Class News
Pete Putzel '64 reports on his Yale Law School 50th Reunion
Pete Putzel reported on the 50th Reunion of the Yale Law School Class of 1968 which took place October 19-21, 2018. In addition to his own personal essay, he sent the personal essays of Peter Bradford, Jim Mandel, and Roy Regozin. These men all took a year off after our graduation in 1964. Like the essays in our 50th Class Reunion Book, these make for interesting reading.
Henry Putzel III
When I left New Haven I assumed that New York would be an interim stop for a couple of years. Anne and I moved to Brooklyn in May of 1968, preparatory to my starting at Davis Polk in the fall. Fifty years later, still living in Brooklyn, I must finally concede that the move was more permanent.
When we first arrived in Brooklyn, our Manhattan friends, astonished that we had elected to live in a third world country, reminded us to make sure that our visas were in order and our vaccinations up to date. Instead, we found a vital, diverse community that has only improved over the years (thanks in no small part to the civic efforts of another transplant, Brooklyn's First Citizen Earl Weiner).
In 1969 our beloved daughter Robin was born with cystic fibrosis. She lived for almost twenty-three years but died in 1992. Our fine son David, a talented furniture designer, lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois. After teaching at Hamden High School while I was in law school, Anne switched fields, took her doctorate in clinical psychology, and until her retirement was a talented therapist.
After two years as a Davis Polk associate, I succumbed to the lure of the courtroom and became an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and during the ensuing four years found my life's work trying countless criminal cases (a vocation that I never conceived of while I was in law school). In addition to the usual fare of the prosecutor, I was charged with representing the government in the case following the terrorist bombing of Sol Hurok's New York office, and I was the junior government lawyer in the celebrated fraud case in which Clifford Irving was charged with writing and selling (to Life magazine) a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes.
(True story: When Ralph Winter first started as a Second Circuit judge, he was assigned to a panel that reviewed a case that I had handled years before as a prosecutor. During oral argument he turned to his colleagues and whispered, "the reason that this case has been so screwed up by the government is that all four Assistants who handled it are former students of mine." Notwithstanding, the conviction was affirmed).
From 1974 until 1979 I taught full time at Fordham Law School. Soon, however, I itched to return to the courtroom, and in 1979 I opened my own law office as a white-collar defense lawyer, a part of the profession that — before Watergate — had not really existed. I am often asked to compare my service as a prosecutor to my many years as a defense lawyer. The two jobs have at least one common characteristic: Every layman in the criminal justice system — whether witness, victim or defendant — comes to the courtroom during a moment of crisis in his/her life. I have found enormous satisfaction, on both sides of the fence, in guiding these people through the often harrowing experience of appearing in a criminal case.
I continued to teach part time at Fordham from 1979 through 2016, and I have drawn enormous satisfaction from the achievements of the many superb trial lawyers who took my trial advocacy course, including approximately fifteen state and federal judges and countless prosecutors and defense attorneys.
In 2012, just as I was winding down my law office, some young colleagues asked me to join their firm as "counsel." After five years, our small firm merged into a large, multinational firm. And so the wheel has come full circle: I am once again a lawyer in a large Manhattan corporate law firm. My duties remain the same: I undertake the occasional case but am free to come and go as I please. When I am in my office, a young lawyer will occasionally knock on my door and say "Do you have time to talk about a case?" I find that I have plenty of time.Peter Amory Bradford
Upon graduating from Law School, I worked a summer for Ralph Nader as one of the original Nader's Raiders on a project assessing the failure of the Federal Trade Commission to discharge its consumer protection responsibilities. This radical group included President Nixon's soon-to-be son-in-law, now the chair of the New York State Republican Party, President Reagan's future undersecretary of defense, a future dean of the Georgetown Law School, and two other law professors-to-be.
Following that summer, I worked in the office of the Governor of Maine on proposals to build an oil port and refinery running on pre-Quaddafi Libyan crude oil using the deep water close to shore on the eastern Maine coast. The proposals were strongly opposed by most of the US oil industry as well as the oil producing states. Environmentalists, not a major force in those days, didn't think much of them either, though the oil-pollution control law put forward by Governor Curtis was sustained by a unanimous Supreme Court when challenged by a coalition of major oil companies. While the refineries were never built, I did get a book out of telling the tale. Kirkus Reviews wrote of it, "If sanity is ever declared illegal, Peter Bradford ought to be one the first people arrested." Critical commentary has been pretty much downhill from there.
In 1971, I became a commissioner of the Maine Public Utilities Commission, eventually becoming its chair. In 1977, President Carter named me to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a position to which I could not possibly be confirmed today. After a term that included the accident at Three Mile Island, I returned to Maine and to the Maine PUC in 1982, drawn back by the challenges of the Bell System break-up and the Seabrook nuclear power station.
In 1987, Governor Mario Cuomo asked me to chair the New York Public Service Commission, primarily to deal with the controversial Shoreham nuclear-power plant. My term there also included the implementation of competition in the natural gas industry and in electric power generation.
In 1995, my wife Susan and I moved to Vermont. She and I formed a company that consulted on utility regulatory issues in the US as well as in many other countries for the World Bank, for the US Agency for International Development, and for various foundations, a profession we have pursued ever since, though less avidly these days. During this time, I also taught as an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and at the Vermont Law School.
I have three children: Laura, senior legal advisor (intellectual property) at Cambridge University in the UK following five years in Cairo with her husband David heading the NY Times bureau (Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East); Arthur, a writer of fiction (Dogivalker and Turtleface) and a film maker (How's Your News) in Portland Oregon; and Emily, a public-school teacher (seventh-graders) in Novato, California. Susan has two children: Anna, practice administrator in litigation and dispute resolution at the KL Gates law firm in Boston, and Doug, coach of the Twin City Thunder in the US Premier Hockey League and a former NHL player (Edmonton and Nashville). We have nine grandchildren.
I am on the Board of Directors (vice chair) of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which focuses on nuclear weapons, climate change, clean vehicles, clean energy, food and agriculture, and nuclear power plant safety, as well as the interplay between science and democracy.
I chair our town's board of zoning appeals and am a trustee of the Peru Congregational Church. Susan is on the Board of Hildene, the Lincoln Museum located in Manchester, Vermont, in the home and on the estate of Robert Todd Lincoln, the only son of Abraham Lincoln to live into adulthood and himself a cabinet officer in two administrations as well as ambassador to Great Britain.
I never did take a bar exam.
James I. Mandel
I was in a four-year program at Yale Law School that led to an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies. I continued my interest in Russia with a PhD in Russian History from Columbia. I could not find an attractive academic position, so I became a consultant on Soviet affairs, first to the Defense Department and then to the State Department's office supervising the construction of the American Embassy in Moscow. From 1978 to 1981 I was resident in Moscow and had the opporruniry to meet with prominent dissidents and refuseniks.
In the mid 1980s, I was back in the United States and looking to improve my financial situation, I decided to try practicing law and joined a small boutique firm in Washington, DC, that specialized in government contracting. Most of my practice was litigating procurement and contract disputes. In 1990 I started looking into the possibility of combining my interest in Russia with my legal practice. That year I was hired by the now defunct firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb to open its Moscow office. I remained with LeBoeuf's Russia and former Soviet Union practice for 13 years. It was probably the highlight of my career filled with extraordinary adventures as well as numerous frustrations.
In 2004, Ernst & Young had taken over Arthur Andersen's Russian practice and asked me to join as General Counsel to help with the restructuring of the merged practices and to supervise the in-house legal department. I remained in that position until my retirement in 2010. I remained in Moscow for another year, teaching Western legal practices to young Russian lawyers at the ABA-sponsored Pericles Center for International Legal Education.
Since 2011, I have been happily retired with time to read and travel and spend time with my wife Irina, whom I met in Moscow. I am also a volunteer attorney with the CLARO program in the Bronx that assists low-income persons who are defendants in consumer-credit lawsuits.
Roy L. Regozin
When I graduated from YLS, my goal was to engage in the practice of law as a career. Happily, I did so for more than 40 years, with the firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York City and Washington, DC. My focus was commercial litigation. Discovery proceedings and settlements were a substantial part of my practice. The advent of the computer revolutionized word processing and, with the internet, factual and legal research. Electronic discovery transformed that field: the sheer volume of material required new approaches to document production and review. I enjoyed identifying and working through legal and factual issues, and interacting with clients, other attorneys, paralegals, judges, experts, fact witnesses, and non-legal staff at the firm. I retired at the end of 2009.
I am happily married and have three children. Laurie and I moved to Massachusetts in 2012, and are enjoying a more rural lifestyle than we had on Long Island. Woods can be very restorative. Since retiring, I have had the time to think and read about non-legal matters that are of interest to me (e.g., mindfulness, the environment) and, since moving to Massachusetts, I also have become more politically active.
Recently, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis and an arthritic lower back. I can no longer get around the way I used to. C'est la vie. A positive result of my condition is that I have begun to learn the Alexander Technique, which utilizes the mind/body connection. Having lived in my head for much of my life, it is exciting to explore that connection.
Best wishes to all.