Unfair to Attorney General

I am writing to take issue, on two counts, with Dave Gram’s recent article on Attorney General Bill Sorrell (“AG losses raise doubts in Vt.”). I have worked as a consumer protection lawyer in the AG’s Office since Attorney General Sorrell was appointed in 1997, and, before that, for his predecessor, Jeffrey Amestoy. I write on my own initiative and as someone who has always thought highly of Dave’s work as a reporter for the Associated Press.

The article first fails to recognize that the Attorney General is responsible for defending the State’s laws, however they’re written, against legal challenges such as those brought in the Entergy, campaign finance, and data-mining cases. The latter two appeals involved statutes that ran smack into the U.S. Supreme Court’s hostility toward governmental limits on campaign contributions and on businesses’ use of information. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that either law could have survived review by the current High Court.

My second concern about the article is that it does not acknowledge that the three high-profile cases it discusses involve only a small fraction of the work that Attorney General Sorrell’s office handles. Most of what we do on a daily basis involves protecting consumers and the environment, combating discrimination and major crime, and representing the State and its people in many other ways. In overseeing all of these functions, this Attorney General has always been a strong and effective voice for Vermonters.

Elliot Burg

Middlesex