From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

The title on the door says Associate General Counsel. But it is no secret around TIME that lawyer Bob Marshall is actually a major league baseball player manque. Instead of his business card, he is likely to hand you his baseball card, a souvenir of the "fantasy" session he attended at the Philadelphia Phillies training camp in 1986. "Have one," he told a visitor. "Have two."

Perhaps it is his shortstop's ability to anticipate that makes Marshall so well suited to his real job. He reads TIME articles (including this one) before publication to help keep anything defamatory from slipping through. Still, says Marshall, "I get more pleasure from helping TIME say something than from keeping TIME from saying it." Marshall is known for his "elegant fixes," the subtle changes of phrase that defuse potential libel problems without reducing hard facts to mush. His batting average on keeping TIME out of trouble is substantially higher than the impressive .689 he hit for the magazine's softball team last year.

Marshall's empathy for the journalists he advises comes naturally: as a boy, he wrote for The Log of the West Wind, the paper at his summer camp, and he was later sports editor for the Harvard Crimson. After graduating with a degree in American history, he joined the Peace Corps and taught English in Libya and Tunisia. Columbia Law School followed, and in 1976 Marshall joined TIME.

Between briefs, Marshall has managed to write some less academic material. His Diary of a Yankee-Hater, which is just that, was published in 1981. He is / now editing a book on Lawrence Park, the turn-of-the-century artists' colony in Bronxville, N.Y., where he grew up and lives today. Our renaissance lawyer is also an avid bird watcher, gardener, art buff and rock-'n'-roll aficionado: his raunchy rendition of Blue Christmas, Elvis-style, is the highlight of the law department's annual lunch.

Staffers consider Marshall an honorary journalist and value his extralegal advice; he even catches occasional grammatical errors. Senior editor Jose M. Ferrer III recalls asking Marshall to review an early draft of a story. "He said there was no problem legally, but that it was the dumbest thing he'd ever read in TIME," says Ferrer. The story was killed. Some fielding.