Blog Posts

I am sick to death of the Cheshire home invasion cases. They linger, like a nightmare that will not go away. If there is a reason for good cheer, it is that this final trial, the penalty phase in the case of Joshua Komisarjevsky, is now upon us. It is fitting in a gruesome sort of way that the...

“These men are human beings, not chimpanzees or gorillas. They belong to the same species as we do. And we’re not hardwired to commit these acts. If, as it appears, the percentage of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years, and it’s...

I suppose reports that the Security and Exchange Commission just extracted a $285 million settlement from Citigroup for mortgage-related fraud ought to come as welcome news. But some part of me suspects this fine is little more than taking back some of the money the federal government gave the...

I spent a lot of time this past summer studying the behavior of starlings, and trying to figure out what makes instantaneous communication among a large group possible. Hundreds of thousands birds can fly in massive, non-choreographed, but seemingly coordinated and breathtakingly beautiful...

I have, from time to time, been known to lose my cool in court. I’ve fumed at judges, witnesses, even marshals. On one occasion I was sent abruptly to the lockup for words spoken to a marshal by a judge who thought due process was a board game. Courtrooms make me tense. There’s a lot on...

We are more than the mere sum of our possessions, of course. But what we own has real significance: it marks our place in society, the elbow-rubbing world of men and women sharing a place at a given moment in time. Distributive justice defines our sense of how possessions ought to be shared in a...

“To what end?” a friend asked this week while discussing the protests originating in Wall Street and spreading now from one city to the next. “What’s the point?”
We were two lawyers standing in the hallway of a local court, wasting billable hours while awaiting...

Here’s the closing argument I would like to see Jeremiah Donovan give on behalf of Joshua Komisarjevsky. Something tells me he won’t.
"Four years ago, a family in Cheshire was destroyed and all of us awoke to a living nightmare. I doubt there is a person in Connecticut who is...

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has been in a tailspin for the past three-plus years. People have lost their jobs, and their hope. Government has been on the verge of collapse. It is a time of austerity.


But not for everyone.


It turns out that...

I see Wall Street and I keep thinking the state of nature. I am not referring to the bare knuckle tactics of brazen traders like Gordon Gecko, huffing, puffing and bragging about a life lived on the solitary, nasty, brutish and short trading floors of our financial palaces. I am thinking of the...