What can Howard Stern teach about legal fees? Not much, really. You see, Howard gets what Howard wants. The rest of us lead lives of quiet desperation under the scrutiny of bar regulators.
Stern has been a radio personality for 35 years. At 56, he is one of the nation’s top draws. When he signed on to Sirius XM satellite radio in 2006, 60,000 folks subscribed. There are now 20 million subscribers. Analysts credit Stern with bringing most of those listeners on. For this, he is paid a king’s ransom. His first five year contract paid him $100 million per year; he recently...
December 13, 2010
The next time members of the Connecticut General Assembly are asked to consider whether the prosecutors of this state should have routine access to investigative grand juries, they ought to take a trip to the Walker Reception and Special Management Unit. That's a euphemism for prison. It's located in Suffield. When they get there, they should ask for a chance to speak with Micahel Seifert. He is a prisoner.
The 60-year-old Seifert is cooling his heels just now, awaiting trial on one of the thirteen bank robberies he is alleged to have committed in the greater Waterbury area. I'm sure...
December 9, 2010
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 than a millennia this orthodoxy was maintained by use of censorship and institutional power. But the printing press changed all that. There could have been no reformation without the printing press. Access to the Bible in the vernacular made the competing versions of the truth possible. So if you...
December 7, 2010
There was a time in the northeastern United States when an innkeeper could expect a few curious customers to respond to signs reading: "George Washington slept here." The man must have laid his head to rest somewhere during his founding travels. Why not at Aunt Sally's bed and breakfast? This is a form of marketing unique to the region, I suspect. It's hard to imagine a similar sign drawing tourists in, let's say, Texas or California.
But the world is changed. We are now everywhere and all at once. The Internet makes the illusion of omnipresence seem almost real. When I press this...
December 6, 2010
December 5, 2010
Those of you representing folks accused of sex offenses know the power of mere words. An accusation standing alone, without corroboration, can...
December 5, 2010
One of the oddest things I have noticed in recent years is just how many of the prosecutors I respect and admire have strong religious convictions....
December 5, 2010
Something like hope twinkled in my client's eyes on Friday afternoon. A jury returned a verdict in his favor, awarding damages, including punitive...
December 4, 2010
Wikileaks matters because government lies, and the United States Government is no exception. Liars don't want the truth exposed, so they prosecute...
December 3, 2010
We missed a tremendous opportunity to conduct an experiment of great significance in our courts. That’s because we didn’t have a crystal...
December 2, 2010
It will be many years before a record is fully assembled about what role the media played in creating a death-chamber in the New Haven courtroom that...