Blog Posts

I’m not sure what the new normal will look like for litigators in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, but several things seem obvious enough.
First, I doubt seriously that any juries will be selected until sometime in 2021.
Why? No one is...

Things are tense in the prisons. As the COVID-19 virus sweeps across the land, there are calls to release prisoners, and concerns about the welfare of prisoners, guards and the communities in which the prisons are located.
Have we warehoused men and women in fertile...

We’re forced, suddenly, to make explicit what we do all the time – make cost-benefit decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Economists call such choices decisions about marginal utility. What value do we get for the next dollar we spend? What do we forego by...

Lost amid the chaos of preparing for, and coping with, the Covid-19 pandemic is an honest assessment of what to do with prison inmates. At least it appears that way in Connecticut, where, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, about 16,000 people are imprisoned. (I’ve heard...

For years, I’ve been haunted by the message of a slender volume written in 2014. Only China survived the challenges imposed by climate change. It did so because it alone had the ability to mobilize itself against the threat.
Western societies, western...

Have you noticed something different about CNN in the past few weeks?
Sure, its round-the-clock coverage of the COVID-19 coverage is repetitive, urgent and filled with expert opinion and commentary. You’d expect nothing less from the cable network. I know I can...

The president has spoken, sort of, announcing hours ago on Twitter that he is considering a quarantine order for portions of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. I write from Connecticut, an easy drive from New York City. My message is simple: Don’t do it, Mr. President.
...

A bold new body of law will emerge from the COVID-19 crisis. Expect expanded police powers for states, a re-striking of the balance between state and federal governments, and a re-examination of what is reasonable in terms of the Bill of Rights. Expect all that.
But...

“Grandpa, what did you do doing during the war?”
I can imagine a time, a few years down the road, in which a grandchild asks about the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the virus, we are told on the news day after day, that has “changed...

It was a scene right out of a thriller. A man diagnosed with an infectious disease walks out of a hospital and is suddenly at large in the community. He is homeless. There is no telling where he went. Officers search for hours, fearing that he is infecting others as he lurches from one...