Rubin: In a judicial race, throwing the book at a nasty campaign mailer

Judge Laura Polizzi was surprised to find out through her mailbox a few weeks ago that she's an uneducated carpetbagger, but hey, says her opponent, that's politics.

Maybe so, and that's unfortunate — partly because the assertions are ridiculous, and mostly because there's too much venom in elections already without bringing it to a nonpartisan race for a community-level judgeship.

Polizzi, the incumbent, was appointed to the bench by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in May. While she's a graduate of a lightly regarded law school, former Gov. John Engler and plenty of successful lawyers hold the same diploma, and she passed the Michigan bar exam a dozen years ago on her first try.

As for carpetbagging, she largely grew up in the same area she now serves in the 52-3 District Court for Oakland County, based in Rochester Hills, and moved back five years ago. For most of the remainder, she was 10 minutes away in Shelby Township, her home base as she commuted to Oakland University and the since-closed Cooley Law School campus in Auburn Hills.

Knowing those things firsthand, she said, she laughed when she saw the mailer from opponent Ryan Deel. Sitting on her counter in Rochester Hills next to the ValPak coupons was an oversized, two-color mailer with her face on it, and "I thought, 'Good mailers can cost $11,000 to $20,000. You just spent your campaign funds on my picture?'"

Others have been less sanguine about an attack ad that says Polizzi "doesn't know the law," an aspersion based on Cooley's low ranking among law schools, and "doesn't know our community," where she and her builder husband are raising two diaper-age sons.

Among those who received it were her sister, many of her friends, and more important to some sizzling online conversations, a fair number of attorneys.

The general thrust of the discussions has been that the message from Deel was unseemly and unduly nasty — the stuff of big-budget congressional races, not campaigns for district court judge, where the winners interact with vulnerable citizens every day in a setting that depends on faith in the system and its even-handed competence.

Or, as labor and employment attorney David Kotwicki suggested on Facebook, "The ad is mean-spirited condescending trash. He should be humiliated to have signed off on it."

He is not. Nor is he abashed or regretful.

“In politics,” said Deel, the president of the Rochester Hills City Council, “you have to strongly make your case to the public," and the quality of a judge’s education is “an important consideration for voters to look at.”

If alma maters don't matter, he asked, why does every candidate questionnaire have a space for them? And why did the Free Press take a nip at Cooley in an election story last week?

Law schools by the numbers

"Laura Polizzi isn't from here ..." said the mailer, noting that she had founded a firm in Mount Clemens before becoming a judge. "She doesn't know Orion from Oxford."

Furthermore, it said, "Her law school, Cooley, has been called 'the worst law school in America.' That's what Wikipedia says. And that's where our newest judge learned the law."

Lansing-based Cooley is, in fact, at the bottom of U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of America's 196 law schools , part of a 19-way tie for 178th. It's weighed down by a low median score on the Law School Admission Test and a poor first-year passage rate of 36% on state bar exams, and burdened reputationally the past eight years by its most famous alumnus: Michael Cohen, the disbarred and convicted former fixer for Donald Trump.

Among other Michigan law schools, the University of Michigan is tied for ninth nationally, Michigan State is tied for 108th, Detroit Mercy is tied for 136th and Wayne State is tied for 55th, arm-in-arm with the University of California-Davis and the state universities of Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland and Oklahoma.

Deel, a staff attorney for the chief judge in Oakland County Probate Court, went to Wayne. He offered an analogy to explain the importance of the gap between his school and Polizzi's, long after the last notes of "Pomp and Circumstance."

“If you were looking to choose between two doctors you’d never met,” he asked, “and one went to the University of Toledo and the other went to Johns Hopkins, would that make a difference in who you selected?”

That depends, said Royal Oak criminal defense attorney Andy Hubbs , who took note of the mailer online and wound up hosting one of the blistering exchanges.

He'd want to factor in temperament, time and further training, Hubbs said, and the example is flawed anyway because it assumes lawyers stop learning after law school when that's when much of their education actually begins.

“I know Ryan. I have a lot of respect for him,” he said. “But as a practicing attorney, I was offended by what he did. I felt like it needed to be called out.”

He doesn’t know Polizzi, Hubbs said, but he has been in her court several times, and he has been impressed — even as she sided with the prosecution in a probable cause hearing.

“You could tell she kept careful notes,” he said. “She hit all the points. She really gave some thought to it.”

It was a textbook ruling, you might say.

A word from Cooley Law

The Free Press' reference to Cooley last week came in a story about the value of certain last names in elections for judge. Both candidates in one contest have degrees from Cooley, the piece said, "labeled by some media outlets 'the nation's worst law school.' "

Cooley administrators were peeved enough about the passage that they considered not responding here to Deel. Ultimately, they sent a statement that began by referencing distinguished alumni such as Engler and two U.S. Representatives.

"Cooley Law School recently celebrated 50 years of graduating confident and future-ready attorneys," it said. "The law school was founded on the mission of providing equal access to a legal education and offers admission to a diverse group of qualified applicants across the country. Since the law school's founding, more than 21,000 graduates have been part of a transformational education that teaches the practical skills necessary for a seamless transition from academia to the real world."

Polizzi said her experience there was "wonderful," and included an array of professors with real-world experience — including one who'd gone to Yale, tied for first with Stanford on the U.S. News list.

She chose Cooley, she said, because in her traditional Italian family, the expectation was that she'd stay close to home. She chose to apply for her judgeship because of her older brother, who traveled far away.

Army veteran Christopher DeSanto served in Iraq, mustered out with physical and emotional issues, and became addicted to opiates prescribed by a doctor.

Polizzi represented him in two court cases, she said, and ultimately lost him to the drugs, eight years ago.

“Nobody’s looking out for these people,” she said. “Seeing that gap in the legal system made me want to start a veterans’ treatment court so I can address those issues.”

It’s already up and running, she said — and no one she has sentenced to treatment has asked where she went to school.

In case anyone is wondering, Neal Rubin earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Northern Colorado, the Harvard of the High Plains. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rubin: In a judicial race, throwing the book at a nasty campaign mailer