THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 8, 1997 TAG: 9702080018
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty
LENGTH: 78 lines
If you inhale deeply you can almost detect a whiff of burning leaves in the air. You see, for some people in Virginia it's not February, it's already November.
Those people, not surprisingly, are politicians. For them, the first Tuesday in November is Thanksgiving, New Year's and the 4th of July all rolled into one.
For several months now these politicians have been sashaying through the editorial offices of The Virginian-Pilot. They stop by to say ``Hey'' and to try to get the inside track on those editorial endorsements we write in the weeks before the November statewide elections.
It's sort of like the preliminary rounds of a beauty pageant - without the tiaras and tank suits.
After schmoozing with a half-dozen of these eager-beaver vote-seekers in the past couple of months, I think it's safe to say I've caught a whiff of upcoming Virginia campaign - and it stinks.
One example: A week ago a candidate dropped by. In the course of a casual ``background'' conversation, we asked him to do some prognosticating - to predict who would be the likely candidates from both parties for the three top offices in the commonwealth. We also asked him to speculate on who he thought would emerge victorious, who was destined for defeat.
Not surprisingly, the candidate quickly predicted his own victory, and then began mulling over the prospects for others. When he got to the hotly contested race for the Republican nominee for attorney general, this man said he believed Virginia Beach state Sen. Ken Stolle was the front-runner. But in the same breath he questioned the credentials of the Virginia Beach lawyer who ``doesn't even have a law degree.''
Upon hearing that kind of elitist snobbery I almost came out of my seat. Lack of a law degree didn't hurt Thomas Jefferson any. Abraham Lincoln did fine without one. And the late federal Judge Richard B. Kellam from Virginia Beach - widely regarded as one of the finest legal minds in the state - wasn't hampered by not attending law school.
There may be lots of reasons not to support Ken Stolle to be Virginia attorney general. His lack of a law degree is not one of them.
When I spoke with Stolle and told him what the opposing party was already saying about him, the Beach lawyer seemed thrilled.
``All our polling shows that my having read the law is a big plus with voters,'' Stolle said. ``That silver-spoon mentality just doesn't go over very well.
``Some of my Republican opponents tried to make an issue of it awhile ago, but they've dropped that approach. Maybe they were getting the same reaction we were.''
Stolle's bootstraps tale of working as a detective on the Virginia Beach narcotics squad - taking the 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift so he could study law by day - is the stuff great political ads are made of.
If Democrats are planning to make the fact that Ken Stolle didn't go to law school an issue, they ought to quickly rethink their strategy. And if they mean to imply that law degrees make terrific attorneys general and candidates, I have three words for them: Mary Sue Terry.
When Stolle decided he wanted to pass the bar exam, he couldn't just quit his job on the Virginia Beach Police Department. He didn't have a rich daddy to pay for law school or a trust fund to support him. Stolle did what many hard-working Virginians have done for several hundred years: He read the law.
It's not as easy as you think. Virginia is one of five states in the U.S. that still allows candidates to read the law and take the state bar exam. Virginia's is a highly structured program that takes three years to complete with a minimum of 25 hours of study a week. There are also periodic exams on prescribed subjects and strict oversight by the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners.
Surprisingly, several states have recently adopted modified law reader programs; Alaska, New York and Maine among them. The latter two states require one year of law school but permit the remaining studies to be done in a law office in an appreticeship-type arrangement.
Today there are 20 Virginians reading the law. Those who pass the state bar exam will be free to hang their shingles, go to court, tape ambulance-chasing commercials, if they desire, and even run for attorney general someday. That's the way it ought to be. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.