Blog Posts

In the beginning, John Locke once wrote, all the world was America. We now recognize this as an ethnographic conceit. But the point Locke was trying to make remains valid: Before there was government, there was civil society, and before civil society, there was a state of nature. This world without...

I set about blogging with all the wrong moves. In 2005, I was a columnist for a Connecticut legal newspaper, where I had written for five years. Mike Cernovich and I struck up a friendship. When he called to ask if I wanted to blog with him at Crime and Federalism, I had to ask what a blog was. I...

This just in. It speaks for itself, and it speaks of improbable hope redeemed.
Miracles happen. This morning at about 3:00 a.m., the surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Dr. Sukru Emre, accepted a donor liver for my husband Wayne Keeney. At 6:00 a.m., Wayne underwent transplan t surgery! This...

My trial season has ended for the 2009/2010 year. At least I think it has. Things can change in this the Land of Steady Habits with the swinging of a gavel. But odds are I will not face another jury until September, when I retry the same murder case on which jurors could not agree this past...

I just finished a tough run of trials that kept me running from one end of the state to the other since just after Labor Day. Soon I will take a month off, and play around the house, trying to stop a perpetual leak in an outbuilding, playing with our dogs, trying, just this once, to stay on top of...

The Securities and Exchange Commission has elected to pursue a claim against David Zilkha for insider trading, after settling a similar claim against his former employer, Pequot Capital, for a whopping $28 million. The financial press is agog over this turn of events. The investigation of the claim...

This just arrived by way of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association. I know Wayne Keeney. If you are in a position to help, please do so. Apparently, he is near death.
Wayne R. Keeney, a member of the Connecticut Bar, is in the intensive care unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He is in...

Evoking the right to remain silent by remaining silent is too ambiguous, the United States Supreme Court held yesterday. In yet another 5-4 decision chipping away at the right of the people to be other than supine playthings for the state, the Court held that silence, even protracted silence, is no...

If I were a drinking man, I'd know just what to do. I'd grab me a bottle of something strong, Dewars, maybe, or Tanqueray, and I'd start doing shots, one after another until the edges ran a little smoother. Today was one of those nerve jangling days trial lawyers dread.
It started easily...

A good friend and long-time blogger sent me the following message:
"I've noticed that your posts have changed markedly over the past couple of months. You wax more eloquently, but wax. You've become more self-indulgent. You have become increasingly "sensitive", almost to the point of whiny....