Blog Posts

The first volume of Mark Twain's much-anticipated autobiography arrived the other day. At 700-plus pages, there is a telephone directory-like feel to it. It was the work of the second half of the author's life. He conceived it as an experiment, trying to determine whether he could be completely...

Evidence begins tomorrow in the penalty phase of State v. Hayes in Connecticut. The state seeks the death penalty. Mr. Hayes has already been convicted of sixteen counts ranging from capital felony murder to assault for his role in the deadly home invasion that left a mother and two daughters dead...

I get many calls each week from people who believe they have been abused by the police. That is because for many years I was at the forefront of police misconduct litigation. But these days I rarely file a complaint against police officers. It is not that I have become a police groupie. Rather,...

Twitter, for those of you who do not yet know this, is a social networking device that permits folks to send and receive brief, instantaneous messages of no more than 140 characters. You can send and receive messages from a computer, a cell phone or another electronic device, such as an Ipad. You...

I stormed out of a federal settlement conference the other day uttering intemperate words. The government has seized the life savings of a hard working couple whose son was growing marijuana in their basement. The feds also want to seize the couple's home. There is no evidence to suggest the couple...

My wife and I are not television watchers. We're not elitists. We're just busy. Although our three kids have all fled the nest, we each have busy and demanding professional lives. Such spare time as we can muster, we devote to our border collies, gardening and reading. Our television viewing is...

Ron Nussle was beaten in prison one day by guards who retaliated against him when he threatened to alert a friend of his, then Gov. John Rowland, about abuse in the prisons. So he sued in federal court to recover money damages. He did so just after the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) was...

History has an uncanny way of repeating itself, especially personal history. In high school, I tried and failed to find a group in which I was comfortable. I was a bad athlete, so the jocks scorned me. The situation in my home was, to say the least, a little chaotic, so I did not study; the nerds...

Why is the murder rate in the United States higher than that of any of the other 29 high-income member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)? We have slightly more than 5 murders per 100,000 population; the next nation in the list is Finland with less than half...

I've attended seminars at which Erwin Chemerinsky has spoken three or maybe four times. The first time, I was persuaded he was a genius. The second time I was a little uneasy. He speaks typically for an hour without notes of any sort, dissecting recent Supreme Court decisions with a chipper sense...