Blog Posts

I am a CIA reject. Almost thirty years ago, I was a candidate to become an undercover operative, or spy. I interviewed with agents fresh from assignments in Moscow and South Korea in hotel rooms at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel. I took aptitude tests at an anonymous looking building in Reston,...

The Supreme Court will hear argument today in another prosecutorial immunity case, Pottawattomie County v. McGhee. The question is whether prosecutors who manufacture or fabricate trial evidence are immune from a suit arising under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. I will be surprised if the Court decides...

The poll results are in: Just under half of those responding believe that I should continue to post about the Trial Lawyers College. I'm tempted, but I am going to say "no thanks."
First, even if the poll reflects some broader reality, a dubious proposition given the fact that the comments...

I started picking another jury in a state court proceeding this week. After two days, we had selected three jurors. We need three more, not to mention the alternates. Odds are, it will take another three days to select the eight people necessary to hear this case. Question: Why take five days to do...

Well, I knew I'd stirred a hornet's nest by writing about the Trial Lawyers College. But refraining from writing has stirred an even bigger nest, and attracted this blog's first hacker.
I received a note today from an apparently friendly alum asking why I had seen the need to label a certain...

Go ahead and keep sending nasty posts. I am not going to publish them. Neither are several others folks we both know. I recommend you start your own page.
Note: IP address removed. See above: Hacker alert!

Prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois, want answers about the students associated with the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University. I say, the state should get those answers, but only if it agrees to provide like information to criminal defendants seeking information about police...

I broke down the other day and bought two volumes of a six volume set I have simply not been able to find in any bookshop or on line. I have been looking for years, and the volumes simply seem to have vanished.
I found volumes three and four Carlyle and Carlyel's "A History of Medieval...

Is the Internet killing meaningful communication?
Today's New York Times book review contains an essay written by Ben Yagoda on John Freeman's The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. One line from the review leaped out at me: Email "is an instantaneous, demanding,...

I have an anonymous reader who in recent days has posted dozens of times. I stopped publishing him or her when it became apparent the person pressed some sort of existential rewind button and was sending messages with the same theme over and over again. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what...