Blog Posts

The conventional wisdom holds that you do a client a great deal of good if you spare him a term behind bars. Prison and the loss of liberty is the great evil to be avoided in the criminal justice system. Rare is the individual who actually benefits from imprisonment; rarer still is the crime so...

I was encouraged the other day to see a phalanx of protesters outside the New Haven courthouse on Elm Street. There looked to be 30 or so people, many with signs, standing on the courthouse steps just after 9 a.m. As I got nearer to the steps, I strained to read a row of signs held by five...

George Zimmerman is now behind bars, to the delight of those who believe he killed Trayvon Martin with neither justification nor excuse. But the trial of that case has not yet taken place. The question of whether Zimmerman acted in self-defense has not yet been decided. All that has been decided,...

I have a confession: Kurt Vonnegut has been a dead key to me ever since I started to read both for pleasure and spiritual succor. I’d pick up a Vonnegut novel or story, start to read armed with the conviction that I was about so find something I had been missing. Then I would get distracted....

He faced a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison when the case was called in for trial. Then the trial judge dismissed the count calling for such a penalty. During several days of jury selection, the judge then ruled that certain statements made by the defendant were obtained in violation of the...

The perversity of the trial tax was on display the other day. My client was facing potential decades behind bars, and, as the jury was being selected, he reconsidered his decision to plead not guilty. We went to the prosecutor to negotiate. He held firm on a prior plea offer previously rejected,...

I write today to thank on old friend for teaching more about the practice of law in a single moment than I learned in three years of law school. His name is Jon Travis Brooks. I am not sure where he is now. We were students together decades ago. One of his passions was diplomatic history. His...

Thomas E. Perez at the United States Justice Department might be a genius, but, then again, he might not know what he is doing. I keep seeing his face in the New York Times announcing litigation of one sort another against public officials. The problem is there is no principled basis for...

A welcome and not altogether unexpected piece of news arrived in the mail. It was from the Grievance Committee. The panel found no further need to investigate a complaint lodged against me. I filed the complaint myself.
I learned a long time ago never to run from a fight. Meet the...

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and even a little chest-thumping about the collapse of Manhattan mega-firm Dewey LaBoeuf. The hand wringers wonder what has become of the law; the chest thumpers can’t say I told you so loudly enough. From where I sit, the collapse of a Biglaw giant...