The Brown campaign has been silent on the issue of Elizabeth Warren’s broad and longstanding practice of law from her Cambridge office without being licensed in Massachusetts.
I assume that the Brown campaign wanted to have all their legal ducks in a row before they jumped on the issue. As numerous commenters pointed out on the debate post, Brown needed to raise it at the right time and in the right manner.
Apparently that time has arrived, as reported by NPR station WBUR:
Brown Claims Warren Is Practicing Without Law LicenseU.S. Sen. Scott Brown is claiming his Democratic rival, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, is practicing law without a license.Brown is also criticizing Warren’s representation of another corporate client. This time, it’s Dow Chemical.“So once again, we find out that she’s been working not for the little guy, not for the victims, as she said, in the middle class, but for the large corporation as a hired gun, and doing that, quite frankly, without a law license, something that I know is something that should be looked into,” Brown told reporters in Winchester Wednesday.“I know I have to be admitted to the bar,” he added. “I took the test, passed the test, and any time you are giving out information, you need to have a license.”
The WBUR article then goes on to make the same legal mistake many make, assuming that because Warren could appear in federal courts she has no problem. As explained here many times, that is a strawman argument. To practice law from her Cambridge office, Warren needed to be licensed in Massachusetts.
I expect the Boston Globe to cover for Warren, as one of its senior writers already has announced that the lack of a license is a non-issue. As have some other Warren defenders, the Globe writer cited Michael Fredrickson, the General Counsel of the Board of Bar Overseers, who volunteered a highly unusual “personal” opinion, only later to admit he didn’t even know enough about Warren’s law practice to reach a conclusion.
This is about to get hot.
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