Merrill Kenneth Albert (April 19, 1923 - December 23, 2011) is an American writer and lawyer famous for his colorful court tactics. One of the leading court advocates in Los Angeles, Albert introduced several practices - such as the use of puppets and other tools in reconstructing incidents - known in current legal practice but almost none when he started his career. He was a pioneer in the development and use of biomechanical devices and modeling in cases of major personal injury to explain the mechanical properties of the musculoskeletal system in relation to the physics and dynamics of collisions with cars, trains, and people involved in accidents. He is the chief prosecutor in the case of "corporate bets" for Union Pacific Railroad, Santa Fe Railroad, South Pacific Transportation Company, Swinerton Construction Co., and the University of California Bupati. Some of his more dramatic experiments are told in Stories on Rails: Railroad Claims Stories by Norman Udewitz.
Video Merrill Kenneth Albert
Early life and education
Albert was born on April 19, 1923 in New Haven, Connecticut. He and his brother were later abandoned by their mother at an orphanage in Oakland, California. Left under the name Merrill Smith, he chose apples at the House of Salvation of Boys during the Great Depression.
He was placed in several foster homes until permanently settled with the Tucker family from Oakland. After graduating from high school from Oakland Technical High School in 1940, he attended the University of California, Berkeley. His studies were disrupted by the outbreak of World War II, when Albert joined the US Marines Merchant found that "Albert" and not Smith were the names of his birth. After becoming the youngest officer to obtain Master's License at Merchant Marine, Albert stopped sailing and returned to his studies at UC Berkeley. There he was elected president of the fraternity, Sigma Nu, and will captain twice of the university tennis team. He made a list of "All Star" teams for 1949-1951. After completing his bachelor's degree, Albert was admitted to Boalt Hall Law School in Berkeley, where he was later published as a review editor of the California Law Review. He graduated in 1955, the sixth in his class.
Maps Merrill Kenneth Albert
Legal career
In the three decades after his graduation from law school, Merrill Albert practiced law in Los Angeles, specializing in defending large corporations against a wide range of high-profile personal injuries and other corporate "betting" claims. It was during this time that Albert began using incident reconstruction during the trial to prove whether the plaintiff's claims were physically possible. He was also a pioneer in the early use of biomechanical accident reconstruction dummies in the courts. He tried more than 300 cases, won most of them, many against the leading plaintiffs court lawyers of that era. His courtroom tactics were equated by many of his contemporaries with those of the fictitious Perry Mason, who reportedly more than once took their inspiration from the real court of Albert.
Retirement and writing
In 1990 Albert retired from legal practice and devoted himself to enjoying opera, tennis, horse racing (he was an old member of the Park Club Santa Anita Turf), and various other activities. He also began writing, and his novel, The Big Casino, was published posthumously in 2003. The book has proved popular in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.
It was followed in 2011 by the collection of The Year Ushers in the Era of Fire and Other Short Stories, a series of stories centering on the forthcoming apocalypse and the efforts of the Polynesian tribe to prepare it. At the time of his death, Albert was working on two other books. Adolf Hitler Life! - who postulated a Nazi enclave who had fled Berlin to establish a secret society in Antarctica to plan their revenge - and Trinity of Life, philosophical speculation about a tripartite meeting in history, politics , and religion throughout human history - will be published posthumously.
See also
- Mark Anchor Albert
References
External links
- LA Litigator
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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