Among the many defining errors I've made along life's way is my public and open scorn for law professors. Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach in a traditional discipline such as history, philosophy or even economics, teach law, I've said. I've been willfully blind to what scholars can contribute to a practitioner's understanding of the law.
So I confess to having read Laurence Tribe's most recent book on the Supreme Court, "Uncertain Justice," with profit. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and long-time liberal favorite for appointment to the high court, writes about the...
July 20, 2014
"I know that a certain percentage of folks I send to prison are, in fact, innocent," he said. "I just don't know how to identify who those folks are."
"Then how can you do what you do?" I asked.
"I believe in the adversarial system," he replied. "If you do your job, then the risk of my making a mistake is minimized."
The speaker was a senior prosecutor here in Connecticut. We were discussing why he was deciding to take a case to trial, a case in which I was persuaded my client was not guilty. I won't name the prosecutor or his jurisdiction for fear he'd never speak candidly...
July 19, 2014
Some contend that trials, especially criminal trials, are won or lost during jury selection. Although jury selection is intended merely to assure that litigants get a fair trial, jury consultants and savvy lawyers spend a great deal of time trying to frame the questions they ask jurors so as to predispose jurors to see the evidence their way, a process known as “indoctrination.”
One would think, therefore, that a judge would take special pains to make sure that jury selection is open to the public. If the game is won or lost at hello, shouldn’t the public get a chance...
July 9, 2014
Richard Kopf, a U.S. District Court judge in Nebraska, writes a blog. The other day, he vented about the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hobby Lobby, the decision that extended the fiction of corporate personhood to the point of now offering the law's protection to "corporate" beliefs. The owners of Hobby Lobby can have their corporation opt out of providing contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act.
Writes Kopf about the court's tendency to decide, on a 5-4 basis, significant issues dividing the country: "Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent – this...
July 8, 2014
July 3, 2014
Over the many years I've written this column – I think it is now 14, but who is counting? – I've taken pride in never missing a week....
July 2, 2014
Despite the fact that I spend as much time as I can in courtrooms, I still enjoy reading fiction about the law and lawyering. I worry always about...
June 27, 2014
A lawyer representing himself, the saying goes, has a fool for a client. So what of a physician who decides to represent himself in a high-stakes...
June 21, 2014
I've noticed a certain uneasiness in the chambers of several judges. They don't like talking about plea bargaining in any public way. Indeed, in one...
June 20, 2014
One of the best scenes in “The Wizard of Oz” is when Toto, Dorothy’s dog, pulls back the curtain on the Great Oz, exposing a...
June 12, 2014
Jerad and Amanda Miller thought the revolution had begun, so they shot a couple of police officers at a pizzeria and then walked over to a local...