Blog Posts

I think my wife has a thing for Harold Koh. She’s not alone. One of our neighbors also glows at the mere mention of the name. They were talking about Koh the other day, and I had to leave the room. What’s he got that makes groupies of women in late middle age?
Koh was just confirmed...

A long time ago, a client and a good friend gave me a painting: It was a Norman Rockwell of a young man reading the law, apparently on break from the more pressing concerns of earning a living. I think of Abraham Lincoln.

What sort of lawyer was Lincoln?

Julie Fenster's The Case...

News of folks exonerated by DNA evidence is by now commonplace, so another book on the topic needs to do more than reveal the twists and turns of a life redeemed by good lawyering and good science. Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, delivers, sort of.
This is a team written...

Justice David Souter’s abrupt announcement of his resignation from the United States Supreme Court has the bar in a collective psychosis. There are forces unleashed akin to those stirring in the breast of children of divorcing parents. What a pity.
Who should replace Souter? The legal...

My preference for the next justice of the Supreme Court, the person to fill the slot of retiring Justice David Souter, is someone like William Bloss, of Bridgeport's Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, or perhaps a young version of New Haven's David Rosen. These are brilliant men who have earned their...

President Barack Obama did the unthinkable when he won the presidency: he erased a color line that appeared indelible. He did so by mobilizing a base of support well outside the mainstream. But he did so with both feet planted firmly in the institutional breeding grounds of traditional elites. His...

Not long ago, I enjoyed dinner with none other than Charles Fried, a former solicitor general of the United States, and a long-time Harvard law professor. (He quipped that he had thrice been voted tenure, having moved in and out of the academy in the course of his career.)
Fried is everything I...

Let's see just how bold President Barack Obama will be in his first appointment to the United States Supreme Court. He wants a lawyer with real world experience. Just how real is the president prepared to get?
Adam Liptak's piece in this morning's New York Times is revealing for the bias it...

A good woman nearly went to prison the other day because she rubbed the person who interviewed her for a presentence report the wrong way. Who gave these unsworn nabobs the keys to the prison?
My client was in a horrible car accident in the summer of 2007. Two of her children died in the crash....

"So what is the law?", a friend asked the other day. He was not seeking guidance on a course of conduct. I wasn't asked, magician-like, to summon shadows whose contours defined risks and benefits. It was as though someone sent to visit from another world sat beside me and asked the simplest of...