One of Abner Mivka’s most famous stories is this:

One of the stories that is told about my start in politics is that on the way home from law school one night in 1948, I stopped by the ward headquarters in the ward where I lived. There was a street-front, and the name Timothy O’Sullivan, Ward Committeeman, was painted on the front window. I walked in and I said “I’d like to volunteer to work for [Adlai] Stevensonand [Paul] Douglas.” This quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and glared at me and said, “Who sent you?” I said, “Nobody sent me.” He put the cigar back in his mouth and he said, “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” This was the beginning of my political career in Chicago.^[3]

Professor Cynthia Grant Bowman wrote an excellent article on the demise of political patronage in Chicago, thanks to a series of court cases. The article’s title was supposed to quote Mikva’s statement. But the law review editors at the last minute, without consulting Bowman, changed the title of the article to make it sound grammatically correct, and of course in doing so mangled both its meaning and the Mikva quote: ‘We Don’t Want Anybody Anybody Sent’: The Death of Patronage Hiring in Chicago.

UPDATE: The story gets even better, as Westlaw changed the title to “We Don’t Want Anybody Sent: The Death of Patronage Hiring in Chicago.”