Blog Posts

State and federal law enforcement agencies make millions of dollars each year manipulating asset forfeiture laws. Generally, these laws permit seizure of items -- including houses, cash and cars -- that are the fruits or instrumentalities of a crime. If forfeited, the funds, whether...

We’ve reached the breaking point. We’ve each become gods in our own idiosyncratic religions, idols served by congregations of one. The result is a public space reduced to warring imperatives. Welcome to the end, as in the logical conclusion, of pluralism.
I’m talking, of...

I was in court the other day when I erupted in a tone loud enough to be overheard by others: "You know, Aristotle once said that it is hard to be angry to the right degree, at the right person, at the right time. He preached moderation and wisdom. You're not being moderate or...

“Angel came down from heaven yesterday; she stayed with me just long enough to rescue me.” The words are Jimi Hendrix’s. I’ve been listening to the song for the past eight months dreading this day. I began to hum them the day I learned Penelope would die as a result of her...

I’m at a loss to explain to my client why she cannot have the book I sent her. But it is so. The warden will not permit her to accept a Daily Roman Missal sent to her from Amazon. Why? It is bound in leather, the reasoning goes. Really? Do prison officials expect her to fashion a weapon from...

Erin Andrews and Hulk Hogan have me wondering about St. Augustine’s pears. Is something like a meaningful sense of sin taking root?
Andrews and Hogan, whose legal name is Terry G. Bollea, were awarded eye-popping verdicts in separate trials in recent weeks.
Andrews, a Fox...

I’m thinking of sending David Brooks of The New York Times a scholarship. I’d like him to attend Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyer’s College this summer. Of course, Brooks is not a lawyer; he is a columnist. But, given what he’s written recently about Donald...

Merrick Garland, eh?
Throw that fish back. He’s just more of the same. We need a new kind of justice on the Supreme Court. We need someone with experience defending folk accused of a crime.
President Barack Obama surprised no one with his nomination of Garland to fill Antonin...

Harper Lee died before the reckoning, but she saw it coming. I’m betting she even foresaw Donald Trump’s ascendancy. She was a realist about race in the United States, you see.
At least she was in her first book, “Go Set A Watchman”; she tried to stifle that realism in...

Forgive me for being churlish, curmudgeonly, even, but Apple Inc. has thus far fired far wide of the mark in its dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What’s at stake in the iPhone controversy is far more significant than balancing privacy and security.
The federal...