Legal Commentary

Crimea and Punishment

Posted on January 10, 2008
British legal blogger Charon QC, one of my favorites from any part of the globe, hosts Blawg Review #141 this week. He opens with a passage from Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade and notes by way of introduction that he is of "the Charge of the Light Brigade category of blawgers":I'm ...

Cyber Law

Posted on January 07, 2008
The various holidays gave me some much-needed time to finish up a number of books I've been reading lately. One of these was Cyber Law, which Brett Trout, the volume's author as well as a practicing patent attorney and Blawg-IT blogger, was kind enough to send me...

It's not "the future" yet.

Posted on January 04, 2008
The outstanding new science fiction blog io9 revisits what the Los Angeles Times thought the courtroom of the future might look like twelve years ago. As an in-house counsel, I don't regularly find myself in a courtroom, but I'm guessing that robot bailiffs, virtual reality juror goggles, floating cameras, and computerized judges haven't featured in your recent courtroom experiences either.

Blawg Review Nominations

Posted on January 04, 2008
Offered in response to the anonymous Editor's call for nominations, the following five posts are, in my humble opinion, the best of the best in what was an outstanding year of Blawg Reviews:#89 (Blawg Review) and #127 (Deliberations) -- What do these posts have in common? Each, in addition to collecting examples of excellent legal blogging, taught me something about arcane and somewhat quaint traditions -- mummering and voir dire, respectively...

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TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (148)

Posted on January 04, 2008
This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Daily Mail (from Monday, December 31; link good at time of posting):It was a moment to make angry wives applaud and two-timing husbands ? and the Chinese government ? squirm.With eight months to go to the Beijing Olympics, Zhang Bin ...

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (147)

Posted on December 28, 2007
This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Monday, December 24; link good at time of posting):Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton may have shot herself in the foot trying to get Iowa voters to pledge support to her -- she is encouraging them to go caucus on January 14, 11 days too late...

Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 25, 2007

I am anyone!

Posted on December 24, 2007
In Slate this morning, Robert Baird asked rhetorically "Why doesn't anyone read Dante's Paradiso?" Perhaps it's because they prefer the abridged version recently published as Blawg Review #137?

This Blawg Review ends with an Epiphany.

Posted on December 24, 2007
Jonathan Frieden hosts Blawg Review #140 at his E-Commerce Law blog. Frieden takes us through all twelve days of Christmas with the best of the past week's legal blogging. Highlights include taxing kidney swaps, pondering the future of Zoey 101, and the dubious constitutionality of "good driver" traffic stops...

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (146)... The Sequel!

Posted on December 21, 2007
This week's bonus joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the New York Law Journal via Law.com (from Friday, December 21; link good at time of posting):A New Jersey man who abandoned a son who later died in the terror attack on the World Trade Center may not collect a share of the son's $2...

The Muller Report

Posted on December 21, 2007
As was the case in baseball, questions about the use of performance enhancing drugs are starting to spread within the legal community. Prompted by John Phillips' post, I issued a statement yesterday denying my participation in this sordid affair. Now, this morning, Eric Muller reports that an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education has found increasing use of "brain-boosting" drugs and "smart" pills amongst university faculty members:The notion raises hackles in some parts of academe...

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (146)

Posted on December 21, 2007
This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of People magazine (from Tuesday, December 18; link good at time of posting):Lynne Spears's book about raising her famous daughters Britney and Jamie Lynn has been put on hold, the publisher confirms to PEOPLE...

I unequivocally deny that I've ever used legal reasoning enhancing drugs.

Posted on December 20, 2007
Although I used "Essence of Cardozo" for a couple of days while recovering from a bout of confusion caused by a poorly-presented CLE seminar, I was concerned about the message that my use might send to younger attorneys and I stopped.John Phillips of The Word on Employment Law sees some cautionary signs in baseball's Mitchell Report for the workplace of the near future:What does the ?steroids era? in professional baseball mean? Maybe more than we want to admit right off the bat (no pun intended)...

Feelings... nothing more than feelings....

Posted on December 20, 2007
Ghandi was quoted as saying "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Others, including Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Pope John Paul II have expressed similar sentiments at one time or another.Notwithstanding, if any of them were around today, they might be inclined to tell the Auckland Regional Council that the line for that concern might best be drawn somewhere above the local worm population...

The gifts which keep on giving...

Posted on December 20, 2007
...can be found in this week's Blawg Review #139, hosted by Hanna Hasl-Kelchner at the Legal Literacy blog. It's a good thing, too, since it's taken me this long to get to reading this edition. Highlights include the employment consequences of a weak handshake, building a sphincter-tightening mediation presentation, and blacklisting a Chinese troll...

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (145)

Posted on December 14, 2007
This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Wednesday, December 12; link good at time of posting:When a robber started taking cash from his register over the weekend, Dunkin' Donuts employee Dustin Hoffmann fought back by clobbering the man with a ceramic mug...

I'm giving everyone I know "The Force" this Christmas (without the bulky packaging).

Posted on December 12, 2007
This roundup of Star Wars toys which never made it into production (via Gizmodo) is one of the funnier things I've seen recently. In all fairness, though, I'm a dork; your mileage may vary.

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