KEY POINTS:
For once Christopher Harder declined a media interview. He dare not on the eve of his bid to be allowed to practise law again. Besides, he is, he says, a new man.
Eighteen months after he was struck off, Harder is trying to return to the law. Beginning next week, he will seek to persuade the New Zealand Law Practitioners' Disciplinary Tribunal that the man who was a problem child for the Law Society has reformed.
His thirst for self-promotion stuck in the craw of the profession. He was known, too, for his energy, determination, commitment, courtroom skills, ability to uncover important evidence - but also for his unorthodox ways, his swagger and rudeness to clients, colleagues and judges. Harder never did do niceties.
It's the calling of criminal barristers to help people in trouble. Harder made more than a career out of trouble. He jumped on planes to offer his services at high-profile crises around the world, ironic perhaps in view of the regular bother he found himself in at home.
He was struck off in February 2006 on his eighth appearance before the disciplinary tribunal.
No stranger to monumental fights, a subdued Harder faces another to resume a career he may think he was born for.
Opposing his application to have his name restored to the roll of barristers is the legal establishment: the Auckland District Law Society and the New Zealand Law Society. Each have engaged Queen's Counsel, the heavy punchers of the law. Harder, too, has a silk - Colin Pidgeon, QC.
Truth is, the Law Society always had a problem with the brash Canadian. If Harder's application is unsuccessful, his track-record suggests an appeal. As a fresh law graduate from Auckland University he did just that when the Law Society refused to give him the necessary certificate of good character to practise law.
Peter Hillyer, QC (who as a judge experienced Harder's rudeness), waived his fee and represented Harder in the Court of Appeal. Though unsuccessful, the court did state that there was room in the law for different personality types.
Harder was admitted to the bar on his second attempt, after 18 months addressing his alcoholism.
Addiction was a factor in him being struck off. He is a creature of compulsion. He slugged Coca-Cola all day long and chain-smoked cigarettes during 18 alcohol-free years until falling off the wagon in 1998.
By the time he was drummed out of the law, his alcoholism was chronic, his life at its lowest ebb. He was also abusing recreational drugs and was living on takeaways and sleeping in the rear of his legal chambers, where the air smelt of cannabis.
At his most unravelled, his staff kept the practise going. Juniors were thrown in the deep end, appearing in court while an unfit Harder stayed at his chambers, dreaming, writing, plotting.
By agreement he admitted a representative charge relating to misconduct in his dealings with three clients (he took one to a brothel and requested he simulate the sexual violation he was charged with), and making inappropriate comments to a female police officer and a female crown prosecutor.
In another incident prompted by his erratic behaviour, Judge Cecile Rushton set off a panic button summoning security to the courtroom. Suspecting Harder was drunk, court officials smelt the dark-coloured drink he was sipping in court and thought it was bourbon and coke. In his defence, Harder said it was vanilla coke.
Where he once saw himself a victim of a vendetta, he now acknowledges responsibility.
"I decided it was time to get honest with myself and stop blaming others for the situation I found myself in," he wrote in his affidavit filed with his application to have his practising certificate restored.
It was a wake-up call in more ways than one. A few months after he was disbarred he had a heart attack. A stent was placed in one of his arteries.
He has done courses to address his alcoholism and drug abuse, in anger management, has quit the smoking habit that he began aged 11 - pinching his father's Kool menthol cigarettes - and reduced his weight "from an obese 118kg to 94kg by adopting a far more sensible lifestyle".
Since December 2006 he has had regular sessions with a psychiatrist specialising in addictive personalities.
"In summary the last 20 months has been a real lifesaver for me and my relationship with my wife," he wrote. "I have learned much about myself, albeit rather late in life at 59, but I have learned."
In a letter to the tribunal, psychiatrist Greig McCormick describes Harder's substance dependencies as "in remission" and says he had embraced a programme that "is a vehicle for both ongoing abstinence and character change".
Harder's character? Pugnacious, exasperating, impolite, brave, kind. His kindnesses were often overlooked but were many, a former colleague told the Weekend Herald, from regularly giving money to tramps to giving his time to the muddled and the distressed who came to him even though there was nothing the law could do for them.
IN his own telling, Christopher Lloyd Harder is the baby who crawled off the rug.
He grew up in Canada, the son of Lloyd Harder, a travelling salesman, and Elma who worked as a telephonist at the Vancouver Sun newspaper before he and his fraternal twin brother Greg were born.
Greg was good and compliant. Christopher had a talent for trouble. As babies, Harder broke his father's edict and crawled off the hearthside rug. "That's indicative of my whole life," he said in a 1993 interview. "When anyone tells me not to do something, I just go right out and do it."
He was the boy suspended from Cubs "for improper use of a hatchet", he wrote in one of his three books.
He was the teenager who found a legal technicality which enabled him to avoid paying for damage caused when a train hit Harder's car that became stuck crossing the tracks in an unauthorised area.
And he was the law student who successfully took the Tramways Union to court for failing to give legal notice of its bus strike. Early experience in use of the tools of law.
Addiction is said to be genetic. Harder's grandfather was a drinker who found his salve in religion. "Grandpa would tell me I was one of God's lost lambs but that if I gave myself to God I could do great things, even save the world!"
Harder did try to solve some of the world's crises. There was Waco, Texas. Harder was there when the compound of David Koresh burned in 1993, his request to negotiate (the brother of a client was inside) rejected by the FBI.
When rebels held hundreds of people hostage in the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1997, Harder flew there, to Cuba and to Germany trying to help.
He was locked up in Suva by Sitiveni Rabuka, the military leader who carried out Fiji's coups of 1987 but was back in Suva during the Speight coup of 2000 with his plan to solve that hostage crisis.
He also travelled to Islamabad in 2001, where he planned to assess for the Taleban ambassador to Pakistan any evidence against Osama Bin Laden.
Some colleagues mocked, some admired his gumption, others wondered why? Adventure? Self-glorification? A son's drive to make amends?
"My father [a World War II pilot] never said anything but I knew he was ashamed of me for failing to fit in and make a go of a career in the military," Harder wrote in Through The Legal Looking Glass.
"He thought they would be able to break me, then control me. They were all wrong. Believing I was now a disappointment to my father I determined to spend the rest of my life trying to redeem myself in his eyes."
It was his father Harder phoned first when he gained his practising certificate, yelling down the phone "they can't take it away from me now".
Harder always was up for the grand mission, always was an outsider, a fighter for the little guy. His favourite quote is by revolutionary Che Guevara: "When they say it is impossible, that means there are a thousand solutions."
He once gave me a copy of a letter he sent to Fidel Castro, seeking the Cuban leader's help in the Lima hostage drama. It was long and rambling but you couldn't deny its passion.
In his letter in support of Harder's bid, Shane Cassidy who, as a young lawyer, worked for him, says he suspects "that underlying Mr Harder's difficulties is a feeling that the profession has never quite accepted him".
At his best, Harder was among the most effective. "For a period Mr Harder could do no wrong," says Cassidy. "He had the ability to strike the right chord with juries."
His many successes include resolving a dispute in which Maori at Whangape, in the Far North, had occupied a farm. His most famous court case was the eventual acquittal of a client charged with the murder of cricket umpire Peter Plumley-Walker.
Plumley-Walker died after a bondage session with dominatrix Renee Chignall. She, and her partner Neville Walker (Harder's client), admitted throwing the cricket umpire's body into the Huka Falls at Taupo.
The question is whether he can avoid succumbing again to addiction and whether he can curb his character. According to his psychiatrist, to successfully deal with addiction requires "fundamental changes to the way in which they view both themselves and their relationships with others". Harder, he said, had gained good insight into the nature of his difficulties but rehabilitation had no finite point. Ongoing recovery required ongoing attention on Harder's part.
Harder's application is supported by 100 lawyers, a handful of judges and a law professor, who believe he deserves another chance.
Their support is not blinkered.
"I do not profess to understand the underlying reasons why any person is the way they are," wrote lawyer Christopher Twigley, who has known Harder for 15 years. "I am, however, certain that Christopher's apparent need for self-recognition and gratification compelled him to explore a dimension of life that is not easily reconciled with healthy morals and values.
"Christopher has never lacked mental tenacity and determination. This is lucky for him as his compulsiveness has driven him to fly as high as he possibly can but also to plummet to the darkest depths. His inherent determination, however, has allowed him to climb out of these depths in the past and I am certain that he is capable of doing so again."
Recently, Harder was admitted to the bar in Tonga to represent two MPs charged with sedition arising from the November 2006 riots in Nuku'alofa where his work has been welcomed. Through that work, he says in his submission, "I realised how much I loved the discipline of law and earnestly wished to be part of it and redeem my past inappropriate conduct."
The "R" word again. Harder's father died not long after his troublesome son was struck off. Despite his self-destructive tendencies, in one way or another, Harder may always have been in pursuit of redemption.
