Editor’s Note: The people and events referred to in this story are fictitious. It was written in 1984 as part of a special issue imagining what the legal world might look like in 2009.

Lawrence Robbins had to stretch to find support in Supreme Court precedent., but he made the most of the facts in the Court’s second active-euthanasia case involving Alzheimer’s disease. The lawyer put the monkey on the justices’ backs at the February 4 argument in Madison v. California by implicitly floating this question:

What would you have done differently if you had found yourself in my client’s position?

Robbins seemed 10 have at least four votes leaning his way throughout – Chief Justice Kathleen Sullivan and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jose Cabranes, and Webster Hubbell. California attorney general Jim Sutton and amicus Richard Taranto, representing the National Association of Attorneys General, got a friendly reception from Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Frank Easterbrook, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III. That left Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once again seeming 10 relish her role as noncommittal swing Vote.

Robbins pitched his argument to O’Connor from the opening sentence: "Only this Court now stands between m;, 68-year-old client. Florence Madison, and 20 years in prison for committing Iwo deeply moral acts of love – acts very much like those hypothesized by the concurrence [of O’Connor, in 2006] in Jackson v. New York.

"Eight years ago, in 2001, my client did what she had to do to prevent her husband from blowing out his brains with a shotgun: She promised to spare him the kind of wretched, lingering death that he had watched his mother endure. In exchange for his agreement to forgo suicide, she promised to help him die with dignity if and when he had declined into such a state of living death that – by his own reckoning – he would have nothing left to live for.

Editor’s Note: The people and events referred to in this story are fictitious. It was written in 1984 as part of a special issue imagining what the legal world might look like in 2009.

Tilton Coleman looked drained as he took his seat after an eloquent 90-minute closing. He had projected his usual cool confidence to the jury, in U.S. district court in Los Angeles. But his clients and partners, watching from Boston, San Francisco, Warsaw, Beijing, and Tokyo, could see what the jury could not. On the eight-foot screens in their conference rooms, Coleman’s youthful 42-year-old visage was etched with worry as he walked back to the counsel table.

It was not the first time he had stood up in court with the fate of Sanus Inc. hanging in the balance. But January 14, 2009, was the first time he had sat down thinking he was going to lose. As if to confirm his pessimism, the feedback window in the monitor on his table showed the plaintiffs heavily favored by the on-line focus group of interactive TV viewers who had watched the whole trial.

If the jury and the appellate courts saw it the same way, Coleman knew, it could deal a devastating blow to the $200-million-a-year embryo screening company: More than 300 children and their families already had claimed that the children’s mental and emotional problems had been "caused" by San us.

Most of the children suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, or schizophrenia. Their lawyers blame these ills on the Sanus embryo screening process, under which couples use (mostly) their own sperm and eggs to create numerous pre-embryos in vitro, then choose which ones to implant in the woman’s uterus on the basis of tests identifying which embryos have detectable defect and disease genes, and which gave genes associated with purportedly positive traits – height, for example.

Bill Gates, the second-richest man in America, was working through his second round of visits this past summer at the Federal Trade Commission, a place as creaky and antiquated as Gates’s Microsoft Corporation is sleek and dynamic.

Gates had a potent lobbying team along: Microsoft’s chief in-house counsel, William Neukom; former FTC commissioner Patricia Bailey; and partners from New York’s Sullivan & Cromwell and from Preston Thor-grimson Shidler Gates & Ellis, the big Seattle-based firm where Gates’s father is a senior partner.

But in his visits to each of the four participating com¨missioners on two clammy July days, the 38- (then 37-) year-old Microsoft chairman did much of the talking himself. And at times he got a bit carried away-just as his company sometimes does in the heat of battle against competitors. Like when he barked, "You don’t know what you’re talking about," at an FTC official in a meet¨ing in the chairman’s office.

Or when Commissioner Dennis Yao, a soft-spoken former Wharton business school professor, floated a line of hypothetical questions suggesting possible curbs on Microsoft’s growing monopoly power, including disclo¨sure to competitors and the public of technical data about its dominant personal computer (PC) operating systems, MS-DOS and Windows.

Gates was vexed. "He started by calling Yao’s ideas socialistic," recalls a source familiar with the July 15 meeting, "and as he got angrier and angrier and louder and louder, he got into calling them Communistic."

A nuclear device "not much more than twice the size of this table," Thomas Graham, Jr., notes over lunch one day, "could level Washington from here past the Beltway, in all directions."

It was a table for two, looking across a grassy square at the White House. "I’ve held one in my hand, about the size of a basketball," Graham adds. That one, a crude nuclear land mine, could wipe out ten square blocks or so.

Graham has been using the tools of the law to keep that sort of thing from happening for 23 years at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, including 14 years as ACDA’s general counsel. Most recently, since becoming acting director when the Bush administration left office in January, he has steered the agency with signal success through two high-stakes battles.

The arms control job is not getting any easier, what with thousands of warheads rattling around in a Russia threatened by anarchy and racked by organized crime, with thousands more in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, with Pakistan already boasting nuclear weapons, with North Korea and Iran seeking to build them or buy them on the black market.

"Americans should feel more threatened now than they were during the Cold War," Graham explains in another conversation, in his office. "Whereas a full-scale thermonuclear war is now unlikely in the extreme, it never was very likely. On the other hand, the prospect of some terrorist group or criminal organization acquiring a nuclear device and smuggling one or more into an American city is much greater than it was during the Cold War." Take note, New Yorkers.

Graham drove home this deadly danger of nuclear proliferation during two policy debates this year, in which he and more powerful allies in Congress prevailed over high-level Clinton political appointees at the Defense and State Departments.

Zoe Baird and her husband Paul Gewirtz, were sitting alone in a small conference room at the Washington, D.C., office of Melveny & Myers about 8 P.M., splitting a sandwich left over from lunch. Their "illegal alien" problem had burst onto the front page of The New York Times that morning, January 14. Another cold blast of bad press was on its way.

"They both looked white as sheets," says a lawyer who saw them there that evening. "The were having a small conversation, a little chitchat, and the two of them mustered a smile. I was struck by how small they looked, with this huge tide about to roll over them, looking very white and very small and very sad. And there wasn’t a damn thing they or anyone else could do.

"You can’t know what it means until you have seen that happen to a human being," this lawyer continues. "It just hit me in the stomach. These are good people who got hit with this thing, and they didn’t deserve it."

The impossible dream – first woman attorney general! brightest new star in the Clinton cabinet! – was beginning to turn into a nightmare. It would unfold over the next seven days with all the cold, capricious cruelty of fate. And it would do lasting damage to our polity by unleashing furies of selective ethical puritanism that will disable or deter many people of integrity, like Baird, from pursuing public service. The casualties – Kimba Wood, Charles Ruff, and more – mounted rapidly as Bill Clinton’s search for an attorney general degenerated from tragedy to farce.

Just 20 days before, on Christmas morning, Baird’s nomination had dominated the news. There were glowing profiles and front-page pictures of her and President-elect Clinton beaming at each other. "You might as well resign right now," a friend recalls telling Baird that day, "because it’s never going to get any better than this."