Van Jones, J.D. Vance and I are all graduates of the Yale Law School. Jones was one of the pundits on CNN last night after the Walz-Vance debate. He commented on Vance’s performance in the debate, basically saying that Vance did a great job as a debater, if you assume that it makes no difference whether you are giving factual or misleading answers. Okay. I think that is right. But then Jones went on, and said that he and Vance were trained at Yale to debate just the way Vance debated.

Say, what? Now, I went to Yale about 25 years before Jones, and Jones went to Yale about 15 years before Vance. Different teachers, and different teaching, I am sure. But when I went to Yale Law, I don’t remember any training whatsoever on how to debate. In fact, the training that I received was virtually all academic training. You know, a course on torts, a course on contracts, and so forth. I did participate in one appellate moot court (I actually reached the finals), and one mock trial. But both of those exercises, as I remember, were voluntary, not required.

Now, every lawyer is bound to defend his/her client. I did that through my career. But I never stood up in any trial or administrative proceeding and lied. I never presented false facts, or – as far as I know – facts so far out of context that they were misleading.

I have said this before about the first time I was ever in an actual court room. It was when I was doing post-graduate work at Washington University. I was already a member of the Missouri bar, and one of its requirements (I think it was a state requirement; maybe a St. Louis bar requirement) was that a new lawyer had to participate as a co-counsel in a criminal proceeding. The reason that this requirement existed is that there was a practice, in the 1960s and in St. Louis or the entire state, that lawyers could be called upon, I think once a year, to represent an indigent criminal defendant.

I was working with an experienced lawyer. A government lawyer was prosecuting. The defendant was a young man accused of going to a high school dance while armed with a rifle. In fact, he had hidden under his overcoat part of a rifle. He came with a friend who hid the other half under his own overcoat. The friend had the barrel and trigger mechanism. Our client had the stock. Our client did not have a firing weapon; his friend did. Our client could only have hurt someone with the stock if he bopped him on his head. The facts were clear. There was no argument as to the facts. The question was: under Missouri law, was carrying the stock of a rifle considered carrying a weapon (or whatever the precise term used in the law was). There was no precedent in Missouri on this question. There were precedents in some other states. I had done a fair amount of research on the precise facts and the applicable law.

I was sitting at the counsel table, when the prosecutor was presenting his case. He cited something from Corpus Juris Secundum , a multi-volume compilation of legal principles, that I had just read a day or two before, during my preparation.

The prosecutor quoted CJS with great confidence. Like he had found the key to why this defendant should be found guilty. But I immediately realized that he had left something out. The citation he read had an introductory clause that he had left out. The sentence started with the words: “The minority opinion is……”

Our client was found not-guilty.

In quoting CJS, there was nothing in the confident tone of the prosecutor to let you know he was trying to trick the court. He sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about.

Why did I think of him while I was watching J.D. Vance yesterday? It should be clear. We saw a very smooth J.D. Vance telling things that were wrong, misleading, needed context, and exaggerated.

If you look at the media fact checking today in the New York Times, Washington Post and the various TV networks, you will see how much of Vance’s performance fit into these various dangerous categories. Of course, most people watching the debate are not fact checkers, and do not look at the fact checkers after the debate, dismissing them (if they pay any attention at all) as biased.

So, back to my take on the debate, for a minute. J.D. Vance was smooth, confident, and deceptive. He did not look “weird” and, with one major exception (having to do with whether Trump lost the 2020 election), Walz did not effectively call him out for his misstatements.

Most pundits seem to feel that, if anyone won the debate, it was Vance. For sure, his debating skill is stronger than Walz’s. But that’s only if you ignore facts, and you can’t blame that on Yale Law School.

It was, by and large, a very civil debate, and this is something that is probably welcome by many voters. But you can remain civil in a debate while, at the same time, calling out your opponents effectively when they veer away from the truth. This is something that Tim Walz was not able to do.