What color is your integrity today?

In news today, there are reports that more people are using the Internet to look up the meaning of words and the number one word for which this check is being made is “integrity.”

A number of years ago, certainly more than ten, I had to be in two separate court hearings in two different courthouses on the same day at the same time. I asked my law partner to cover one of the two hearings for me. He appeared in the court on my behalf and one of the attorneys present made a motion for the judge to recuse himself because another attorney appearing in the same case before this judge was the personal attorney of the judge. Needless to say the judge was offended. He said, “My integrity is inviolate.”

Later, after my partner recounted to me the events that transpired in chambers, my partner said to me, “I did not know that integrity came in colors.”

For years after this event, people who knew my partner were asking, no one in particular, in the courthouse and elsewhere, “what color is your integrity today?”

Joel Friedman and I practiced law together for twenty-five years. Joel died March 7, 2004. We have collected a group of his sayings and we called them “Joelisms”.

copyrighted 2005

Integrity

Religion