I imagine John Grisham, the best-selling author of plot-driven legal thrillers, channel surfing late one night on his 100-plus-acre farm in Oxford, Mississippi, and settling on an episode of "Better Call Saul." The author of books selling 275 million worldwide must have felt a pang of regret on seeing Saul. "I need to create a street lawyer," he said aloud. The result was his latest book, "Rogue Lawyer," recently published by Doubleday.
Grisham has now declared that he, too, wants to play at legal noir. Enter Sebastian Rudd, a criminal defense lawyer practicing law out of the back of an...
November 19, 2015
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy thinks Connecticut ought to open its arms to Syrian migrants. Of course, he wants assurances the migrants are appropriately vetted, the better to weed out suicide bombers and extremists. Why take the risk? There are times that xenophobia is adaptive. This is such a time.
Last weekend’s attacks on civilians in Paris was savage. ISIS claims responsibility for them, just as it seeks to expand its reach throughout the world. Its brand of Islamic fundamentalism is a scourge aiming at nothing less than the destruction of our way of life.
ISIS promises more...
November 19, 2015
Much has been made, and will continue to be made, of the past week’s events at the University of Missouri and, closer to home, at Yale. These flashes in the pan do signal something important, but not what most folks think. What is at stake is the death of pluralism.
In Missouri, a college president and a senior administrator stepped down after members of the football team announced they weren’t going to play anymore unless the president resigned. The president, they reasoned, didn’t do enough about campus racism. At Yale, students erupted after a silly debate about...
November 11, 2015
If the recently argued case of Foster v. Chatman teaches anything, it is that there probably is no fail-safe way to police the conduct of lawyers during jury selection. In the end, the criminal justice system, and the civil justice system, will rise or fall based on the integrity of those who participate in it.
Timothy Foster was convicted and sentenced to death in Georgia in 1987 for the murder of Queen Madge White. Foster is African American; White was caucasian. The jury the convicted Foster and sent him to die was all white.
That was apparently by design....
November 5, 2015
October 28, 2015
Causation, as trial lawyers know, is a notoriously difficult subject. We're taught, for example, what scientists know: two events apparently related...
October 28, 2015
You may not recall the name Bradley Birkenfeld. But, I suspect, if you work for a large bank, a hospital, a defense contractor, or any of the...
October 22, 2015
I can never really tell when a client is serious about suicide. My hunch is that those who talk about it won’t do it. It’s the silent...
October 22, 2015
Some time in or about 2040, Caucasians will become a minority in North America, according to projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. This change in...
October 14, 2015
In the end, when our civilization and way of life collapses, it will not be because some foreign enemy laid us low. The rot that will destroy us will...
October 7, 2015
“How did you feel when you got your summons in the mail asking you to come to court?”
More often than not, it is the first question...