Blog Posts

Jury selection is scheduled to begin next week in the case of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis late last spring. The death of Mr. Floyd sparked protests, and riots across the country on the theory that his death was demonstrative proof of...

I’ll never forget the thrill of first reading John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, first published in 1689. (Its actual title is An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government; the essay is routinely published with an essay attacking Robert...

Am I guilty of professional misconduct worthy of forfeiture of my law license if I publicly question whether we really need Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day? Or if I post a photograph of a Budweiser beer bottle surrounded by Coors beer cans wearing hoods above the caption “Ku...

The thing that most terrifies me about the Covid-19 pandemic is not the prospect of death or physical illness. No one gets out of here alive: I’m old enough to understand that less as the abstract application of a syllogism – all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore...

Spotify just earned my respect. It did so by looking cancel culture in the eye, and saying: ‘f@ck you.’ I’ll be taking a subscription to Spotify this afternoon. It’s a safe haven for freedom of speech.
What did Spotify do?
It...

Does the State of Connecticut have a coherent statewide plan for the resumption of jury trials? If so, it is one of the best-kept secrets in the state. I talk each week to prosecutors in the various courthouses. One would think they would know what’s going on. They don’t.
...

To listen to my father tell it, he crossed the border from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit, Michigan, as a teenager in the late 1930s. He was accompanied by his father. Both were illegal immigrants looking for opportunity. They came from Sfakia, Crete.
I was born in 1955,...

Just in case you’ve not had enough of all things pandemic-related, I recommend Lawrence Wright’s, “The End of October,” published just weeks ago. Mr. Wright, a writer at The New Yorker, previously wrote a gripping and Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the plot...

In the last piece of this series on Dystopian Jitters, I wrote about how the COVID-19 pandemic has been used to foster tolerance of mass surveillance. (See, Mass Surveillance and COVID-19 – Dystopian Jitters, I) Given the imperative to survive, most everyone is willing to...

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...