This week’s Connecticut Law Tribune features an interview with F. Lee Bailey, who, at 77, remains sharp as a tack. The interview saddened me, in a necessary sort of way. Bailey’s now pressing the case for the merits of alternative dispute resolution. Trial is too costly for most Americans, he says. And besides, the trial process often gets it wrong. Daggers to my heart, these words. Trial is the best thing about the practice of law To see one of its great practitioners so clearly call out its shortcomings chills.
Bailey is no longer able to practice law. He’s been...
March 20, 2011
This current New York Review of Books features a savage review of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, a new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, by Garry Wills. Entitled "Superficial & Sublime," Wills is impressive as always with his scholarship, and withering in his judgments. This is Wills at his raging, prophetic, best: small wonder that the man has written some 40 books, including, in 2002, Why I Am A Catholic. Yet for all his evident brilliance, Wills does not defeat the argument made in All Things Shining. Rather, he confirms...
March 19, 2011
Although I grew up in Chicago and Detroit, I became a New Englander the day I started to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Decades later, I still see the paperback pages recounting his planting of peas and beans. Something like destiny led me to my current home, situated well off the beaten path in New England, and necessity drives me to my knees each early spring to prepare the soil for another year’s crop of vegetables. Always, the first plants planted are peas. We plant them just after St. Patrick’s day.
I was back in Detroit today, standing in the now...
March 19, 2011
Delay is often the best friend of a criminal defense lawyer: witnesses move away, their recollections fail, the state loses evidence. Things really do go bump in the night. Criminal cases, unlike wine, rarely get better with age. So I should be in favor of delay, right?
As a tactical matter, yes. But no two cases are alike. There are cases in which delay is harmful, and wasteful, both of the time of lawyers and of the finances of clients. Indeed, delay between arrest and trial often creates friction between lawyer and client.
In Connecticut, it is not uncommon for years...
March 18, 2011
March 16, 2011
I was in New Haven just as day broke. Much to my surprise, there were few media wagons in front of the courthouse on Church Street. Only one ghastly...
March 16, 2011
"There is no such thing as justice – in or out of court." The words are Clarence Darrow’s. The same Clarence Darrow who once...
March 15, 2011
One could be forgiven for believing that the walls wept in the West Hartford, Connecticut, home of former endocrinologist Dr. George Reardon. The...
March 14, 2011
Another lost weekend is behind me. It was spent fussing over a manuscript, reading the same words for the umpteenth time, trying to force the garbage...
March 12, 2011
Call someone a victim, and they are at once framed in a sympathetic light. Bad things happen to victims, we are drawn to them, wanting to help them...
March 11, 2011
Everyone plea bargains in the criminal courts; sometimes the bargaining resolves a case. It is part of the process. But not all parties approach the...