Biography

 

After 50 years, Mr. Moore retired from practicing law.  Rather than fading away, he is undertaking new non-profit projects on matters of public concern. For those who may want information about him, the following resume is presented, which is admittedly lengthy in order to address different areas of his life which some may find relevant is evaluating his proposals.

 

Charles R. “Chick” Moore was born in Hays, Kansas, in 1947.  His mother was a school teacher in Eastport, Maine, where she met his father, a Navy Seabee, while he was stationed in Eastport during World War II.  Eastport is a small community on Moose Island on the most northern coast of Maine.  It is located across the bay from Campobello, Canada, which is also an island. Mr. Moore is married to Keithe Moore and has two children, a son, Eric, and a daughter, Meredith.

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Early life

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After the war, Mr. Moore’s mother got on a train in Eastport and traveled to Kansas City to meet his father where they were married.  They then moved to Hays, a small town in western Kansas, where his dad had been hired by Lone Star Cement Company, which supplied cement to the oil drilling industry. The year he was born his mother took him on a train from Hays to Eastport to meet his Maine family.  Maine has since played an important part of his life, with Mr. Moore returning almost every year since. It was in Maine that he got his nickname “Chick,” which is a nickname for Charles on the Down East coast of Maine. It was probably of Irish origin.  His grandfather and one uncle were both named Charles and called Chick.  As he was the first born among his mother’s siblings, he was named Charles and given the nickname Chick, which he has carried for his entire life.

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He was always told by his father that he had Cherokee blood as his grandmother was on the rolls of the Cherokee Nation. This was confirmed by genetic testing from the company 23andMe at 6.5%, perhaps explaining his lifelong interest in Western art, Native American artifacts and history.

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New Orleans

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When he was 10 years old, his father was transferred from Hays to New Orleans because of an offshore oil boom.  His family lived on the west bank in Algiers.  He attended public schools, graduated from Martin Behrman High School in 1965 and then attended college at LSUNO (now the University of New Orleans) located next to Lake Pontchartrain. At LSUNO, he was active in student government and was a member of Lambda Chi.  He graduated in 1969 with a degree in government. 

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Law School

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Mr. Moore entered LSU Law School in 1969 and earned his law degree in 1972.  He was a member of the Louisiana Law Review, Order of the Coif and was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi honor society.  He received the award for the best Comment, a student-authored analysis of a development in the law published in the Law Review.  He has since been inducted into the LSU Law Center Hall of Fame. 

         

Law practice

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After practicing with other attorneys, Mr. Moore started his own practice in 1975 in Baton Rouge, where he practiced for 50 years until his retirement in May 2022.  He was a trial attorney, primarily in the areas of personal injury, wrongful death and medical malpractice, trying cases across the state.  He is board certified in Civil Trial Advocacy by the National Board of Trial Advocacy.  He has served as a member of the adjunct faculty of both LSU and Southern Law Schools, teaching pretrial litigation at both schools and workers compensation at LSU.  He served as a member of the Louisiana State Law Institute Committees on Product Liability and Evidence and assisted Professor George Pugh, the primary force behind the Code of Evidence, in having it adopted by the Louisiana Legislature.  He would frequently be called to the Capitol to testify on proposed legislation.

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Mr. Moore served as president of the Louisiana Association for Justice (formerly the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association), the association of attorneys who primarily represent injured Louisianans, their families and small businesses. During his term, he was successful in having the organization adopt a Code of Professionalism.  He was then asked to co-chair the Louisiana State Bar Association's Committee on Professionalism, which prepared a Code of Professionalism applicable to all Louisiana lawyers. For this work, he received the Bar Association’s President’s Award. He was a member of the Intra-Professional Committee for Physicians and Attorneys, which was focused on improving the interaction between the two professions.  He also served as president of the Louisiana Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), an organization of plaintiff and defense attorneys who support trial by jury.

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Mr. Moore has been a member of the Louisiana State Bar Association, the American Association for Justice, the Louisiana Association for Justice, the Baton Rouge Bar Association and the American Board of Trial Advocates.  He was selected for membership in the Litigation Counsel of America, a national invitation only trial lawyer honorary society.  He has been admitted to all Louisiana state and federal courts and has practiced before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  He has been admitted to practice in other states on a case-by-case basis.

 

Mr. Moore’s legal philosophy is that no one is above the law, and because of that he has taken cases that other attorneys have shied away from accepting.  Most notable were suits filed in the 1990s in New Orleans Federal District Court personally against a majority of the judges on the Orleans Parish Civil District Court.  He then was called on to represent a client against the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.  In both cases, a court administrator was wrongfully fired for properly reporting improper financial practices of the courts to federal and state authorities. 

 

Depositions of all judges were taken under oath.  In the case against the Criminal District Court judges, potential jurors were in the jury box, ready for the attorneys to ask questions to determine which ones were suitable for the case.  All defendant judges were present in Court, shutting down the Criminal District Court, when a settlement between the parties was reached.   This case, above most others, highlighted the power an individual can have against those in authority who have committed wrongful acts. 

 

Mr. Moore has extensive courtroom experience.  His practice has taken him not only from one end of the state to the other but also out into the North Sea off the coast of Scotland and across the United States taking the depositions of officers and employees of some of our country’s major corporations. He has handled cases involving workplace explosions, crop duster and helicopter accidents, toxic chemical exposure, offshore and maritime accidents, defective surgical equipment and medical devices, catastrophic trucking and automobile accidents, medical and legal malpractice cases and selected commercial cases. He also accepted cases that he found to be particularly challenging and interesting or that were a matter of public interest and importance.

 

Publications

 

In addition to the Louisiana Law Review, Mr. Moore has been published in the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce and was asked to write an article published in Japan regarding his representation of the family of Yoshi Hattori, a foreign exchange student brutally shot and killed in Louisiana after knocking on the wrong door as he was seeking to attend a Halloween party.  Mr. Moore had the honor of representing Mr. and Mrs. Hattori and helped them win a civil judgment against the man who had shot Yoshi even though he had been acquitted in a criminal trial. The Hattori case was followed internationally and has resulted in documentaries in both the United States and Japan in which Mr. Moore appeared.

 

Mr. Moore also co-authored an article published in Australia on injuries arising from the use of electrosurgical equipment.  Most recently, his article on the importance of the oath that attorneys take when they are sworn in was published in the Louisiana Bar Association Journal. He has been a frequent lecturer, having made over 100 presentations at seminars and bar meetings.  He was often called on to speak on the use of demonstrative evidence and has written on the subject in the Louisiana Bar Journal. He also was requested to write the chapter on demonstrative evidence in a book aimed at introducing young attorneys to litigation practice in Louisiana. 

 

Seminars

 

With participation from the district and the appellate courts and the state Supreme Court, as well as from all Louisiana law schools and professional law organizations, Mr. Moore organized a ceremony held at the Manship Theater at the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge at which attorneys joined together to recommit themselves to the oath they had taken when sworn in as attorneys.   

 

He also has organized seminars on the importance of an independent judiciary.  Speakers included not only the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court but also Louisiana and out-of-state judges who described blatant attempts to intimidate them to influence their decisions for which they received death threats.  The cases arose out of social issues that had been randomly assigned to each judge and were addressed according to applicable law.  One federal judge chose not to participate because he had to be under constant protection because of death threats since the trial of a well-known drug figure.  Speaking at the seminar was Judge George Greer, a Florida probate judge who was assigned the Terry Schiavo case.  In that case, the issue was whether Terry’s feeding tube could be removed because she was in a vegetative state.  The case received national attention.  After ruling that the tube could be removed under Florida law, Judge Greer was denounced on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.  He  received multiple death threats requiring that he be under guard by Florida State Troopers.  Judge Greer, a Republican, was assigned the case by chance and, applying Florida law, ruled that the husband could have the feeding tube removed.  After that ruling his life changed simply because he did his sworn duty.

 

When Mr. Moore was called upon to head the Law Day program in Baton Rouge, he went about trying to make the event memorable for the high school students who were bused to the Manship Theater in downtown Baton Rouge.  The program began with the Southern University Band marching onto the stage.  The participating high schools selected students who wanted to be journalists and were interested in questioning the Baton Rouge serial killer task force at a press conference held for the students.  At that time, Baton Rouge was in the midst of a hunt for a serial killer, and the students questioned members of the task force about the status of their investigation.  Mary Manhein, forensic anthropologist and founder of the FACES Laboratory at LSU, also gave a presentation.  She was nationally known for her ability to reconstruct a face from nothing but a victim’s skull.  Finally, student representatives participated in a debate before the entire audience on whether a teenager convicted of first-degree murder should be subject to the death penalty. Mr. Moore has spoken at many seminars over the years, mainly on demonstrative evidence, products liability and professionalism. 

 

Public service

 

Mr. Moore has a history of public service, having co-founded Louisiana Industries for the Disabled, Inc., now known as UPLiftd, an organization that provides employment for handicapped workers. He served as chairman of the advisory council of the Women’s Community Rehabilitation Center, which provides a transition from institutional care to a return to the community for women with mental impairments. He is past president of the Arts and Humanities Council of Greater Baton Rouge, served as a member of the finance committee of the Baton Rouge Area Parks and Recreation Association (BREC), was President of Mid-City Kiwanis, served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Louisiana Arts and Science Center and was a member of the LSU College of Arts and Science Advisory Council. 

 

Mr. Moore is also the founder of Science Outreach Foundation, a personal project to excite school children to learn science through hands-on interaction with a life-size cast of a T-Rex skull, dinosaur fossils, meteorites, enlarged Hubble Space Telescope photos, a space shuttle heat shield tile, a mammoth tusk, crystals, insects from around the world and many more wonders of science. Mr. Moore has spoken free of charge to over 25,000 students at more than 80 schools across Louisiana, from New Orleans to Bastrop and from Amite to Sulphur with many stops in between.    

 

In 1986 the mayor of Baton Rouge asked Mr. Moore to have over 5,000 voters who were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls reinstated, which he did on a pro bono basis.  For that work the mayor designated Election Day in honor of Mr. Moore’s firm.  He has served as chairman of the East Baton Rouge Parish Executive Committee of the Louisiana Democratic Party as well as a member of the State Central Committee.  He was an unsuccessful candidate for state representative, running on the slogan “Education First,” and was proud to have been endorsed by many in education.

 

Mr. Moore is an avid photographer and has recently developed a passion for studying and photographing whales and other wildlife on the Maine coast.  Eastport has always been an important part of his life, and he worked to bring lobster boat racing to Eastport, a sport which is popular on the Maine coast.  He also loves to collect art. 

 

6513 Perkins  

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6513 Perkins is an office building owned by Mr. Moore.  He has had his office at this address since it was built in 1992.  The building offers large high-quality office suites as well as small offices with access to large and small conference rooms.  The tenants are part of a “Community of Professionals” where there is a sense of camaraderie. Its website is accessible at 6513Perkins.com. The building is a local landmark across from the Pennington Biomedical building, and it has had a large American flag hanging from its front balcony since 9/11.  The flag has been stolen three times and burned once but has always been replaced.  Mr. Moore receives calls thanking him for hanging the flag, with many stating that it gives them comfort.  After one theft, a veteran brought Mr. Moore a large flag that he owned and asked that it be flown from the balcony, which was proudly done.  On another occasion, a Gulf War veteran who was receiving medical treatment for PTSD got off the bus by the office and came in to talk about his experience because he was drawn to the flag.

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The flag has become a backdrop for photographs.  The Port Allen Pelican High School baseball team was bused to the office to have its photo taken in front of the flag.  Passersby often stop to have their photos taken.  After luncheons held by Mr. Moore for retired judges, the judges would stand for a photo in front of the flag.

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Current Projects

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Mr. Moore retired on May 31, 2022.  He nevertheless remains active.  He is currently working with LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication on a program (Charles R. Moore Investigative Journalism Support Fund) to encourage investigative journalism and to help the public understand the high ethical standards a journalist follows when reporting a story. He has given the school a substantial grant for that purpose.  He has other projects that he plans to activate to keep him busy in his retirement from the practice of law.