We’ve reached the breaking point. We’ve each become gods in our own idiosyncratic religions, idols served by congregations of one. The result is a public space reduced to warring imperatives. Welcome to the end, as in the logical conclusion, of pluralism.
I’m talking, of course, about the furor over North Carolina’s legislation involving public accommodations. The law calls, in part, for folks to use public restrooms based on their genders at birth.
Shocking, isn’t it? If you were born a man, you must urinate with other men.
This requirement is...
April 15, 2016
I was in court the other day when I erupted in a tone loud enough to be overheard by others: "You know, Aristotle once said that it is hard to be angry to the right degree, at the right person, at the right time. He preached moderation and wisdom. You're not being moderate or wise."
Bystanders seem startled to overhear a lawyer preaching Aristotle to a client in the corridor of a criminal courthouse. But so it goes.
Anger is the pulse of the courts. We lawyers, we sometime counselors at law pressed into the service of people at their worst, know all about the corrosive power of...
April 7, 2016
“Angel came down from heaven yesterday; she stayed with me just long enough to rescue me.” The words are Jimi Hendrix’s. I’ve been listening to the song for the past eight months dreading this day. I began to hum them the day I learned Penelope would die as a result of her lymphoma.
Penelope was a border collie. For just over 11 years, she was by my side. Now she is gone. I am broken.
She was pure joy, an energetic and eager friend who never walked when she could run, who sprang to her feet whenever I so much as moved. She was always in search of work; I...
April 7, 2016
I’m at a loss to explain to my client why she cannot have the book I sent her. But it is so. The warden will not permit her to accept a Daily Roman Missal sent to her from Amazon. Why? It is bound in leather, the reasoning goes. Really? Do prison officials expect her to fashion a weapon from the binding?
Beth Carpenter is a former lawyer, and a client of mine. She’s been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after being convicted of conspiring to commit murder for hire. My office has been working with her for more than a decade trying to get her a new...
March 31, 2016
March 24, 2016
Erin Andrews and Hulk Hogan have me wondering about St. Augustine’s pears. Is something like a meaningful sense of sin taking...
March 22, 2016
I’m thinking of sending David Brooks of The New York Times a scholarship. I’d like him to attend Gerry Spence’s Trial...
March 17, 2016
Merrick Garland, eh?
Throw that fish back. He’s just more of the same. We need a new kind of justice on the Supreme Court. We need...
March 3, 2016
Harper Lee died before the reckoning, but she saw it coming. I’m betting she even foresaw Donald Trump’s ascendancy. She was a realist...
February 28, 2016
Forgive me for being churlish, curmudgeonly, even, but Apple Inc. has thus far fired far wide of the mark in its dispute with the Federal Bureau of...
February 23, 2016
Framing the dispute between Apple Inc. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the need to balance security and liberty tilts the...