Blog Posts

I am not much of a fan of legal blogs. But I met a young man the other day who blogs on the Supreme Court. He's a star on the rise.
My youngest son and I were bleary-eyed when we stumbled from a cab in front of the United States Supreme Court at about 3:30 a.m. one morning this past week. We...

Sometimes the rules of criminal procedure make no sense. Why, for example, aren't defendants free to move for summary judgment?
There are occasions in which the criminal justice system is misused. A complaining witness can bring what is essentially a civil complaint to prosecutors and huff and...

The myth of American exceptionalism is disproven with a vengeance when it comes to race. God didn’t pick North America as a preserve for the righteous. We are no city on a hill beckoning the world to do as we do. At the founding we enslaved people of color; today we spend other people’s...

Administrative subpoenas offer great opportunities for abuse by the Government. A pencil pusher in a regulatory agency has the freedom to fire off requests for documents, sometimes thousands of documents, without bearing any cost at all. And without any judicial oversight.
It works like this: A...

The jury returned a verdict in favor of my client today. Life is good. Here are two stories about the case. I am on auto pilot today.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2009/04/willoughby_not.php
http://www.nhregister.com/

I've never understood why folks belong to secret societies. What's the point of esoteric words, secret handshakes and clubs?
David V. Barrett's Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (2007), didn't help me understand esoterica any better. But it was a good read...

Gerry Spence turned eighty this year. There will be a birthday bash for him at Thunderhead Ranch this summer. Invitations have been sent out. I got one. And I thought about going, even going so far as to ask a friend for the names of hotels in the area. I've not been to the ranch, home of the Trial...

Easter Sunday, you say? I hadn't noticed anything different about the day. The Sun shines this morning, to be sure. In New England that is a rare thing this time of year. But otherwise this day, this Sunday, is no different than any other. A late breakfast over the newspaper with my wife, and then...

I got an email the other day from a regular reader. She noted that another legal blogger had written about his apparent disappointment that I had not linked to his blog. Sure enough, someone wrote that I didn't think his blog was "good enough" to link to mine. A small pebble was dropped. The...

I confess that I am a lost soul. So lost, indeed, that I wonder whether it makes sense even to hope of being found, or finding anything really at all. So often when I hear those with faith discuss salvation I wonder, salvation from what? We take on faith our births and gradually come to a sense of...