Blog Posts

Yeah, Schorr couldn't sing, but he did anyhow. And with Frank Zappa. Somehow, this strikes me as almost sublime in a homely sort of way. Listen here.

A former law partner used to say that the practice of law is really social oncology: Criminal defense and civil rights lawyers spend their time dealing with things that just don't fit within a well-functioning social organism. A man accused of murder represents an aggressive malignancy; a person...

I was reluctant to read Charles Ogletree's book on the by now much overblown confrontation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Crowley. This was a garden variety event mismanaged by both the arresting officer and the arrestee. But for the fact that Gates is well connected and famous the case...

The best part of my summer is the time I spend at Glen Highland Farm in New York. We've just returned from a couple of stints there, about nine days with our border collies, Penelope and Odysseus. These dogs have trained my wife and me to be better listeners, and, perhaps, better human...

My wife and I have taken the better part of July off this year. The plan was to take the entire month, but the feds got interested in a client of mine. I interrupted the vacation for several days to try to talk them out of an indictment. I still don't know whether I succeeded, but I suspect not. So...

Books about race and criminal justice are typically depressing. In the war of the establishment versus angry black men, the establishment wins the power struggle, but is left defending a vulnerable castle. The moral high ground goes to the dispossessed. Because I am white by accident of...

My few regular readers know that dogs are an important part of my life. My two border collies, Odysseus and Penelope, run our pack during vacation season. So we are heading out bright and early Saturday morning to an off-the-Internet location to spend six days playing with sheep, working on agility...

I spoke to a reporter this morning who has attended each and every day of the Rod Blagojevich trial in Chicago. Based on what I heard, there's still time for the defense to pull the the former governor out of this mess. But it's a long shot. Things will have to break just right. Illinois jurors...

Yesterday, my wife and I traveled to Boston to visit my mother-in-law, who lives in a residence for people with special needs. She is in a ward where the doors are kept locked. But she does not really see this as a prison. She suffers from dementia, you see; and in her late-eighties she...

The most profound form of "stranger danger" apparent in the nation's criminal justice system arises not in the form of a sexual predator lurking in the shadows. No, the stranger who presents the gravest danger to our society is the lawmaker, judge or prosecutor who seeks to transform the criminal...