Blog Posts

The myth of American exceptionalism is disproven with a vengeance when it comes to race. God didn’t pick North America as a preserve for the righteous. We are no city on a hill beckoning the world to do as we do. At the founding we enslaved people of color; today we spend other people’s...

Administrative subpoenas offer great opportunities for abuse by the Government. A pencil pusher in a regulatory agency has the freedom to fire off requests for documents, sometimes thousands of documents, without bearing any cost at all. And without any judicial oversight.
It works like this: A...

The jury returned a verdict in favor of my client today. Life is good. Here are two stories about the case. I am on auto pilot today.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2009/04/willoughby_not.php
http://www.nhregister.com/

I've never understood why folks belong to secret societies. What's the point of esoteric words, secret handshakes and clubs?
David V. Barrett's Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (2007), didn't help me understand esoterica any better. But it was a good read...

Gerry Spence turned eighty this year. There will be a birthday bash for him at Thunderhead Ranch this summer. Invitations have been sent out. I got one. And I thought about going, even going so far as to ask a friend for the names of hotels in the area. I've not been to the ranch, home of the Trial...

Easter Sunday, you say? I hadn't noticed anything different about the day. The Sun shines this morning, to be sure. In New England that is a rare thing this time of year. But otherwise this day, this Sunday, is no different than any other. A late breakfast over the newspaper with my wife, and then...

I got an email the other day from a regular reader. She noted that another legal blogger had written about his apparent disappointment that I had not linked to his blog. Sure enough, someone wrote that I didn't think his blog was "good enough" to link to mine. A small pebble was dropped. The...

I confess that I am a lost soul. So lost, indeed, that I wonder whether it makes sense even to hope of being found, or finding anything really at all. So often when I hear those with faith discuss salvation I wonder, salvation from what? We take on faith our births and gradually come to a sense of...

There ought to be a law against adding something to the penal code without at the same time removing something else. Each year, the list of ways in which we can err and become a ward of the state grows longer and longer. Is it any wonder that the United States tops the list of industrialized...

I am hung over today, spent, limp and dangling by a thread. Wherever I was yesterday, or the day before or the day before is a blur. Today I am unsteady and trying hard to catch my bearings. All this and I haven't a drop of alcohol. I'm recovering from a trial. It was a tough one.
The jury is...