If you are not from New England, odds are you don’t understand the significance of a town green. It is a city’s center, a haven, if you will, from the particular cares and concerns dividing a community. The town green is where the people can and do meet. New England towns typically have greens. They are part of the folklore of the region, a place where town meetings and congregational churches place a premium on civil cooperation and participation.
That’s the vanilla, Norman Rockwell vision of the world.
In New Haven, things are just a touch different. You see,...
March 13, 2012
Everyone, it seems, wants to be a pundit. That includes J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, a federal appellate judge and one-time contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Wilkinson decries the fact that we debate endlessly in this country the scope and meaning of the federal constitution. Let it be, he counsels. It is too dangerous a fire to stir.
In an op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, Wilkinson warns of our national obsession with constitutional conflict. We harm ourselves by seeking to define ourselves, he suggests. Why it would be better, I suppose he...
March 12, 2012
Michelle Alexander writes in this morning’s New York Times about mass incarceration and plea bargaining. She wonders what would happen if defendants everywhere organized and refused to bargain. That would collapse the criminal justice system, wouldn’t it? Imagine prosecutors having to try all those cases! Might that not force a system that regards violations of the law as a board game designed and intended to sustain a prison-industrial complex rethink the madness of making almost any form of deviance from antiquated norms a crime?
Odds are Ms. Alexander, a law professor, a...
March 11, 2012
Lawyers who tell war stories are tedious bores. I mean, we all have stories to tell, right? What makes your story so special that I should stop what I am doing to listen to it? Yet we can’t help telling these tales. The truth of the matter is, a lawyer lives a privileged sort of life. We get front-row seats at the theater called chaos.
So let me relay a story, sanitized somewhat to protect the names of folks who might not like being memorialized in this manner.
I do not often take cases out of state. Although Connecticut is a small place, there is generally enough work to...
March 8, 2012
March 7, 2012
Any man married for more than a decade should have an intuitive grasp of the dignitary interests served by the right to remain silent when accused. I...
March 6, 2012
Here's the latest in the ongoing saga of the Bridgeport school board crisis. Unless you have followed the story to date, this will not make a lot of...
March 2, 2012
I hope Tanya McDowell will forgive us, someday, for our hypocrisy and cruelty. I hope her son will as well. But first she will have to serve her...
March 1, 2012
I have long grown accustomed to the facts of life known to all criminal defense lawyers: little people get run over and crushed in court. When a...
February 29, 2012
This just in from a source watching Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's mad scramble to deprive Bridgeport voters of the right to vote for their own board of...
February 29, 2012
A call came in moments ago. Mayor Bill Finch and his aides are busy at work in Hartford, lobbying lawmakers to pass legislation retroactively...