Super Lawyers - Maryland 2013

MARYLAND LAW & POLITICS
Timothy F. Maloney talks ’70s politics, civility among lawyers,
and having a gun pointed at his head

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED AND EDITED BY ERIK LUNDEGAARD

Q: You were with the Maryland General
Assembly from ’79 to ’95.
A: I was. I was elected at the age of 22.
Q: And your father was involved in
politics but not as a politician?

A: Well, no. He worked for Sam Ervin’s subcommittee on constitutional rights. He was in the JAG Corps, which is why I was born in France. And he was an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB].

But when I retired from public office,
he decided to run for county council. I
took him out to do some door knocking,
which he hadn’t done in 20 years; and
he ended up winning by 38 votes. One of
our local columnists called him “a block
off the old chip.”
He was elected in ’94, the year I retired,
and he was re-elected in ’98. He tragically
died in office in 2001. A car accident. He
had a heart attack, we think. But he was
a very independent reformer, a great
lawyer—as was my grandfather, a Harry
Truman Democrat. In fact, my grandfather
grew up in Missouri, and was a friend and
contemporary of Harry Truman. And when
Harry Truman was elected to the U.S.
Senate, Truman brought my grandfather
to Washington, summer of 1937, for a
temporary appointment. He never left.

Q: Did he ever work for President
Truman?
A: He served as commissioner on something
called the Bituminous Coal Commission,
which today would be FERC: Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission. After his
term ended, he had a very unusual practice
area: He started representing Potawatomi
Indians in claims for land that had been
expropriated by the federal government.
These claims were all over the country:
Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas. If you Google
him, you can see some of the old records in
these cases. With the Irish name “Maloney”
people don’t suspect it, but I am one-thirty-
second Potawatomi from my grandmother’s
side. We are descended from the Indian
princess Madeline Bertrand. I have the
same amount of [Native American] blood
as Elizabeth Warren, running for Senate
from Massachusetts, who’s in all the trouble
about that.

Q: Is that why your grandfather
developed that niche practice?

A: I think that was part of his interest. That was my first exposure to the law: going into his basement, which would be filled with thousands of documents and maps and ancient records; and then going out west with him and my father to meet with Indian leaders, watch these claims being adjudicated. There was no such thing as a speedy trial before the Indian Claims Commission. These cases went on for 10, 15, 20 years. And when my grandfather died in ’ 67, my father, my poor father as a young lawyer, had to take on some of these cases to bring them across the finish line. He did those even throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.