Blog Posts

The best stories we keep to ourselves. It’s the law’s way. You hang a shingle asking people to come to tell you their troubles. Good lawyers often lose a taste for fiction as a form of entertainment. We don’t need to make things up. Just be alert. Pay attention. Try not to be...

Does anyone doubt that if Anders Behring Breivik were prosecuted for the murder of 77 people in the United States we’d either seek to kill him or to imprison him for as many consecutive life terms as the judge could impose? We administer justice with a sledgehammer, shattering the lives of...

I just don’t get Lance Armstrong’s decision to throw in the towel. If he wasn’t blood-doping, he ought to stand his ground and fight. If he was doping, he ought to admit it. But walking away in a huff is sort of like hopping off your bike to walk it up a steep hill. Champions...

Oxcodone is the new "gateway drug," or so federal prosecutors are reporting in their sentencing memoranda. Take some oxy, and you’re on the slippery slope to serious drug addiction. And let’s not forget the violence associated with drug dealing of all sorts. So let’s slam oxy...

One of the reasons I refuse to have anything to do with the American Bar Association is the group’s patent sense of unreality. It belts outs standards, policy statements and awards that seek to define the norms of practicing lawyers. Even when it seeks to be daring it becomes merely droll:...

Times change, and so do the means of challenging those holding power. At the time of the founding in the United States, the individual right to bear arms was sacrosanct. If every able-bodied man, well, make than white man, were armed, then no tyrant could hold power. We the people would shoot them...

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office took a gentle swat at me the other day. It believes I came dangerously close to violating the rules of professional responsibility as to pre-trial publicity by speaking out to the press. The case involves a client accused of promoting prostitution as...

Mitt Romney’s decision to pick a budget-slashing bad bay zealot from Wisconsin as a running mate didn’t surprise me. That’s the Romney brand: technocracy and a focus on the bottom line. Romney’s gamble is that we will trust him to manage the economy much like he was trusted...

You decide one night to go to the movies. So you trundle off to downtown New Haven for a late-evening showing of the new Batman flick, "The Dark Knight Returns." Because it’s New Haven, you decide you better be armed to defend yourself. Who knows, you might get mugged by your parking...

Here’s a one-word review that sums up my reaction to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown Publishing, New York, 2012): Wow! I liked the book so much I am inclined to pick it up and read it all over again. Now. If you are looking for a perfect end-of-the-summer read, this is it. Amy and...