Blog Posts

Most lawyers don’t talk much about legal fees with members of the general public. Why should they? It’s rare that good news brings a person to a law office. More often than not, crisis drives the need for a lawyer, and a lawyer’s request to be paid for his or her services is...

I've been reading the press reports about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's jury selection in Boston with a growing sense of ambivalence. Tsarnaev, you will recall, is the surviving suspect in the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon.
I have for decades been opposed to the death penalty, and the specter of...

Word on the street is that Koskoff, Koskoff & Beider is so wealthy the law firm weighs, rather than counts, its money. I hope that's true, because the fight the firm just picked against Bushmaster and others is going to cost plenty to litigate. Call the expenses of the suit the costs of good...

It will take more than the Band-Aid President Barack Obama offers to staunch the bleeding wound caused by the police violence in Ferguson, Mo. The fact of the matter is the events in Ferguson reflect a broader crisis in legitimacy, a crisis brought about in large part by the federal...

Juries are fickle, especially in civil cases, where we give them the right and the power to award money in the form of compensatory damages, and, in rare cases, to assess punitive damages. Money becomes a proxy for justice. Yet standing in well of a civil court asking for money always reminds me of...

What would you call a self-confessed agnostic who recites Psalm 23 in times of grave trouble? Hypocrite comes to mind, and the description fits. Fool also fits. And sinner works, too, although just what the concept of sin can mean to the godless is a mystery.
But there...

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...

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. (Except for the couple of months years back when I impetuously quit, and then returned.) Only once has a column been spiked, or not used by the editor,...

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 criminal case? Is he, too, a fool?
Dr. Lishan Wang is charged with murder. He is alleged to have shot to death another physician, Dr. Vajinder Pal...

The process, criminal defense lawyers like to say, is the punishment. Nowhere is this so true as in the low-level criminal courts in Connecticut, known among the cognoscenti as the “GAs,” or Geographical Areas. All criminal cases make their courtside debut in the GA courts. Only the...