Blog Posts

The tongue-clucking moralists on the Pennsylvania State University board of trustees who fired Joe Paterno in the dead of night ought to be tarred, feathered and then run out of Happy Valley. They used Joe Pa for all he was worth and then killed him once they had milked every conceivable dime they...

Pennsylvania lawyers are no doubt sitting by their phones, hoping that someone will call to report that they, too, were a victim of Jerry Sandusky’s lust. There’s great money to be made in claims of child sex abuse. Just ask the Catholic Church, which has paid claimants in a series of...

I’ve never met Eric Robert of South Dakota, but what I’ve read about him makes me wonder whether he is a little too sane for the rest of us. The only safe thing to do is to kill him and claim that we are doing justice. At least that is the course the state of South Dakota is taking....

I see Wall Street and I keep thinking the state of nature. I am not referring to the bare knuckle tactics of brazen traders like Gordon Gecko, huffing, puffing and bragging about a life lived on the solitary, nasty, brutish and short trading floors of our financial palaces. I am thinking of the...

Troy Davis is dead. Joan-MacPhail-Harris is happy. And the American criminal justice system is sick. Who do we think we are kidding when we call ourselves the land of the free?
Let me put my cards out on the table straightaway. I am with Thomas Hobbes when it comes to the death penalty....

The message in New Haven the other night was loud and clear: “We’re from the federal government, and we’re here to help.” It was all I could do to remain in the room. I tried to believe them. But an instinct of mistrust overcame the good will the FBI agent and federal prosecutor tried to...

It is not at all clear to me why the Founding Fathers matter. I understand the significance of the colonies’ break with Britain. And the creation of a new secular order, a federal government of limited powers binding together independent states, endures today. But resorting to the founders,...

James “Whitey” Bulger a hero? Not really. Not ever. He stands accused of murdering 19 people, and has a list of charges longer than Pinocchio’s nose at tax time. But Bulger’s name can go down in the annals of law enforcement right next to former Senator Frank...

Preventive detention. Read the words. Repeat them aloud. Say them louder. Write them on a pad of paper. Then scrawl them on a piece of cardboard with a magic marker. Preventive detention. Holding someone on mere suspicion of who they are or what they might do. The Supreme Court now says that it is...

I was a little bemused to read the headline on a recent news story reflecting a debate about whether Osama bin Laden had, in fact, been murdered. If ever there were a fellow in need of killing, it was he. But the discussion is an important one, reflecting, as it does, the distinction between mere...