Blog Posts

Framing the dispute between Apple Inc. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the need to balance security and liberty tilts the debate in favor of the government. A more candid framing destroys the government’s assertions: the conflict pits slavery against freedom. Who favors...

Antonin Scalia’s death doesn’t just yield a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court; it provides an opportunity to re-examine the role of the Court in American life, and to ask fundamental questions about how we decide what is, and is not, just.
No...

The public at large rarely gets a glimpse behind the curtain of justice, and thus can’t appreciate the ugly reality of the criminal justice system. Sadly, defendants are often punished for relying upon the very rights we say we revere. Nowhere is this more evident than in imposition of what...

Odds are, you have never visited someone imprisoned for life, or for many decades. Prisoners are outcasts, beloved, if at all, only by their families; remembered, if only periodically, by their lawyers. We give them numbers and then forbid their jailers to get too close to numbered...

Utopian or dystopian?
You decide. But consider seriously the question: The Muslim Brotherhood forms a new a political party in France, and, in a coalition with the left, forms a new government, with a prominent Muslim as prime minister. Then the Saudis purchase the Sorbonne, an ancient and...

Just why the office of the chief state's attorney is hell-bent on killing people is one of those deeper mysteries I am destined never to understand. But there stood Harry Weller, one of the state's smartest appellate lawyers and prosecutors, in the well of the Connecticut Supreme Court, urging...

The trouble with appeals to heaven is the answer might disappoint. For the folks who’ve commandeered the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, that could spell disaster.
My pulse quickens and a certain anarchist joy dawns when I hear of a group of citizens reclaiming their...

It is the day before Christmas, and I should be scurrying around, doing my last minute shopping, and letting the holiday spirit overcome me all at once. I fight it, you see, feeling somehow that a day celebrating the birth of the Son of God by a virgin is just too much to take.
But I yield in...

At year's end, it is sometimes customary to name a person of the year, so let me add my nominee: Aylan Al-Kurdi. Odds are, you never learned his name, but it's also true that you will never forget the sight of him. He's the tiny body laying face down on a beach, dead, near Bodrum, Turkey, his face...

I felt much as a secret agent, or a confidential informant must feel, settling in among strangers, listening to them talk, wary of my surroundings. But I was one of them, wasn’t I? No one forced me to attend. I chose to be present, and for no apparent ulterior motive.
Yet I had...