Blog Posts

This just may be what comes of the triumphant cry of the warrior who knows but one truth, and who is determined to destroy all those who stand in its way: Salman Rushdie, laying in a pool of blood on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. He was getting ready to speak to a group...

What we need is another Kerner Commission, and what we’re being offered is a Watergate Committee. The result will be a committee that convicts the canary for dying in the mineshaft. Come the fall of 2022, and, more importantly, the fall of 2024, the toxins in the mineshaft will be that...

Who owns the English language?
I ask because I am under fire for using the “n” word without permission.
I’m branching out professionally, making the seamless and easy transition from criminal defense lawyer to stand-up comic. The...

I wrote this almost a year ago. Friends thought I was howling at the moon. Now they think I was prophetic. Spread the word. We need to amend the federal Constitution to prevent race-based transfer payments and distribution of public goods. It was written as I watched the hullabaloo arising...

Jury selection is scheduled to begin next week in the case of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis late last spring. The death of Mr. Floyd sparked protests, and riots across the country on the theory that his death was demonstrative proof of...

One of the good guys died today, United States District Court Judge Dominic J. Squatrito. He was 82.

I don't know how many cases I tried before him. It was a lot. All were federal civil rights verdicts. Several of them were astounding. He presided as a common man, never putting on airs,...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court appeared to ask a lot of the right questions in arguments this week on Bill Cosby’s appeal of his criminal conviction for sexual assault. What worries me are the answers the court is likely to give.
It took two trials for the...

(Originally published earlier this summer at about the time of George Floyd's death. More timely now.)
We finally learned what all the fuss has been about for the past month. It’s not about police reform. It’s not about systemic racism. It’s about race-based transfer...

The final words of Book Two of St. Augustine’s Confessions could easily be a epigraph for our times: “I turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.” I’ve all but given up watching the news on television: In a matter of months, our public life has been...

I’ve turned during this season of pandemic-induced hysteria to Saint Augustine for solace. His Confessions is one of the greatest books ever written. Augustine understood sin; he experienced the transforming power of grace; and, he wrote of his relationship with God in terms at once...