Blog Posts

Perhaps the Attorney General's office will submit a jury charge requesting that jurors be told that police officers are our friends. In this case, arising under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, the defendants are alleged to have brutalized a young man. The officers, surprise, deny it.Moral: You can the shit...

Dear Mom:
I finally made You Tube.
Norm

Managing client expectations is nowhere as important as when agreeing to handle a civil case for a plaintiff. There are plenty of folks who have waited a lifetime for validation for injuries real and imagined. All the courts can offer is compensation for harms the law recognizes. Interviewing...

When the criminal justice system fails, it is, perhaps, normal to expect someone to take responsibility for the failure. The rhetoric of prosecution is steeped in the ethic of personal responsibility. Horrible things are done to people in the name of holding them accountable for what they have...

When the criminal justice system fails, it is, perhaps, normal to expect someone to take responsibility for the failure. The rhetoric of prosecution is steeped in the ethic of personal responsibility. Horrible things are done to people in the name of holding them accountable for what they have...

Unless you have an institutional client or two with deep pockets, you live, as a lawyer in the land of Smalllaw, by your wits. That means the telephone is your friend, except when it is not. The telephone can strangle you if you let it.
We get a lot of referrals from other lawyers. I used to...

One of my fantasies as a lawyer is that uniform rules of procedure be set to govern civil and criminal cases. We pursue justice in both fora, don't we? Then let justice be truly blind. Let's place life and liberty in the same scales we use to measure an insurance company's money.
I've called...

It's all so simple in law school: Proven facts are supposed to yield predictable consequences. Learn the fact patterns that constitute causes of actions and crimes. Master the evidence code. Ace procedure. Then on to fame and fortune as a trial lawyer.
They forget to teach the part about...

It is a tale of two nominees, one the golden child of doting Upper West Side, Manhattan parents, seemingly destined for great things and expensively reared and educated, the other largely self-made, the product of two blue-collar workers struggling to get by in Detroit. While the child of Manhattan...

It is a tale of two nominees, one the golden child of doting Upper West Side, Manhattan parents, seemingly destined for great things and expensively reared and educated, the other largely self-made, the product of two blue-collar workers struggling to get by in Detroit. While the child of Manhattan...