At around 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, Tom King checks with his wife Debi, a district manager for Hallmark Cards, makes weekend plans, then pulls out of the parking space behind the Doug in his silver Saturn Vue, fast. Everything with him is amped up. We're heading for the Yardley campus of Holy Family University, where he teaches one night a week. He has a master's in education, and so instructs grad students who mostly teach in high and elementary schools, in Education Law...They're very bright, but he pushes them.“It's a matter of metabolism,” he says, chowing down on an iced coffee at McDonald's...“When I was a kid, I had a terrible bone infection in my jaw...We didn't know what was going to happen. Ever since, I've been driven.” He screels into the Holy Family parking lot, having gotten to Bucks County from Haverford on Rte 1 north, then I-95, in 45 minutes, despite the heavy rush-hour traffic.“Come on, Lombardi!” he urges.“My kids are waitin'.”

Seventeen of them, tonight: He fiddles with his audio-visual slide set-up until a techno-minded female student fixes it for him. He bounces around, sometimes sliding a little, setting up the whiteboard with black marker: Civil Law, Tort Law, Criminal Law, Policies & Procedures:

“Who was here last week?'' he asks.“Who remembers the basic stages of due process [in criminal cases]?”
No one speaks:“Arrest!, right? That's always the starting point. Then?”
“Preliminary arraignment,” a spectacled student, slightly older, volunteers.
“Right. They have up to 36 hours. You must be formally informed of the charges. Then what?”
“The preliminary hearing,” the girl who'd fixed the slide projector says.“Ten days.”
“To set a trial date,” King adds.
“Next comes the trial,” says a woman in the back row.
“Which can be a matter of hours or days, or can go for weeks, like Enron, or the big organized crime trials...What's next?”
“Plea bargain!” offers a curly-haired youngster.
“That's if the defense knows it's losing, and if prosecution is feeling expedient...Then?"
“Sentencing,” says the same student.
“Right, Demetrius!” King jokes.“Then – appeal. Which in murder cases, can last for 10 years, or more. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, went on and on, and he committed his final crimes in Florida, which in his day [70s], was a very tough state for executions, almost as tough as Texas – though not any more...
“Does everybody have this as I have it?” – King's drawn a kind of due process bar diagram on the whiteboard –“this is not only ridiculous-looking but kind of obscene,” he snorts, and energetically erases it, drawing laughs . . .

“All right. Trials Court. Appeals Court. Supreme Court. Appeals reviews Trials, then either rejects or sustains. Defense can move all the way to Supreme, or sometimes, as in the Missouri case that broke the juvenile death penalty law in 2005, the prosecution, unhappy with Appeals Court rulings, may push for a Supreme Court decision [Missouri Appeals courts had ruled against the Missouri Trials Court's death sentence in Roper vs. Simmons, a 1993 juvenile murder case, on 8th Amendment grounds (cruel and unusual punishment.)]“In that case, though, the Supreme Court upheld the Missouri Appeals Court...” [And the defendant got life]. He shrugs:

“Civil cases vs. Criminal cases. Standards of probability and belief. Much different. Example: O.J. found not guilty [in criminal court] by reasonable certainty. But in civil cases, all you need is 51 percent reasonable certainty, and so Juice lost his subsequent civil trial, brought by his dead wife's family . . .[In the criminal trial] the L.A. prosecutors had all kinds of good stuff against O.J., but the defense team was able to create ‘reasonable doubt' – the little glove deal, remember? Or was that before your time? Wasn't that long ago, was it?”
He gets another laugh.
He deadpans:“Lesson? The rich will receive due process. But the poor may not get it.”
He turns to work on the whiteboard again, and a cup on the desk clatters to the floor.“No throwing things at teacher!"

“Okay. Education and the American legal system. Who should control education? State government interests? Answer: State government, largely...Federal government interests? An issue with developing science...Parents? They think they do. Students? No say, like non-tenured teachers. Teachers and others? Not a lot – though this varies by institution and school district...

“What happens in a difference of opinion? Mediation. Arbitration. Prior court decisions. Two forms of ADR [alternative dispute resolution]. In mediation, you have a way to avoid the courtroom in civil matters. Non-binding suggestions, by a knowledgeable, neutral party...Arbitration is more formal, handled by more ‘official' authorities and is often binding, though not always...Who has jurisdiction? Only as good as the state – you'll be marinated in these things...

“Let's say you're a teacher, and you have a dispute with your school district. Do you have the right to sue? Or appeal a ruling you don't like? 8,000 writs of certiorari! [petitions for appeal.] You may never see them again, but they're good for parties...”
“Yeah,” snickers Demetrius.“Confetti.”
“Give you two cases: Cameron vs. Bd. of Education in Ohio; Boring vs. Buncombe County in North Carolina."

“Jane Cameron [an elementary school teacher], was ‘not terminated,' but her contract was allowed to lapse. No reasons were given. She sued for false dismissal on the grounds that the school district objected to her being an unwed mother, but wasn't able to legally demonstrate motive. School officials denied it! Nothing she could do.

“Margaret Boring, a high school English and drama teacher, was transferred to a less desirable school from the one near her home because, she charged, she was being punished for staging a play about a divorced mother with a lesbian daughter, and another daughter with an illegitimate child. [Some students' parents had objected.] When she filed a complaint [1994] that she was being retaliated against [for exposing students to harsh reality], thus violating her freedom of speech under the 1st and 14th amendments, and her due process rights [she was transferred without consultation], she was at first denied, but later upheld on the grounds that in selecting and directing the play, she was constitutionally protected.” The board's action against her was ruled as illegitimate pedagogical concern...

“So you see, Demetrius, and all of you guys? The system isn't perfect, but you've gotta keep punching . . .

“All right. That concludes the first half of today's class. Only two more hours...”
King, hands on hips, looks around amusedly at all the dismayed faces...It's 7:55 p.m., and he's been talking since 5:30. He laughs and waves his arms:

“Only kidding. Go on, pack up. See ya next week.”

*

He's been up since six a.m., talking to his son Michael, 21, who's doing a bit in community college before returning to Penn State. He's had a morning of meetings – Dick Wynn, Haverford VP for Finance and Administration and Treasurer, his direct boss, and with some faculty (concerned about parking!); he's talked to Debi about buying a house closer in, since their Bucks County home is a long haul every day; he's done a full workout in the new gym around the corner from his office, and now he's shepherding me down to the Warrington train, so I can connect with 30th Street Station:

“Talking is the whole thing,” he says seriously.“When I was a cop, I was a good ‘closer' not a tough guy. I'd get somebody in the room there and find a way to break their story...A woman who'd drowned her baby in the bathtub because her husband couldn't stand its screaming...Cooked up a lie about some black teenagers in a car snatching the kid from her on a corner in NE Philly, but why would they do that? And where was the baby? Then she switches and says it was white teenagers. Next she says ‘I did a bad thing,' and she's ready to take the fall herself, even though her husband was eventually found guilty of disposing of a part of his child's body...So he gets some time for filing false reports and another misdemeanor, and she gets life without parole...

“You talk to people. You see through them, but not in a hard way. You select the right people for the right jobs, and you help them to do what they want to do – like Nora, Mark and John.
“My only talent here is doing that – seeing in Security that we have the right fit. It takes some time to get there. And it's an ongoing thing...”

— John Lombardi
*for Steve Heacock