Blog Posts

FEW THINGS TERRIFY ME AS MUCH as the thought of being kept alive, indefinitely — hooked to machines, monitored, maintained and held in the land of the living long past the point at which the joy of living has ceased.
I worry less about death than I do about pain. It may be appointed unto...

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., might be one of those understated legal geniuses who see things in life’s tawdry fact patterns the rest of us miss. Or maybe he’s just the son of a famous man, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who rode his daddy’s coattails all...

Secession anyone? The last time there was a groundswell of support for the states to secede from the union, we ended up fighting a bloody civil war. One hundred and fifty years later, there are new calls for secession. Just how serious is the new secession movement?
The mainstream press has...

I’ll be starting trial this week in Norwich. My client is accused of murder. The victim was shot to death, point blank, with a hand gun. The gun has never been found. As near as I can tell from reading the police reports, a bunch of people were hanging out in a low-income neighborhood,...

So we’re to have four more years of Barack Obama in the White House. Good, I say. Better him than a throwback to a 1960s sitcom. Once the election results were tallied and the loser had conceded the race, it suddenly came to me: I distrusted Mitt Romney because he reminded me of one of the...

Even if you are in mourning about the results of the presidential election, and I am not, you will agree that there is one occasion for rejoicing: With the elections safely behind us, both President Obama and the Senate can now turn their attention to fully staffing the federal judiciary. The...

I did not get a chance to head out to Milford to watch any of the trial of Jason Anderson, the former Milford police officer involved in the high-speed collision that killed two teenagers. Frankly, I don’t like watching other lawyers try cases; it’s sort of like watching ice melt. When...

I did not feel like much a sovereign when I walked out of the polling place this morning. No, I felt as though I’d just been tossed from a fast-moving car after a six billion dollar – the sum spent on political advertisements this year – joy ride. Oh, yes, I cast a ballot in favor...

I’ve a brand-spanking-new lawyer reporting for duty this week. Freshly minted and admitted to the bar, she’s eager to show the world what she can do. I need her to help stay atop the chaos that comes of representing people in crisis. But how can I prepare her for what she’s about...

F. Lee Bailey appears this week before the State of Maine Board of Bar Examiners to request permission to once again practice law. I am rooting for Bailey. He’s been disbarred now for more than a decade. If he wants to return to the trenches, we should welcome him back. At 79, he’s...