12. The Clash over Class Certification October 1987-February 1988

The litigation process resumed in earnest after the July 1987 IPA Congress in Montreal. Weinshel and I were both deposed in San Francisco in early August as scheduled. Our depositions “went very well,” according to Clint Fisher, our attorney, who had come from New York in order to attend them. Mine occupied only four hours instead of the entire day that had been set aside for it. This, of course, was Stromberg's decision; there was nothing more of significance that he felt he could usefully find out from me. From my standpoint, the whole exercise was more boring than otherwise, endlessly repetitive questions covering ground very familiar to both of us, and with no real surprises or new perspectives emerging from either Stromberg's questions or my answers. The most difficult part for me was to contain my natural impulse, in a dialogue, to expand on and develop lines of inquiry that were opened up; I had been carefully schooled by Fisher on the previous day to confine my responses to the simplest, most direct, and most literal (of course, always truthful) responses to the question asked—just a yes or no, if possible—and never to voluntarily amplify my statements. Fisher, who was keenly monitoring my performance, felt that I had succeeded admirably in this, though for me it was a strain.

Following our two depositions there was, in August, a series of interlocutories between Stromberg, on the one side, and on our side, Fisher, Weinshel, Auletta, and me. Stromberg was asking for complete copies of various documents that had been referred to in the depositions; published articles by Weinshel or by me, unpublished talks we had given in scientific or administrative contexts, minutes of meetings. All of these contained passages relevant to the issues of the lawsuit; in almost all cases they were either sent to Stromberg, or if they were not immediately available, he was referred to the appropriate source. In a few instances, as in an introductory