Res Publica: A Lawyer in Public Life
By Yoshinori H.T. Himel

Many lawyers have had a taste of public life; some have been public employees or elected officials their entire careers; and very few have served an overseas public. McGregor W. ("Greg") Scott, the recently appointed United States Attorney, is one of those few. He has served a variety of publics starting when he was in college.

Scott impressed this writer as being an affable person with a warm handshake, yet with an eye for detail. He seemed eager to foster professionalism as well as team spirit in the offices he heads.

Scott comes from a line of Humboldt County lawyers. While he was growing up, his father and grandfather were in private practice together in Eureka. His grandfather had been the Humboldt County District Attorney in the 1930s and 40s. He retains a liking for rural counties and small towns.

An urban environment claimed him for college, at the University of Santa Clara, his father's law school alma mater. There, he developed his interest in European studies through his major in history, and came to admire Winston Churchill as a hero.

For the fall of his junior year, in 1983, Scott took a semester abroad, interning with Simon Coombs, a member of the British House of Commons. MPs had much smaller staffs than American legislators, and Coombs welcomed Scott's assistance. He saw Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in person in question sessions, and he remembers the British media being much more critical than the American media of America's involvement in the Grenada war.

The year he graduated from college, Scott interned with another legislator, Congressman Ed Zschau, in Washington, D.C. He got to see President Reagan, and saw Thatcher again when she addressed Congress.

For the next year, Scott was a California Senate Fellow, working on the Budget Committee with Senator Bill Campbell. This experience opened his eyes to how things really get done in the state legislature, where he found the influence of money readily apparent. During 1986, he took advantage of his ROTC commission from Santa Clara to join the Army Reserves. He would see active duty in 1992 when he led a company of 120 to restore order after the Los Angeles riots. Then, when the curfew had not emptied the streets, the populace embraced the troops with open arms and with what he calls an "excess" of chocolate chip cookies.

The money Scott saved from the Senate Fellowship helped him pay his own way through law school at Hastings, where he received his J.D. in 1989. His father and grandfather had not overtly pushed him to enter the law, but they gave him a positive image of lawyers as people who use their education and experience to help people. He also looked forward to the intellectual stimulation of having new things to do every day.

Upon his graduation, Scott's father and Congressman and Santa Clara professor Pete McCloskey were among those who advised him to pursue a career as a district attorney, so he could try cases and gain confidence. Although Scott had intended to return to Eureka to practice with his father, he followed the advice and went to work for the Contra Costa County District Attorney for seven and one-half years. Near the end of that time he married the former Jennifer Urbanski, also a lawyer, with whom he now has two young sons.

At that time he was looking for work that would take him from the Bay Area into the country. He found what he was looking for when the Shasta County Board of Supervisors selected him to fill out a term as the District Attorney in 1997.

He found the work of an elected DA very different from being a line deputy, who is handed files and told to go try cases. As DA he did not handle cases regularly, but ran the office. He sees one important part of running an office as striking a balance so that he knows what's going on in the office without micromanaging. He saw his role as like a coach: get resources, hire and train deputies, root for them, and then get out of their way.

He also saw the DA's position as an opportunity to do the right thing. He prosecuted, among other hate criminals, Benjamin and James Williams, brothers who executed a gay couple in the Redding area. The bedrock principle to him through this prosecution was "equal justice under law," regardless of sexual orientation. He tried hard to understand the opposing state of mind, where two men decided they were God's representatives and could murder people who had done nothing to them.

For Scott, the right thing to do has not always been the popular thing. Once, when a kindergarten class was doing art with toothpicks, one pupil used a toothpick to jab another. The 70-year-old teacher meted out punishment by jabbing the offender 25 times. Even though public sentiment was to allow the teacher to maintain discipline however she wanted, Scott decided to bring charges and did not rest until the teacher agreed to retire from the school system.

Asked of his plans for the United States Attorney's Office, Scott points to the office's role in combating terrorism. He also explained that he sees narcotics, especially methamphetamine, as a priority. As Shasta County DA, he formed a county task force that was a coalition of doctors, other treaters, educators, and law enforcement, to educate young people on drugs' dangers, to treat them when needed, and, when needed, to prosecute them. He hopes to continue to work with local interests to spread these sorts of coalitions throughout the Eastern District of California. He also hopes to improve further the working relationship between the United States Attorney's Office and state and local law enforcement. Given the different priorities of federal, state and local law enforcement, he foresees constant effort to see what the three groups can partner on.

When asked about an achievement and how he approached it, Scott looked back to his senior year at the very small St. Bernard's Catholic high school, whose basketball team beat much larger high schools to garner the championship. He says that the hard training for that season was a vital step in his development, because it taught him the importance of being in something bigger than oneself, working with others toward a common goal. In his new and expanded public role, he will have plenty of opportunity to do that.