The Alaska Constitution forbids appointing an attorney to the “non-attorney” positions on the Alaska Judicial Council.

Attorney John W. Wood, 79, is a long-time pal and political associate of Gov. Mike Dunleavy. He is many things. But a non-attorney he is not.

Attorney Wood is getting $300 an hour from Dunleavy for the kind of work that is usually performed by attorneys. He is doing legal work related to union contracts and earns more per hour than most Alaska attorneys.

Attorney Wood has been rewarded by Dunleavy with five no-bid consulting contracts since 2019 with total compensation that may top $900,000 by the time this all ends.

Here is Wood’s latest contract.

In addition to having Attorney Wood on the payroll, Dunleavy really wants him on the Alaska Judicial Council to help pick judges pleasing to Dunleavy.

The problem is that the three positions on the council under Dunleavy’s control are reserved, according to the Alaska Constitution, for people who are not attorneys.

The Alaska Judicial Council is one of the most important commissions in state government and one of the few entities created within the Alaska Constitution.

Dunleavy and his brightest bulbs are claiming Attorney Wood is not an attorney because he hasn’t practiced law for 25 years.

Attorney John Wood, pictured when he served on the state fish board under Dunleavy.

In a document penned by state attorneys Claire Keneally and Robert Kutchin and signed by former AG Tregarrick Taylor, the state claims it is “hyper-formalist,” whatever that means, to say that Attorney Wood is an attorney.

He stopped being an attorney 25 years ago, according to Dunleavy.

The Dunleavy administration claims that Wood is no more an attorney than a pilot who hasn’t flown an airplane for 25 years is a pilot.

Not to be hyper-formalist, but there are lots of old pilots who haven’t flown in 25 years who remain pilots.

Once you are an attorney, you cannot be a non-attorney. Attorney Wood cannot even claim to be a retired attorney, as he has never changed his status to retired with the Alaska Bar Association. Even Attorney Wood admits that he is an attorney with a suspended license, not a non-attorney.

Alaskans for Fair Courts, a group fighting to uphold the independence of our judicial system, is in court trying to stop this appointment. Here is the group’s latest filing, which goes into a variety of legal arguments.

In 2019, when Attorney Wood applied to the Dunleavy administration for a political appointment, he submitted a resume in which he said he was an attorney who used to have a private law practice. Here is that document.

He never claimed to be a non-attorney. He conveyed the distinct impression that he was an attorney, which is one reason there was news coverage identifying him as an attorney.

The Dunleavy administration now claims that Attorney Wood “provides exactly what the delegates” to the Alaska Constitutional Convention “wanted in non-attorney members.”

The state also claims that although Attorney Wood is getting $300 an hour from Dunleavy under his latest no-bid contract, he does not hold a “position of profit” with the state because he is not a formal employee, just a contractor.

Before becoming a long-time government contractor, Attorney Wood was a long-time government critic.

“Wood, an attorney in private practice and city assemblyman from 1983 to 1993, is an avowed libertarian who is broadly anti-government and anti-tax. But he said previously that his differences with the IRS were not a tax protest,” the Anchorage Daily News reported in October 1993.

In May 1992 the IRS won a judgment of $151,080 to cover unpaid income taxes and employment taxes between 1977 and 1985.

The federal prosecutors charged that Wood "arrogantly and unfairly forced the IRS to devote an inordinate amount of its time and resources (at taxpayers' expense) to the collection of his taxes.”

In 1986, the federal government filed a lawsuit trying to force a sale of Wood’s house to pay back taxes, the Anchorage Daily News reported in March 1986.

Attorney Wood’s license to practice law was suspended in 2000 for failing to pay his dues to the Alaska Bar Association. Someone should pay his back dues and this would end all debate.

His decision to quit paying his dues, while not withdrawing from the bar association, probably had something to do with his public censure by the Alaska Supreme Court on Feb. 10, 1995. The censure followed his 1993 conviction for failing to file his federal taxes in 1987. He said he closed his office in 1995.

“Wood agreed to discipline by consent under Bar Rule 22(h) for engaging in conduct that adversely reflected on his fitness to practice law,” the bar association says in its account of the censure.

Though he is suspended, he remains on the roll of Alaska lawyers posted by the Alaska Bar Association.

One of the parties in the current court case fighting the appointment of Attorney Wood is Eric Forrer, who is represented by Joe Geldhof of Juneau.

Attorney Geldhof says that Forrer read a 40-page court filing from the Dunleavy administration and responded with a “rather pithy single-word invective” that could be restated as “bloviation.”

“As an aged, nearly broken-down attorney with some experience litigating constitutional disputes, finding a legal justification in support of the assertion that attorney John W. Wood is a ‘non-attorney’ for the purpose of constitutional analysis is more than puzzling,” Geldhof writes. “It defies logic, reason and reality.”

The appointment is indicative of “whim, caprice and bad judgment.”

Can’t argue with that.

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Attorney John W. Wood is not an attorney, Dunleavy claims