Blog Posts

Some books are so good, you can read them twice, each time with profit. I don't often reread non-fiction, but in the case of Dean Strang's wonderful book about the trial of a group of Milwaukee anarchists in 1917, I did so. Wow, I say. If you care about the law, read this book.
A bomb erupted...

I keep running into the following in books and articles I read about current affairs. An author writes about critics of a current social policy or tendency, and he characterizes the criticism as "white supremacist." There's something dishonest about the move that I can't quite put my finger...

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...

Public service is thankless, and nowhere so much so as in Hartford, where good men and women go to battle ceaselessly over crumbs. Rarely do people ascend the political heights that Hartford has to offer to enhance their reputations – what has that anthill to offer? But good men’s...

The long knives were out this morning in Hartford. A source, believed to be from the office of Governor Ned Lamont, whispered to a friendly reporter: “Be sure to ask the governor what he would do if he had the authority to act regarding Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo. The...

Many years ago, a colleague of mine started a gruesome game, he called it death bingo. At the beginning of each year, he’d invite folks to submit names into a pool. At year’s end, the person who forecast the most deaths won.
I never played the game. It struck...

Among the world’s mysteries is the transformation of naked power into authority. Yes, from time immemorial, there have been those with the means to impose their will on others. But we say, or at least we used to say, that when the state acts, its agents possess not mere power, but...

F. Lee Bailey is dead.

There’s nothing surprising about this. Death comes for us all. But he once promised me he’d live to be one hundred years old and invited me to his party. For twenty years, I called him a friend. All at once, where once there was...

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...

I’ve been reading press reports of the Derek Chauvin case in Minneapolis with a gnawing sense that something isn’t quite right. I can’t tell whether Chauvin’s defense seem are understated geniuses or, perhaps, not up to the task. As for the prosecution, it took...