Zeitoun and the Rule of Law


I spent the other day reading a book my wife gave me for Christmas, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. It’s the report of one family’s ordeal in the wake of Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005. Although the book was written in 2009, and won awards, it escaped my radar.
There is so much to love about this book. The protagonist, Abdulrhman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant, is my kind of guy. He’s stubborn. He doesn’t listen. He works perhaps too hard. When his wife catches wind of a major storm’s approach, he largely ignores her and goes...
December 27, 2012

Guns Are Just Like Cigarettes

Cigarettes don’t kill people, people do. That would be the tobacco lobby lying to the world. We’d recognize the claim at once as transparent nonsense. So we tax tobacco, using the proceeds to pay for, among other things, health-care for those destroying themselves by indulging their right to smoke.
Why not use the same public policy tools to attempt to control gun violence?
I concede a hidden agenda. Were it within my power, I’d repeal the Second Amendment. It is an anachronism. We aren’t armed against foreign invaders; no militia is necessary to protect...
December 20, 2012

The End That Never Comes

I am willing to bet that you’ll able to read this come Dec. 22, and thereafter, too, should you be so inclined. That’s because I don’t think the world is going to come crashing down around us, as the Mayans predict, on Dec. 21, 2012. For that matter, I don’t think any cosmic ending is about to befall humankind. Ever.
We might just well succeed in destroying ourselves, however. Civilizations — ways of life built around common myths, ideas and settled practices — come and go. The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, cataloged some 21 civilizations in his...
December 20, 2012

Returning to the State of Nature, One Newtown at a Time

Enough, finally, is enough. Your right to bear arms does not yield the right to kill at random. Doesn’t last week’s killing spree at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown give you even a moment’s hesitation? Or are you still going to hide behind the facile quip that guns don’t kill people, people do? Even the tobacco lobby was not that cynical; it just lied about causation, trying to hide the consequences of smoking. You cannot hide the 20 children killed by gunfire.
Twenty little coffins will carry the bodies of the elementary school children killed by a...
December 17, 2012

Double Standards at the Courthouse Door

December 13, 2012
There’s a new security regime in the Connecticut federal courts, so let me gripe about it a bit: You see, lawyers are now required not just to...

Color Blind? Or Wilfully Blind?

December 13, 2012
When I have an African-American defendant in a criminal trial, I like to ask potential jurors the following question: What do you think of race...

Guns and Guilty By Association

December 6, 2012
I suppose I should be relieved that the nation’s top cop came waltzing into New Haven the other day talking tough about gun violence, and...

Why No Racial Balance On Connecticut Juries?

December 6, 2012
When I wrote last week about seeing a jury panel in Norwich from which black males were entirely absent, I assumed there must be some reasonable...

Jim Crow In The Jury Room

November 29, 2012
Call me a racist, but Connecticut does not do enough to assure that criminal defendants face a jury of their peers.
I’ve just finished...

Assisted Suicide and the State

November 29, 2012
FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land...

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Taking Back the Courts
Norm Pattis Taking Back the Courts

The Wizard of Oz was one of my favorites movies as a kid. Little did I know judges were so much like the wizard, hiding behind empty trappings of power. This book tells you things you need to know about what really goes on in court. Read it, weep, and then demand that the courts do better.

In the Trenches
Norm Pattis In the Trenches

Plenty of lawyers write about the law, but few who write try cases. Judge for yourself whether I talk the talk and walk the walk in this collection of occasional essays about life in the law's trenches.

Juries and Justice
Norm Pattis Juries and Justice

How prepared are you to take seriously the notion that 'we the people' are, in fact, sovereign? Discover the secret, and unused, power of jurors. 'Ask why; then nullify.'

Norm Pattis

About Norm

Norm Pattis is a Connecticut based trial lawyer focused on high stakes criminal cases and civil right violations. He is a veteran of more than 150 jury trials, many resulting in acquittals for people charged with serious crimes, multi-million dollar civil rights and discrimination verdicts, and scores of cases favorably settled.

© Norm Pattis is represented by Elite Lawyer Management, managing agents for Exceptional American Lawyers
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