Sam Sloan
Samuel Howard Sloan (b. September 7, 1944), also known as M. Ismail Sloan, in Richmond, Virginia in the United States. Sloan, who has no formal legal training, orally argued a case in front of the Supreme Court of the United States of America and won, 9-0. The case was SEC v. Sloan in 1978.
Sloan is an internationally known chess player and chess journalist. He has traveled to nearly 80 countries. He operates a website which covers a wide range of topics and chronicles some intimate details of his life and some of his many other court cases. He has been married five times and has eight children. He now drives a taxicab in New York City.
Early life
Sloan, whose mother was a psychiatrist and whose father an IRS lawyer and auditor, grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. He demonstrated his promise in chess early in his life, playing in major tournaments before he reached his teens. He later went on to score an 800 on his math SAT's and attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1962, majoring in mathematics. UC Berkeley was a center for student protest during the social unrest of the 1960s, and Sloan became the president of the Sexual Freedom League, an organization which was covered in Playboy and Time magazines and earned Sloan a spot on Joe Pyne's national televison talk show.
After leaving UC Berkeley, Sloan made a living trading stocks on Wall Street. Although the details are murky, the SEC brought civil actions against Sloan in 1971-1975 in which it alleged that he had failed to maintain adequate books and records. In 1975, the SEC revoked Sloan's brokerage license. After years of litigation, Sloan in 1978 prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court, but his career as a broker was ruined. The case is remarkable in that Sloan argued the case pro se (by himself) even though he was not an attorney; Sloan won before the U.S. Supreme Court 9-0. He claims to be the last person ever to accomplish this.
In 1986, Sloan fled the USA with his daughter Shamema and established a new home in the United Arab Emirates, but his daughter was returned to the USA in 1990 while he was traveling, in a manner that was deemed a kidnapping by the UAE. He lost his custody rights to his daughter and, after a visitation incident in 1991, was convicted in 1993 in Virginia of attempting to abduct her.
Recent activities
Sam Sloan has operated his website since the mid-1990s, posting over 3,000 pages of information of a wide range of topics. Sloan is often frank online, sharing personal details about himself, including many pages describing his sexual activities during his days in the Sexual Freedom League and since.
Although Sloan is not a lawyer, he is often involved in litigation, much of it self-initiated. He represents himself in court and writes his own petitions, serves his own affidavits, etc. Sloan has sued such organizations as the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the United States Chess Federation and even President Richard Nixon.
Chess
Sloan is also well known in the world of chess, especially via his thousands of postings on Usenet groups such as rec.games.chess.politics. On the board, Sloan is one of the extremely few chess experts who plays the black side of the Damiano Defense, which even Sloan admits does not succeed in entrapping his strongest opponents. While living in the UAE, Sloan competed at a world-class level in the Asian forms of chess, that is Thai (Makrook), Chinese (Xiangqi) and Japanese (Shogi) chess.
Notable court case
Books
- Sex Marchers (with Jefferson Poland, eds., Elysium, Inc. 1968) ISBN 1881373053
- Khowar English Dictionary (as Mohammad Ismail Sloan, 1981) (published in Pakistan)
- Chinese Chess for Beginners (1989) ISBN 0923891110
- How to Take over an American Public Company (1992) ISBN 1881373010
- The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson (1992) ISBN 4906574009