Blog Posts

Osama bin Laden is dead. Good. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States boasted of the jihad he and his like-minded followers were waging against the United States. For nearly a decade, he eluded capture. Then, this week, a bead was drawn on him. Commandoes assisted by intelligence...

The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog carried a piece last week about the vanishing trial. I don’t know what the author is talking about. I try ten to twelve jury trials a year, year in and year out. And I do it in a state in which the manner of picking juries is time-consuming and...

I don't much like government, and pretend to love chaos. Watching news reports from Cairo forces me to admit hypocrisy. The fact is, I want chaos on my terms. The state of nature terrifies. As a general rule, I would prefer not being murdered, the victim of theft or otherwise terrorized by others....

There is a great line dividing Americans: On the one side, and tipping the scales of justice, are those who have never been accused of a crime; on other are those accused, and their family and friends. The rule of law is supposed to serve as a sort of Charon, navigating souls across the river of...

Someone tell me: Just how did it happen that I need to defend my right to die? Death is part of life, the tail end of a bargain none of us struck. Asserting that I have a right to die is gibberish. Would that I had a right to remain alive; that would be a right worth any fight. Death is a...

I read this year's Best Crime Reporting with a guilty sort of pleasure. It was a gift, so reading it over the holidays was appropriate enough. But wasn't I taking a few weeks off? Why the appeal of crime stories in a season devoted to time away from the grind of a criminal law practice?
The...

Experienced criminal defense lawyers and even judges know a simple truth: Ask the wrong questions, and the truth will slip through your fingers. Sometimes it is all about plausible deniability, a truth parsed so finely that the difference between fact and fiction becomes indistinguishable. That's...

Immigration-speak is a language I have yet to learn. It sounds strange. It doesn’t quite fit the world in which my clients and I live. When I was told that a client of mine had no "status" in the United States, I wondered what that meant. He’s been here since he was six years old. He...

Is Julian Assange the new Martin Luther?
The significance of the Protestant Reformation lies not so much in the proliferation of new, and non-Catholic, theologies: Early Christianity was a wild cacophony of conflicting views of Jesus. It took centuries for orthodoxy to emerge. For well more...

Wikileaks matters because government lies, and the United States Government is no exception. Liars don't want the truth exposed, so they prosecute those with the courage to tell it. It really is that simple. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise wants something the liars can confer, whether that...