Blog Posts

Erin Andrews and Hulk Hogan have me wondering about St. Augustine’s pears. Is something like a meaningful sense of sin taking root?
Andrews and Hogan, whose legal name is Terry G. Bollea, were awarded eye-popping verdicts in separate trials in recent weeks.
Andrews, a Fox...

I’m thinking of sending David Brooks of The New York Times a scholarship. I’d like him to attend Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyer’s College this summer. Of course, Brooks is not a lawyer; he is a columnist. But, given what he’s written recently about Donald...

Merrick Garland, eh?
Throw that fish back. He’s just more of the same. We need a new kind of justice on the Supreme Court. We need someone with experience defending folk accused of a crime.
President Barack Obama surprised no one with his nomination of Garland to fill Antonin...

Harper Lee died before the reckoning, but she saw it coming. I’m betting she even foresaw Donald Trump’s ascendancy. She was a realist about race in the United States, you see.
At least she was in her first book, “Go Set A Watchman”; she tried to stifle that realism in...

Forgive me for being churlish, curmudgeonly, even, but Apple Inc. has thus far fired far wide of the mark in its dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What’s at stake in the iPhone controversy is far more significant than balancing privacy and security.
The federal...

Framing the dispute between Apple Inc. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the need to balance security and liberty tilts the debate in favor of the government. A more candid framing destroys the government’s assertions: the conflict pits slavery against freedom. Who favors...

Antonin Scalia’s death doesn’t just yield a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court; it provides an opportunity to re-examine the role of the Court in American life, and to ask fundamental questions about how we decide what is, and is not, just.
No...

The public at large rarely gets a glimpse behind the curtain of justice, and thus can’t appreciate the ugly reality of the criminal justice system. Sadly, defendants are often punished for relying upon the very rights we say we revere. Nowhere is this more evident than in imposition of what...

Odds are, you have never visited someone imprisoned for life, or for many decades. Prisoners are outcasts, beloved, if at all, only by their families; remembered, if only periodically, by their lawyers. We give them numbers and then forbid their jailers to get too close to numbered...

Utopian or dystopian?
You decide. But consider seriously the question: The Muslim Brotherhood forms a new a political party in France, and, in a coalition with the left, forms a new government, with a prominent Muslim as prime minister. Then the Saudis purchase the Sorbonne, an ancient and...