Criminal Law

410. Translating the euphemisms

Posted on November 20, 2009
In my former life as a first amendment lawyer (well, as a low-level associate who glommed onto as much first amendment work as I could sniff out) I would, at least once a week, read these words or an excerpt from them: Thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials...

409. Let Sarah be Stephen

Posted on November 18, 2009
Sarah Palin has been getting a lot of unfavorable fact-checking attention for her insta-book, proving yet again that there's no such thing as bad publicity, unless you're a news-gathering organization and must explain why you put 11 reporters to the task...

408. Conventions

Posted on November 15, 2009
It's hard for any professional to question the conventional wisdom of his or her field. It's hard even to perceive the things one takes for granted.  The tendency is easiest to see in fields in which one has no emotional or financial investment, such as medicine...

407. Gomorrah (Camorra optional)

Posted on November 14, 2009
Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah has been celebrated as a brave book, and an eye-opening one, and as a beautifully-written one, and even (though this will never stop seeming improbable to me) as the basis for a movie.  But it's also a great book because of its universality...

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406. Recognition

Posted on November 13, 2009
In the CBS interview (see post 405), David Lisak described one way in which rapists choose their victims, or as the rapists themselves prefer to see them, their conquests.  Writing in the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski captured, in a skin-crawling way, the narcissism of rapists...

405. Consent defense

Posted on November 12, 2009
CBS News interviewed the psychologist David Lisak about "non-stranger rapes."  In just a few minutes he says a number of very interesting things.  For example, what if we prosecuted other crimes--say, auto theft--the way we prosecute rape?  Imagine the cross-examination: Q...

404. The highest standards

Posted on November 09, 2009
The last post described the crisis in Slovakia's judiciary, where ethical charges are being imposed to punish politically inconvenient judges.  The purge is being carried out by the Justice Minister of the governing coalition, which includes an explicitly racist party...

403. Le droit, c'est moi

Posted on November 06, 2009
From The Slovak Spectator, news of an open letter from 15 judges protesting disciplinary proceedings against one of their number.  Well, of course they don't like it, right?  But this story comes with a twist: The letter by the 15 judges cites cases of disciplinary proceedings against Judges Anna Benešová, Darina Kuchtová, Milan Ru?i?ka and Robert Urban to support their claim that disciplinary proceedings have turned into a tool of intimidation...

390. How did they get away with it?

Posted on September 29, 2009
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the gangster judges of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania (see post 389) is how long they got away with it.  It's not like they were sentencing children in secret, or even (if the stories are true) receiving famous mobsters in their chambers in a surreptitious manner...

389. Gangster law

Posted on September 27, 2009
Everyone knows it was pretty bad in Luzerne County (Scranton Wilkes-Barre) when the top-heavy courthouse was presided over by Judges Mark A. Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan, who last February pled guilty to selling children to a private detention facility, but recently were permitted to withdraw their guilty pleas...

388. Judge Heckler-Sleaze

Posted on September 24, 2009
Yesterday the Washington Supreme Court heard oral argument in Yousoufian v. Office of Ron Sims.  The unusual thing is that it issued an opinion in the case over eight months ago, in an opinion written by Judge Heckler himself, Richard Sanders.  (See post 383...

387. Who decides?

Posted on September 18, 2009
The New York Times website this evening runs the same story three times, although nothing indicates that the reporters or editors understood it was the same story.  First, with a color photograph of a costumed man statistically likely to die young, is this headline: "Ruling May Blunt Sports' Anti-Doping Plans...

386. Go figure

Posted on September 17, 2009
Two divisions of the Department of Justice have released crime figures this month.  The press release from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, reporting the results of the National Crime Victimization Survey, says: The violent crime rate in 2008—19...

385. Cold feet, hot type

Posted on September 15, 2009
Fox News reports that authorities have identified the body of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who disappeared just days before her wedding.  On the same web page they offer a video: "Cold Feet or Foul Play?"  Hey, they just report.  You decide...

384. The cord is light

Posted on September 13, 2009
The Supreme Court is going to screw up campaign financing again even worse than it already is.  That's a given.  These are the people, after all, who ruled that soft money could have no tendency to corrupt politicians forced to prostitute themselves to get it (see post 133) and that suing a sitting President is "highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [his] time...

383. Judge Heckler

Posted on September 12, 2009
CNN is reporting that the Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, who attacked and beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a stout cane, has raised a million dollars from his admirers in just the past couple of days. I suppose we should be grateful that, while the Palmetto State's tradition of political thuggery remains intact, it has evolved over the decades from attempted murder to Fox News-style attribution of bad motives...

382. Happy Labor Day

Posted on September 07, 2009
How better to celebrate Labor Day than with a visit to Big Debt, Small Law?  Subtitled "Dirt poor lawyers in a filthy rich town," it reaches hilarity with its language.  Scrape away the inspired invective (though why would you want to?) and you're left with a thoughtful and convincing economic and social analysis of the condition of recent law graduates from private-but-not-exclusive-enough law schools...

381. Cars

Posted on September 05, 2009
What is it about judges and parking spaces?  65-year-old Judge Robert Nalley of Charles County, Maryland - a bit of Maryland southeast of Arlington - demonstrated the aptness of Above the Law's name when he let the air out of a cleaning lady's tires...

380. Don't think of it

Posted on September 01, 2009
If you had told me six months ago that Americans could work themselves up into spittle-spraying rages in defense of their insurance companies, I might not have believed it.  Forgive me for doubting you. The New York Times reported that in his Saturday radio address, Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi charged that they - you know, them - wanted to "intrude 'a Washington bureaucrat in the relationship between a doctor and a patient...

379. Sessions' laws

Posted on August 31, 2009
The Sotomayor confirmation hearings were pretty sad.  It's not that I expect meaningfulness, or even necessarily meaning, but it would be nice if the participants could avoid actively misleading C-Span viewers. Alabama's Jeff Sessions describes himself as one who enjoyed a "distinguished legal career," and he was once proposed for a federal judgeship himself, and he wasn't turned down for lack of ability (not that that's necessarily a disqualifier, anyway), but for certain, ahem, speech patterns of the type you'd expect from an Establishment white Alabaman of a certain age...

378. Bigforest

Posted on May 30, 2009
Well, obviously Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed.  As some Republicans have belatedly realized, once they allowed people like Newt Gingrich to make her ethnicity and gender the chief issue, they assured her confirmation, barring only a dead-girl-or-live-boy or, you know, nanny-tax sort of revelation...

377. Otherworld pt. 2

Posted on May 23, 2009
Jeffrey Toobin has a profile of Chief Justice John Roberts in this week's New Yorker, revealing that George Bush's judge-pickers knew what they were doing when they named Roberts to the court. In the course of pulling back the curtain to reveal that an upper-crust man who devoted his adult life to Republican causes before receiving the best patronage job in America from a Republican president is, in fact, a Republican, Toobin writes: After four years on the Court, however, Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative...

376. Otherworld pt. 1

Posted on May 20, 2009
Post 375 linked to this article about Justice Souter's lachrymose farewell speech to the Third Circuit conference. The article contained this weird passage: Without lawyers and the lawyers who go on to be become judges, he said, society would be prone to "private acts of vengeance...

375. Replacing the 69-year-old virgin

Posted on May 17, 2009
The problem with finding a replacement for Justice Souter is that it matters so much. If only our Supreme Court justices were judges! In one of the more sanctimonious pieces of nonsense to come out of the Supreme Court in recent years, Justice Ginsburg once wrote: Unlike their counterparts in the political branches, judges are expected to refrain from catering to particular constituencies or committing themselves on controversial issues in advance of adversarial presentation...

374. Your dishonor

Posted on April 09, 2009
The mass media has a simple rule of thumb for measuring the newsworthiness of any story about the judiciary: it's not news unless it's been done to death already. That's why you hardly heard about about Knowles v. Mirzayance, decided two weeks ago, and what little coverage there was missed the only particularly significant thing about it...

373. Oh, well, that's okay, then

Posted on April 05, 2009
In New Mexico Territory, an Army colonel faced a court of inquiry - the equivalent of a grand jury or preliminary hearing - looking into his conduct. It seems that he marched his troops into town where they laid siege to the private residence of a person against whom the colonel had taken a personal dislike...

372. Linkages

Posted on March 24, 2009
CQ Press used to be Morgan Quitno but that's not where the name's Q comes from. CQ, as opposed to MQ, had something to do with Congressional Quarterly once, but apparently no more, unless the company's history was written by Tony Gilroy, writer-director of Duplicity, in which case it might mean Congressional Quarterly will now be published from MQ's hometown, William S...

371. "I just violated that sealing order."

Posted on March 23, 2009
The manuscript of For the Sake of Argument was sent off to the publisher earlier this month and came back copy-edited a little over a week later - a bit more quickly than in the old hand-set letterpress era of the 1990s. Back then, we mailed paper to each other, if you can imagine that...

372. Linkages

Posted on March 23, 2009
CQ Press used to be Morgan Quitno but that's not where the name's Q comes from. CQ, as opposed to MQ, had something to do with Congressional Quarterly once, but apparently no more, unless the company's history was written by Tony Gilroy, writer-director of Duplicity, in which case it might mean Congressional Quarterly will now be published from MQ's hometown, William S...

370. Good riddance, Chief Justice Taylor

Posted on November 15, 2008
From a fatuous Slate article I learned that Michigan's Chief Justice Clifford Taylor was ousted by the voters. Taylor was a contemptibly bad judge, already featured twice in these hallowed pixels. (See post 216 and post 144.) Here's what the Trial Lawyers had to say about him...

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