Professor Marcus Hurn
Specialty: The Hard & Weird
Attorney Marcus Hurn knows the king's English. And he knows the king's law as well.
"Most lawyers don't know how to research and interpret English cases," says the erudite professor at Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord. "I do." Hurn's knowledge of English law came in handy when working on what he calls "a piece of the Tyco case." Tyco was operating under a Bermuda charter and was trying to have the case against it tried under U.S., rather than Bermuda, law. Bermuda, Hurn says, follows British law in many respects, but not entirely.
"I persuaded them that, in fact, they were much better off with Bermuda law," he says. And where did he get his knowledge of English, let alone Bermuda, law?
"I guess it was from when I taught English legal history here in the Eighties," says Hurn, a law professor since 1977 and associate dean at Pierce Law for the last two years. He has an unusual practice in that he mainly works for and gives advice to other lawyers. He was once involved in a huge environmental lawsuit that had more than 100 parties dropping in and out and had become hopelessly complicated.
"The thing was about to break down when the lead counsel hired me to untangle it," he says. A Republican who is more harshly critical of President Bush than most Democrats are, Hurn is a hard man to categorize in either his political leanings or his legal career.
"People ask me what my specialty is and I don't have a normal one," he says. "I've taught 15 different subjects and my usual response is, 'I specialize in hard and weird problems.'" Like the mortgage he designed on a satellite in outer space.
Reprinted with permission from New Hampshire Magazine , October 2007
