Blog Posts

Lawyers ought to be required to ride circuit, to travel to different regions of the country and appear in courts and before judges they do not know. The forms of justice aren’t rigid and ossified. Justice, if that is what we truly do in a courtroom, comes in many forms. There just...

Never doubt for a moment that law is at its core politics. If you do doubt it, then read Jeffrey Toobin’s latest book, “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court” (Doubleday, New York, 2012).
Toobin writes about the high court as well as anyone living. His first...

I know a thing or two about suing police officers. Indeed, I paid for a few college educations with the proceeds of money earned in the well of the court in police misconduct claims. In those cases, cities and the state paid for the misdeeds of errant cops. The men kept their jobs. No one even...

A funny thing happened in the court the other day. I notified my adversaries I intended to call an expert or two. The other side asked for a hearing to challenge the witnesses. They claimed the testimony would be little more than junk science.
Trial courts have a responsibility to determine...

The literal and figurative firestorm erupting worldwide over the YouTube film “The Innocence of Islam” provokes the sense of despair one gets watching a couple divorce: The pretext for the latest quarrel is threadbare. Everyone sees that. But the divorce, that’s inevitable....

If you doubt for one moment our membership in the animal kingdom, spend some time in family court in a high-conflict case. I swear you can all but hear the parties snarling at one another in territorial rage. The claims of reason are tenuous when what’s at stake is an affair of the heart. We...

The general counsel of Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College has some explaining to do. As general counsel and board member of the college, R. Rex Parris professes a dedication to the college’s mission statement. That statement pledges a commitment to seeking justice for “the poor,...

Friends and colleagues warned me against agreeing to appear on the Dr. Phil show. But my client wanted to go. The client asked me to come along, to make sure things did not go horribly wrong. So I put on a good suit, brushed my hair and drove to the site of the interview. It’s quite a...

The best stories we keep to ourselves. It’s the law’s way. You hang a shingle asking people to come to tell you their troubles. Good lawyers often lose a taste for fiction as a form of entertainment. We don’t need to make things up. Just be alert. Pay attention. Try not to be...

Does anyone doubt that if Anders Behring Breivik were prosecuted for the murder of 77 people in the United States we’d either seek to kill him or to imprison him for as many consecutive life terms as the judge could impose? We administer justice with a sledgehammer, shattering the lives of...