Blog Posts

I start trial in about ten days. The facts are gruesome. A mother driving home with her three young children is involved in a head-on collision with another car. Two of the mother's children are killed on impact; she and the surviving child are seriously injured. The driver and passenger of the the...

It was a close call this morning. My client was accused of sexually abusing a minor by digitally penetrating her vagina. The child was five at the time. She claims it happened; my client denied it. There was no physical evidence to corroborate the child's claim. So we prepared for trial.
On...

The following is an excerpt from Clarence Darrow in Hell, a play written by Kenan Heise and Dan Heise. In this scene, Darrow is accompanied by none other than Dante. Darrow has refused to confess his sins at the gates of Hell. He disputes now with Charon the need for such a confession. Indeed, he...

I own a small firm. I have four associates, and one lawyer who is of counsel to my firm, Karen Torre. Karen's a great lawyer, but we rarely see eye-to-eye on politics. The other day, she decided to tell the world I am a moron. I pass the column along as an example of bad rhetoric: Call it a failed...

"When a metaphor contains a radically new vision of world it gives absolutely no information until after the hearer has entered into it and experienced it from inside itself. In such cases the hearer's first reaction may be to refuse to enter into the metaphor and one will seek to translate it...

I just learned that the University of Connecticut School of Law is starting an International Human Rights Clinic in the spring semester. The clinic will be taught by Professor Mark Janis. I have applied for permission to audit the course. It strikes me as a unique opportunity to learn about...

This will be a funky Sunday. Nothing will change that. Tomorrow morning I will cross examine a six-year-old girl. She contends my client touched her where she should not have been touched. I know what the issues are in this case, but I have never enjoyed the cross examination of a child.
Under...

I had a hard time sleeping the other night. It started around midnight, long after my wife and all the animals had gone to sleep. Indeed, I had drifted off at 8:30 or so. We are early to bed and early to rise, although I steal several hours in the dead of most nights to read, the purest of solitary...

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
Archilochus
I did not find this quotation on my own. My attention was directed to it by Isaiah Berlin, one of my favorite essayists and political theorists. Berlin taught for many years at Oxford, wrote dozens of essays and...

My wife and I are readers. We have a lot of books around the house, in my offices, in the book store we own: There are books everywhere. Now that all our children are grown and gone making lives of their own, our evenings are once more given to the pleasure of long hours reading.
In the past...