Christopher "Chris" BURDETT

Chris’s More Complete Autobiography (2021)

After graduation from Staples, I attended Drew University, where I majored in drinking beer, shooting pool, and dating. At the end of my sophomore year I made arrangements to take a junior year abroad at the London School of Economics, but instead I married my college girlfriend and in January of 1964 we had a son, Michael (guess who he’s named after). Michael is married to a terrific gal and they have a daughter, Jamie, who is now 22. They live in Portland, Connecticut where Michael works as an IT manager for ING.

During my years at Drew I became involved in various movements - the civil rights movement, the students’ rights movement, and then the anti-war movement. My mentor during that time was Jim Mellen, a young professor who had been hired by the university specifically because he was a “classical Marxist.” Because of these involvements and influences, upon graduation I attended Rutgers Law School in New Jersey, where I quickly became a student of, and later a research assistant to Professor Arthur Kinoy, who in those days was Bill Kunstler’s partner and probably the leading radical constitutional lawyer in the United States. At Rutgers I did very well, was on Law Review and various student committees, and was a research associate for both Arthur Kinoy and Professor Robert Carter.

Early in my senior year at Rutgers I was told by the dean that Supreme Court Justice Brennan (who was from New Jersey and a good friend of the dean) had decided to take one of his law clerk’s from Rutgers, and that I had been selected for that honor. Unfortunately, Justice Brennan then became ill, and the selection of his law clerks was left to his chief assistant who, as the Justice had in years past, chose all the clerks from Yale. Consequently, about three months before graduation I found myself without a job. After looking at several possibilities, I was hired by the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union as its first staff counsel. Needless to say I was looking forward to that job, but approximately two weeks before graduation the executive director of the ACLU called to say that as excited as they were about my starting, they had run out of funds and couldn’t pay me. Once again I found myself without a job, and with a feeling of desperation, I applied for a position at the Legal Aid Society of New York City and was hired on the spot at the Appeals Bureau.

After spending eighteen months in Appeals I transferred to the trial division, where I was quickly put in a senior position. As it turned out, I tried the first misdemeanor trial in the state of New York after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that jury trials were constitutionally mandated in misdemeanor cases. I was soon transferred to the Supreme Court division, and then to the Federal Defender Services Unit. Several years later, I was asked to move back to the civil division to become Assistant Attorney-in-Charge, and then acting Attorney-in-Charge. Because I was only 29 years old at the time, I ultimately did not get the permanent appointment to that position, so I went back to the criminal division, where I became the Attorney-in-Charge of one “complex” which was doing an experimental project in “continuity of representation” where the same lawyer would represent a client from arrest through final disposition. During the period I had some interesting clients of my own, including a Playboy centerfold, a member of the original Panther 21, and Philippe Petit, who was charged with various offenses after he walked a high wire between the World Trade Center towers.

In 1972, I married my second wife, Lori, and several years later we left New York and moved back to Connecticut. I took a position with Irwin Friedman, Michael’s uncle whom I had known since childhood, and we did insurance defense and plaintiff’s civil litigation. After two years I left Irwin’s office to join a firm in Stamford, and after a year I left there and opened my own office. At first I specialized in plaintiff’s personal injury work, and then I expanded my practice to include medical and legal malpractice and family law. Since 1990 I’ve limited my practice almost entirely to family law, and since 2018 I’ve been “semi-retired.”