Blog Posts

I spoke to a reporter this morning who has attended each and every day of the Rod Blagojevich trial in Chicago. Based on what I heard, there's still time for the defense to pull the the former governor out of this mess. But it's a long shot. Things will have to break just right. Illinois jurors...

Yesterday, my wife and I traveled to Boston to visit my mother-in-law, who lives in a residence for people with special needs. She is in a ward where the doors are kept locked. But she does not really see this as a prison. She suffers from dementia, you see; and in her late-eighties she...

The most profound form of "stranger danger" apparent in the nation's criminal justice system arises not in the form of a sexual predator lurking in the shadows. No, the stranger who presents the gravest danger to our society is the lawmaker, judge or prosecutor who seeks to transform the criminal...

John Kindley's People v. State is one of my favorite blogs. He's a libertarian of sorts. His page is steeped in the history of anarchism. He is a young lawyer. This is a recipe for heart break, and this morning I read that he is, in fact, heart broken. You see, it is wearing on him to appear in one...

I'm mid-way through a month away from the office and something like calm has descended. It therefore came as a rude awakening last night to be reminded of emergencies in the office. I tossed and turned all night long, considering the issues that had arisen in the course of an afternoon. When I got...

Hat Tip: Jamison Koehler

There's just no way to sugar coat the killing of Oscar Grant. A white cop shot the kid to death, in the back, in front of witnesses, and was videotaped doing so. And still a jury could not find it in its collective heart to convict the cop of murder. Instead, jurors concluded the cop made a...

I would not normally write about the voir dire of a prospective juror. I respect how difficult it is to answer questions in open court in the presence of strangers. But I am going to make an exception just this once. I am going to make an exception because the prospective juror is a public...

There’s something funky about the Justice Department’s lawsuit to invalidate Arizona’s immigration legislation. I keep thinking about Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion. Could it be that federalism is in its death throes? Arizona’s immigration law requires lawmen to...

The Justice Department's long-anticipated suit challenging Arizona's new immigration law raises a radical question: Is federalism dead? If so, we ought at least to have the integrity to declare it so in some more formal manner.
Arizona contends that it needs to act to preserve the health,...