics at the time. The judicial politics in Baltimore City in particular, but in Maryland were hot and heavy. The black bar felt quite justifiably that the underrepresentation of black judges, particularly in Baltimore City, was not acceptable, that black lawyers were not being given a fair shot by the judicial nominating commissions and by the governors, et cetera. And so at the circuit court level by then, so this was '87 by then, there had been quite a bit of controversy over Al Figinski and Peter Ward, two white lawyers, who were appointed by, I guess Mandel, or maybe Schaefer, I don't remember. But anyway, when they ran for in Maryland, at the circuit court level, as you well know, you can get appointed and then you run in the next general election. Well, the two of them I don't think it was the same election, but the two of them lost in the following general election. Al Figinski, by the way, was castigated by the community because he held unconstitutional during that period after he'd been appointed and before the election, he held unconstitutional a rent control ordinance that Baltimore City had adopted.

So he didn't know that you're not supposed to make any controversial rulings in that period of time. Keep your head down.

Peter Ward, bless his heart, who I know well, is British by birth and has this one do you know Peter?

I don't.

He has this wonderful British accent. Just a wonderful, wonderful lawyer, wonderful guy. He got appointed and he was defeated by a white lawyer who ran, also named Ward who's a former city council person, Tom Ward. Who served for many years. The politics around judicial elections were such that people were really paying attention to who was being appointed, who was going to run. We have this so called "Sitting Judge Principle" in Maryland so that when you get appointed by the governor to a circuit court in Baltimore City, the judges who were up for election at the next general election run together as a slate. And so during this time, there was a lot of attention being paid to the racial makeup of the slate.

And so they wanted to be in a picture with you.

Exactly. And so I won't go into any greater detail, but the year that I ran, after I was appointed to the Circuit Court, we had three sitting judges: Joe McCurdy, Paul Smith, and Andre Davis. The three: Joe McCurdy white; Paul Smith. black; Andre Davis black. We had been colleagues on the District Court of Maryland, actually, and Schaefer had appointed all of us to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. We ended up not having any opposition.

Well, there we go. That's a good slate.

We had two fundraisers and we ended up giving the bulk of the money to the next year legal Aid. We did leave some for the next go round of sitting judges, but we gave most of it to, I think, Legal Aid and some other charity.

So did you have to preside over any death penalty trials?

No, I didn't. The the death penalty in Baltimore was obviously was still on the books, but neither Schmoke nor Jessamy nor Stu Sims who succeeded Jessamy? No, I think Stu was, Stu was interim, I think, between Schomke and Jessamy. Kurt may have sought it in one case, I think, but it was not a real thing in Baltimore City.

And yet you're charge the county there was the policy of seeking death penalty in every case.

Exactly. Sandy O'Connor sought it in every case.

So it's very confusing, as a young lawyer that Sandy O'Connor was the Baltimore County State Attorney, while Sandra Day O'Connor was our well known Supreme Court justice. Did you see the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once?

I haven't seen it yet.

It's an odd movie, but I'm trying to think there are so many different timelines, and there's one where you could have just stayed a state district court judge for your entire career, and it sounds like you would have enjoyed yourself. I would have, immensely. And then there's the circuit court for Baltimore City. There's another break in the timeline here. So my understanding is that in 1994 you applied for the Court of Special Appeals.

I did, for various reasons. There was a vacancy I forget if it was a city seat or an at-large seat, but I applied, as did a number of other people, including, I think, at least one and maybe two or three other Circuit Court judges from Baltimore City. And I was passed on to the governor by the commission and had a great interview. I've told you before, I thought it was the best job interview I ever had with Governor Schaefer. I left there thinking, boy, I'm in pretty good shape here. He might appoint me. But in the end he didn't. He appointed Ellen Hollander, my colleague on the Circuit Court for Baltimore City and I continued to serve as a Circuit Court judge.

And interesting bit of trivia. When you were eventually, when you were elevated from the US District Court to the Fourth Circuit, who replaced you on the US District Court?

The Honorable Ellen Hollander not only replaced me but moved into my chambers in the Garmatz Courthouse on the fifth floor.

That's great.

She's been a dear friend and a Goucher College grad.

A Goucher College alum just like me and you during all of this. You've always had a lot of extracurricular activities. You were. . .

I was a trustee of Goucher College for two three-year terms, I think ending in I want to say '81 but I don't remember exactly.

That's terrific. And let's see we are running short on time here. My goodness. But okay, maybe we'll invite you back for another session at some point.

I would be willing.

So Judge Hollander goes the Court of Special Appeals route but then there you are in 1995. How did you come to become a US District Court judge.

Well, when Clinton was elected in '92 there were three vacancies, existing vacancies on the District Court of Maryland of the ten of the ten slots and at least two nominees had either had a hearing two of first President Bush's nominees had had a hearing or they were scheduled for a hearing and it never happened. In any event, those nominations sort of died on the vine at the end of that Congress in '91 and '92. And then when Clinton became president in '93 it was around the same time that the Greenbelt Southern Division was created. So that Maryland now had a northern division — Baltimore — a southern division Greenbelt. And the lawyers and judges down in the Washington area had for years been agitating about the lack of representation on the federal bench in Maryland among lawyers from the Washington suburbs Montgomery County, Prince George's County and Steny Hoyer had managed to get the Greenbelt Courthouse authorized by Congress.. So it hadn't opened in '93 but it was under construction. And so Senator Sarbanes, then Senator Sarbanes sort of managed the process for the White House interviewed a number of people, including myself for those original three vacancies.

You might have been in Greenbelt.

And it might have been but the word got out pretty quickly that the people Sarbanes intended to recommend to the White House were almost certainly going to be lawyers and or judges from Montgomery, Prince George's County. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Alex Williams, the then state's attorney for Prince George's County. Deborah Chasanow judge, was then a magistrate judge on the district court who lived in Prince George's County and whose husband was a Maryland judge, later to become a judge on the Court of Appeals of Maryland and Peter Messitte, who was then a circuit court judge in Montgomery County. So those are the three recommendations that Sarbanes supported to the White House, and all three eventually were confirmed. Fast forward a year and a half or even a year, and lo and behold, there are three more vacancies.

Three more all at once?

Actually, two more. I'm sorry. Two more vacancies came open. And Sarbanes went through the same process, interviewed a number of people. I don't know who he interviewed. And unlike today, there's no public posting. Hey, if you want to apply for a federal district, Sarbanes pretty much played it close to the vest, and he interviewed a number of people, including me, again, and by himself. Just me and him in a room. Yeah. Took about an hour the second time, about two hours the first time. And lo and behold, the Honorable Sathy Blake, with whom I had served in the US Attorney's Office, who was then a magistrate judge, and I were recommended to the White House by Sarbanes. We had our hearings on the same day at the same time, and we were sworn in on the same day in August of 1995.

So that's right after the Republicans had retaken the Senate.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Did. Did you face any higher grilling because of that, or did you fall off the radar for US District Court?

It's amazing how times have changed. The Chair of the Judiciary Committee I can't believe I don't remember. Well, Bob Dole was the majority leader in the Senate, and, of course, the '96 candidate for president against Clinton. But we had the old style hearing. We got a few questions.

Nobody asked you about the lawsuit you filed.

Nobody asked me about the lawsuit. The issue that I was confronted with was, are you going to follow the sentencing guidelines? This was at a time when the sentencing guidelines were very controversial. Many, many federal judges just despised the guidelines. There was so much injustice in sentencing. And I remember and they were viewed as mandatory. Oh, yeah, they were mandatory. Not just viewed as mandatory. They were mandatory. And I'll never forget, during the hearing, Judge Blake went first, went up to the table, was sworn in, answered a few questions, and just as my turn came to go up to the witness chair, who comes in from stage right, but Strom Thurmond almost carried along by some aid, and he takes his seat. And he asked me, I won't try to duplicate his Southern drawl, but basically, he asked me, Judge Davis, do you think you're going to have a problem adhering to the federal sentencing guidelines, et cetera? I said no, your honor. No, Senator, I'm going to follow the law. And that's what I did.

I do recall from that era, because Justice Ginsburg had just been confirmed the year before and after hearings, Judge Ginsburg. And I was like, that doesn't even sound like I would expect. But he was in his nineties and such a strange time that he really was this champion of segregation was still sitting in the Senate, and was a man who had wrestled a fellow senator to the floor to try to avoid him, casting a vote for the Civil Rights Act of '64. And there he was asking questions of our future federal court judges.

In my hearing, he got up and left after questioning me. It was very strange actually. He came out to question me and then he got up and left. But I think there was only one Democrat, of course, Sarbanes. Right. Sarbanes and Mikulski both showed up, made nice remarks about me as I recall, introduced me to the committee and Judge Blake, but I think that I'm not even sure if the chair of the Judiciary Committee was actually there. Frequently the chairman doesn't show up for non-controversial markups of nominees, but as I recall, there was only one Democrat and one Republican until Thurman came in and left. That was that.

Yeah.

Who else was on that day was a judge on the Ninth Circuit who was held up for like a year. He was a district judge who had been nominated by Clinton to the Ninth Circuit, and I'm not going to recall his name, but he became a friend later. But I remember he had to wait more than a year before he was confirmed to the Ninth Circuit.

Some of my favorite things to hear I mean, I know so many people who have clerked for you over the years and talk about what a terrific mentor you were to them. And what I love are the stories of when you're a trial court judge, lawyers will call chambers, and often who would they get when they called your chambers?

Sometimes they'd get me.

It sounds like it was more than sometimes. And maybe not announce who it was they were even talking to.

I tried to be forthright, but you take your chances.

You take your chances. What's the relationship like you between you and your law clerks?

Oh, family, family, family. I have grand clerks. Until the pandemic, my wife and I held a summer cookout at our home for any and all clerks who could come. And in the winter, in December, we typically would hold a gathering. In recent years before the pandemic, we had a lovely restaurant in Columbia, sort of halfway between DC and Baltimore, and people could come. The summer thing would be families with kids, the winter thing would be just three hours, just before the holidays to get together. So all of that was very important to me. And I will tell you that I don't make friends easily. What am I trying to say? I'm easy to be a friend to, but I'm not easy to make friends. And so having the clerkship family is really they're all my friends. They're all my closest friends now. My closest friends are my former clerks now.

Oh, that's great.

And it's been great. Since I retired, I spent a lot of time writing letters and giving references for people, applying for all kinds of things. I performed a number of weddings for law clerks, and now I can't do that anymore, but that's okay.

Some lightning round type questions here, actually. Lightning round. How did you vote on the constitutional amendment to change Maryland's appellate court names?

I voted. I figured if Judge Barbera wanted it, I was not going to stand in the way, but I voted in favor of it. It seemed 20 years from now, nobody will care if people care today. But I think it's a good thing for Maryland to have a Supreme Court.

And I just love because the former chief Judge Robert Bell, very openly voted against the name change, and I think he just loved his vote. There's no justice in this courtroom. I mean, it's his line there. And let's see, as you look in particular towards the younger lawyers, they've just come up in such a different world. What makes you hopeful for the future of the profession?

What makes me hopeful is that I believe we have a rich, rich, rich collection of lawyers and judges who care deeply about the law, who care about the profession, and who care about the communities where they work and live. And I look to people like you, you're in that group.

I'm not that young anymore.

You're not that young anymore. And so I believe that there is hope residing in the fact that for all the turmoil and divisiveness that we see in the country and the weird, weird, unethical, unlawful behavior of some prominent lawyers in the last few years, I think the weight of opinion in the profession is that all of that was bad, unethical, illegal. Don't do it. And I think that these young lawyers today are going to be exposed to really upstanding, outstanding lawyers like yourself. And I think that people like you and myself and others will take every advantage that we get to mentor young lawyers and help them stay on the straight and narrow. I do believe the law is an honorable profession, and I think that most lawyers agree with that.

Now, in closing, I'd like to talk about one of my mentors and role models. The late Max Lauten was a partner here for many years and passed away in 2010. And one of my most vivid memories was my second argument that I had in the Fourth Circuit was a case that I took over from him while he was dying from cancer, and he passed away shortly before argument. And I went to argument, and Judge Niemeyer was on the panel, and it was very clear I was not winning the case early on, and I'm going through. But at the end, when you came down to shake hands and you walked over to me and you used that time to just express your condolences, and to me, that was just the height of the profession. And that became the moment from which I began to seek you out for mentorship when I could.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Steve. Max was beloved by everybody who knew him. I knew him in the US Attorney's Office and a little bit afterwards, just full of cheer and joy and positivity and just a winning smile. And he just carried himself as a person that you admired, and I so admired him. Such a loss.

I get choked up just even mentioning his name. Well, I have your verbal commitment here, and I will pro se bring you to court for specific enforcement if you don't go on with it. But I'd like to have you back at some point and we can talk more about your time as a federal judge in the US District Court in the Fourth Circuit and then the couple of years that you spent as city solicitor after that.

I would love to do that, Steve. And I'm sorry, what did I say to you? I said 30 minutes. But I had no idea that you would unleash this beast that lives inside me, all these stories. You got to be careful when you talk to a retired judge.

Even as a judge, because I remember I brought you out to a panel in Salt Lake City one time, federal Bar Association. We did a panel, unreported opinion. Everyone after said, you brought a judge who said things.

That's a great line.

Well, thank you very much. And again, this has been Steve Klepper with Kramon and Graham, where I head the appellate practice. And I've been speaking with retired Fourth Circuit Judge and City Solicitor Judge Andre Davis.

Let's do it again.

Let's do it again soon.