Bar applicant's litigation conduct, 'personal attacks and invective' are cited in law license denial
A law grad who passed the Massachusetts bar exam in 2008 was initially deemed qualified for a law license, until three lawyers contacted the Board of Bar Examiners to report their concerns about his conduct in divorce litigation.
The lawyers represented the wife of the bar applicant, Chandrakant Shridhar Pansé. Pansé’s litigious conduct in the divorce and other civil litigation has spurred the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to refuse to grant him a law license. The Legal Profession Blog has highlights from the Oct. 6 opinion (PDF).
Pansé had filed numerous lawsuits against his ex-wife and others, and professional complaints against several attorneys and judges involved in his divorce and related proceedings, according to findings of the Board of Bar Examiners that were cited in the Supreme Judicial Court’s opinion.
The three lawyers described Pansé as “a person of vengeance, control, and intimidation who misused the legal system at the expense of his family and others,” the Board of Bar Examiners said. The family court judge had also expressed misgivings, saying Panse’s “narcissism and myopic view of all relationships have resulted in his inability to note or appreciate the harm which he causes.”
Pansé was also involved other civil proceedings, some of which were not fully disclosed in his application, the Supreme Judicial Court said.
“As the board found,” the Supreme Judicial Court said, “Pansé repeatedly engaged in ad hominem attacks in those cases. In a lawsuit he brought against his former employer, the Massachusetts Bay Community College, Pansé described the president of the college as a ‘reject from Montana.’ He also accused several defendants of lying and filing ‘malicious and fraudulent’ reports, described some defendants as ‘morally challenged,’ and stated that the office of the Attorney General was ‘unethical’ and had engaged in ‘repeated misconduct.’ He also accused the college’s counsel of producing a witness ‘to lie wildly under oath.’ “
In his brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Pansé continued to “resort to personal attacks and invective,” the court opinion said.
In refusing to grant Pansé a law license, the court cited board findings that he failed to fully disclose litigation to which he was a party, used the legal system for purposes of harassment and intimidation, relied on personal attacks, and failed to express remorse for his actions.
In an email to the ABA Journal, Pansé says he was concerned in the divorce litigation that his former wife was unable to care for one of their children who has severe disabilities. “Yet she and her attorneys fought for, and got, custody of this child from three different judges,” Pansé said. That amounted to “felony endangerment ordered by trial courts, and enforced by the appeals court and the Supreme Judicial Court.”
He also says his former wife was able to obtain a temporary abuse prevention restraining order against him as a result of a system in which anyone who asks for such an order gets one. That makes the law “an expressway to fraud,” he says.
The restraining order record is “nothing but a compilation of frauds,” he says, and the Supreme Judicial Court is “enforcing these frauds.” In addition, he says, the Board of Bar Examiners “engaged in lie after lie for over six-and-a-half years.”
Referring to the Supreme Judicial Court as the SJC, Pansé writes: “Naturally, I challenged the SJC’s own morality in all this, and their authority to judge anyone else’s morality. Naturally, the SJC wouldn’t touch any of it, repeating instead language from a trial judge who had to, as the SJC well knew, try to justify the ordering of felony endangerment of a severely disabled child. Nor would the SJC go anywhere near the bar counsel, the board of bar overseers, the [Board of Bar Examiners], the judicial review commission et al. all engaging in their own cover-ups. For each, its own little crime spree.
“There are also other shenanigans, which pale into nothingness in comparison to these vicious and filthy crime sprees involving extreme moral turpitudes, targeting a child utterly unable to make his miseries known to anyone.”
