"[T]he great emancipatory gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below." Thus concludes James C. Scott's brief celebration of the joy and necessity of anarchism, Two Cheers for Anarchism, (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2012).
Of course, Scott is right. Who foresaw the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring, the Occupy protests, or, most recently, the groundswell of popular protest in Brazil? When, one wonders, will the damn of restraint...
May 19, 2014
The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be compelled to testify against himself. In other words, a person cannot be required to speak if his statements would tend to implicate him in a crime. The right is what lawyers call a testimonial privilege, and it is related to other areas declared off limits by the law, areas such as the attorney-client privilege or the matrimonial privilege.
But the law also guarantees to criminal defendants the right to present a defense. This right is anchored in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee to a defendant of the right to use compulsory process...
May 18, 2014
I confess to being among those who regard the reach of the surveillance state with a tired sense of inevitability: I’ve long since grown accustomed to the notion that the government can, and does, record everything. It’s not that I do not value privacy; I just feel that worrying about government snooping is futile. Glenn Greenwald’s new book on Edward Snowden, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, confirmed my fears, and moved me a notch or two off my sense of resignation.
I’ve watched Greenwald’s career with a puzzled...
May 17, 2014
“Congratulations,” the caller, another lawyer, said. “You hung ‘em up; I’d call that a win.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “But I am not so sure. We’ve got to try it all over again in October.”
My client stands accused by the United States government of possession and distribution of various quantities of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. He’s also accused of illegal possession of various guns and ammunition. Seven counts in all. Given his criminal history, he’ll spend more than 20 years in...
May 7, 2014
May 4, 2014
Robert Ferguson's book on the American criminal justice system, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2014) ought to...
May 3, 2014
Perhaps the single most important moment in the debate about whether to approve the Green Haven condominium association project on Bethany’s...
April 30, 2014
Death comes swiftly, with a crushing finality, leaving the living numb with grief and overcome with loss. Our comings and goings remain stunning...
April 27, 2014
One measure of our humanity is how we treat the least among us. The future will judge us harshly, I am afraid. This is especially so regarding our...
April 20, 2014
The process, criminal defense lawyers like to say, is the punishment. Nowhere is this so true as in the low-level criminal courts in Connecticut,...
April 14, 2014
Anarchism is given a bad rap by folks who rarely take the trouble to understand what they are criticizing. Alexander Berkman's classic text on...