Blog Posts


In re: Andrew McDonald -- Shame on Senate Republicans

Just why the Republican Party is intent on importing the same level of asinine partisan vitriol rampant in Washington, D.C., to Connecticut is a deep, and troubling, mystery. This is a small state. Ideology ought not to trump civility; we actually used to get things done here. But the ideologues...

Thank You, Shon Hopwood

Practice law long enough and a certain weariness sets in. It’s more than a function of aging, although that is certainly a factor. But it’s also the accumulated wear and tear of too close an acquaintance with sorrow, anger, fear – the raw emotions spawned by the needs that drive...

Dowd Is Out; More Pointless "Donald Drama"

The resignation of Donald Trump’s chief personal lawyer, John Dowd, brings to mind an aphorism often discussed, but rarely publicly acknowledged, among lawyers: “You can lead a client to the courthouse, but you can’t make him think.”
Dowd, it...

#MeToo's Presumption of Victimhood

Burdens of proof matter in the criminal justice and the civil justice systems. In the criminal courts, the state must prove its allegations by the law’s highest standard: proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In the civil system, there is a lesser standard, what the law call’s...

Crying "Foul" After The Yale Rape Case Is Misleading

How dare I ask questions about text messages, alcohol consumption and what an accuser wore on the night she claimed she was raped by an acquaintance? That’s the media’s take away after last week’s acquittal of Saifullah Khan in New Haven. The former Yale student was...

Call Me, Harvey. I’ll Defend You

Not since Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm sitting across a diner’s table from Billy Crystal in “When Harry Met Sally” have we seen such disingenuous huffing and puffing about sex from Hollywood. The starlets are atwitter with allegations of being groped, and worse, by Harvey...

Bitcoin's China Syndrome

All eyes are on China as bitcoin rises and falls on digital exchanges. The Wall Street Journal reports that just this past Friday, Chinese authorities in Beijing met with bitcoin entrepreneurs to announce that it will soon shut down bitcoin exchanges and forbid bitcoin trading, even on a...

Bitcoin Will Outlast J.P. Morgan

Bitcoin went on a rollercoaster ride last week, spiking in value on some exchanges just north of $5,000. Then J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon told the world that the cryptocurrency is a fraud, and that he’d fire any employee of his he caught trading it. Bitcoin’s price tumbled.
...

USA v. Shkreli: A First Amendment Outrage

The First Amendment has for decades been interpreted to protect “inappropriate” speech, a fact well known to anyone who has sat for a bar examination in the past 40 years. So what was United States District Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto thinking this week when he revoked bail for Martin...

A Suicidal Computer? Was Saint Augustine Right?

From Washington, D.C., comes news of the most ingenious proof ever of the existence of God. It comes in the form of an apparent suicide.
National Public Radio reported this weekend on a robot that propelled itself into a fountain, shorting its circuits and effectively...

© Norm Pattis is represented by Elite Lawyer Management, managing agents for Exceptional American Lawyers
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