LAST WORD

Portsmouth native Paul McEachern of the firm Shaines & McEachern has been an attorney for more than four decades. Photo:  Michael McCord

Paul McEachern laughed when he told me he hopes I wasn’t writing his “epilogue.”

Not even close. After more than decades as an attorney-at-law and one of Portsmouth’s favorite sons, McEachern isn’t ready to retire anytime soon.

I’ve come to talk to McEachern not for epilogue material but simply to listen and learn. After all, he has no shortage of perspective. When McEachern formed a law partnership with Robert Shaines in 1966, it was before the landmark Supreme Court Miranda decision on criminal rights; it was seven years before the controversial Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion; and it was a few decades before anyone imagined the state Supreme Court would play such a pivotal and politically explosive role in public education with the Claremont decision.

McEachern is a living law library, a Portsmouth native and University of New Hampshire graduate — where he studied government — who told me that “politics and the law” are intertwined callings.

He has practiced what he has preached. He was elected to the state Legislature in the early 1960s while he was still in college. Then Gov. John King became a mentor to McEachern and advised him to become a lawyer so he could give legal teeth to the important issues of the day.

“I learned that words are more important than atoms,” he said.

King, a Democrat, was an historical freak of political nature in this state and McEachern himself learned that hard fact of New Hampshire political life — he was on the general election ballot twice as a Democratic candidate for governor in the 1980s, losing to a Sununu (John, the elder) and a Gregg (Judd, the younger).

The fact that he refused to take the anti-tax pledge likely doomed his chances but he hasn’t changed his thinking — he still thinks the state doesn’t have a “fair taxation system” that will hurt it in the long run.

He began his law career at $150 a week doing debt collections which, in today’s legal environment of ever more specialization, equates to horse and buggy as primary transportation. But, McEachern tells me, it was a good and humbling role. More often than not, “I met nice people who became clients.”

He and Shaines spent 30 years at a Maplewood Avenue location before moving to Pease International Tradeport last year. “After 30 years, a building becomes invisible to you,” McEachern said. “Pease is the future.”

The rebuilt former Officer’s Club at Pease also has plenty of room, which McEachern said the old location lacked. He told me when they moved that four tractor trailer loads of old files, papers and goodness knows what was towed away.

“It could have been more but we brought it here,” McEachern said, with a shoulder shrug. Part of what they brought was a massive collection of law books that now sit in a conference room as quaint artifacts of a bygone age.

He told me the dramatic advances in information technology and gathering had created a new velocity in the profession.

“Volume is up, speed is up,” he said. But what is not up is access to the legal system. For all the talk about tort reform, especially in ideological legal circles, McEachern sees a power play by corporate and political interests.

“The little guy is being shut out more and more,” McEachern said. “When I started out that wasn’t the case.”

During his career, McEachern has argued against the Seabrook nuclear plant’s evacuation plans (or lack thereof) in the federal courts and slyly told me he ended up suing his alma mater more than he could have imagined (over employment-related issues for clients).

“The law is an interesting way to spend a life,” said McEachern who considers himself a legal generalist. “It provides plenty of intellectual fodder.” On the other hand, he said, while he may have gained plenty of wisdom over the years, “there’s no demand for wisdom these days.”

I met with McEachern during the week that the U.S. Senate compromised with the Bush administration about rules for the treatment and trials of terrorist suspects and detainees.

He told me he’s been thinking a lot of late about the future of American democracy and the concept of rule of law. “The real heroes of democracy these days are lawyers who are taking on unpopular causes,” he said.

We have serious and deadly enemies who deserve to be confronted but McEachern thinks what we could do to ourselves may prove to be a more subtle enemy in the long run.

“Democracies don’t last forever. We are prone to excesses and the only we can learn is through history,” he said. “We’re debating torture and habeas corpus. That’s unimaginable. Each day we have fewer rights than when I started.”

Not that he’s planning to slow down anytime soon. “I love it,” he said about his profession. “It’s like adult day care.”

And on the political front, McEachern was running again for the state Legislature. “Somebody has to speak truth to power.”