Monthly Archives: September 2008

Paulson’s a Day Trader

When I first heard the words uttered by Congressman Darrell Issa, Republican from the 49th District of California, it made me cringe.  Day Trader.  In the world of finance, few words are as pejorative.  Day Trader.  Ouch.

These words take me back to the dotcom crash, when every moron with a computer spent his time day trading hi-tech stocks in a whirlwind market where one could never lose.  The market only went up, up, up.  Is anything sounding familiar?

The new mantra from Congress is that Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, is a day trader, not a banker.  Mind you, he was CEO of Goldman Sachs (immediately following John Corzine, New Jersey Governor and seat belt advocate), so it’s not like he was a run of the mill day trader.  He was in fact an extremely successful day trader, and became a fabulously wealthy day trader in the process.  But he was still a day trader.

I spent some time arguing with some lawprofs yesterday about whether there is, in fact, a crisis.  I posited that Paulson put on his Chicken Little costume 10 days ago and ran around screaming the sky is falling.  For the record, it was supposed to fall yesterday.  It didn’t, but I don’t see that as being a critical point.

What was curious was how the disagreement lacked the normal courtesies and nuanced language, and went right for the jugular, contrary to normal lawprof etiquette.  For example, see Jonah Gelbach’s post, Remarkably Wrongheaded, directed at Ilya Somin at VC. This is remarkably strong language. I wasn’t surprised that they would use such a direct attack at me, since I’m a practitioner, but to hurl such missiles at each other is quite remarkable.

But the disagreement shed no light.  Why is this a crisis?  Why is the world about to implode if this bailout doesn’t happen?  Immediately?  The responses were a jumble of one-word answers: libor, freezing, liquidity.  These, I was informed, were the “facts”, and if I just refused to heed the “facts”, then there was no point in discussing it further.  It wasn’t a very interesting discussion, so I saw no point in pursuing it.

But these are dots that lack any connection to real problems.  There’s no distinction between cause and effect.  There’s no comprehension of the difference between perception and reality.  It’s become an article of faith; you either believe or you don’t.  If you don’t, you just don’t “get it.”  This is a rather peculiar mindset for people whose thrust is to scrutinize and test theories, rather than jump into the mix with their eyes wide shut.

Eric Posner argued that the 777 point drop in the Dow was proof that the bailout was necessary, his argument being that the loss of value in equities was far more costly than the infusion of $700 billion into the financials.   Gelbach agrees wholeheartedly.  I think this is just plain foolish. 

The Dow swings up and down on perception, not reality.  It’s whatever the consensus of a bunch of guys in a pit think will happen in the next 5 minutes based upon their quick and dirty grasp of the world.  Would they really base this nation’s fiscal policy on a bunch of guys who routinely wear napkins on their heads at parties?  My first thought was that such an argument can only be seriously made by someone who hasn’t lived through violent market swings before, since the Dow can recover its drop in a couple of days should some other news hit the fan that makes the boys think differently.  But the $700 billion infusion is real money, not Dow points, and once spent would be lost from the nation’s coffers for real. 

Was Paulson’s predication of the destruction of life as we know it real?  Or was Paulson serving his constituency, Wall Street traders and investment bankers, and speaking of how the lack of liquidity would affect them?  The argument has been made about how this affects “Main Street,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe, but that’s just a game, since we know from chaos theory that everything affects everything else, with only the slightest rhetorical stretch. 

Not only have I yet to hear anyone explain why Paulson’s assessment of this dire emergency was correct, but how his solution will stave off catastrophe, if catastrophe is indeed looming.  Over the past 10 days, too many people have forgotten that both the “disaster” and the “cure” have come from the perspective of one man.  While Congress and the White House (to the extent anyone cares that there is a fellow called “Mr. President” living there) have spent many hours tweaking the edges, the basic plan is still right out of Paulson’s noggin.  He created the paradigm, and the rest of us are trying to see if the square pegs will fit into his round holes.

Why have we staked out country’s future on this one person, Hank Paulson?  After all, they guy is just a day trader.

Tasers, It’s A Family Thing

With thanks again to J-dog, who has his finger on the pulse of weaponry of all stripes, comes yet another imaginative use of Tasers.  As Joel put it, “the family that gets tazed together stayzed together.”  That’s his line, so don’t blame me.

From KTVU News, the tale of the Brentwood, California, police response to a 14 year old shooting victim:



The shooting occurred at about 9:15 p.m. near the 7000 block of Brentwood Blvd., where three teenagers were standing. One received at least one gunshot wound and ran with the two others back to the victim’s neighborhood, according to Sgt. Mark Misquez.



Police later arrived and began assisting the victim. The victim’s family and friends gathered at the scene, and, according to Misquez, interfered in the assisting officers’ work. The officers then ordered the family members to step aside and when they did not comply, police responded by tasing some of the victim’s family, including his father and sister.



“As the brother was getting tased the dad approached asked them to stop tasing his son, then they started tasing the dad at that time there were three cops tasing two people who were already on the floor,” said witness Janine Esquivel.


Darn those parents of a 14 year old shooting victim, who just won’t comply promptly.  Don’t they get it?  So what if it’s your son or brother who’s lying on the ground in a pool of blood, a mere child, writhing in pain.  If the cops say jump, you jump.  They have no time for sympathy for the victim’s family, nor understanding, nor tolerance.  They are busy being heroes.  Nobody interferes with a hero.   Not if you know what’s good for you.

Thank God the family wasn’t so appreciative of the cops’ heroic efforts that they hugged them

What is particularly shocking (can we still use the word “shocking” in relation to Tasers, where nothing is really very shocking anymore?) is how utterly indiscriminate their use has become.  It’s not merely a substitute for the old cop stand-by, the nightstick, but for talking, or reasoning, or calming as well.  Why repeat yourself when you can Taser somebody in less time. 

In this case, we have a distraught family trying to help a young member.  There’s no clear indication of how long it took police to arrive (note the language, “Police later arrived,” suggesting that it didn’t happen quickly), and the family was there for the young man.  Note further that the compulsion to taser, to subjugate and control, took precedence over victim.  Not satisfied with tasing the family members who were caring for the victim because they didn’t “step aside” when told to do so, the cops then engaged in a second round of tasing those who complained about the first round of tasing.  And what of the victim while this was happening?

What distinguished this story from most is that the family, while not sufficiently complaint with the cops, were not implicated in any independent wrong-doing, such that the apologists can argue that they deserved a good tasing anyway.  That said, however, it doesn’t mean that they got a quick tase and that was the end of it:


The police took several individuals into custody for assaulting and resisting officers, according to Misquez.

But of course!  They assaulted police by viciously throwing their bodies into way of the police tasers.  When I recently wrote a piece for Judicial Reports about how complaints like this appear before arraigning judges, the editor told me to stop kidding around.  He had trouble believing that this was mere hyperbole. If only it was.

As a concession to J-dog, this is not an indictment of the Taser per se, which was a far better choice in this instance than a fully loaded Glock which would likely have caused the deaths of many bystanders (though no one at which is was aimed).  It is, however, an indictment of putting a weapon like this into the hands of children, telling them that it’s non-lethal so that they should feel free to use it whenever it’s convenient, and setting them loose on the street.

Maybe we should just be thankful that the shooting victim survived and his parents were killed for being there.  This outcome is beginning to look increasingly likely.

Why Law Review Articles Were Never Meant for Us (Update)

For years, I’ve suspected it, but now there’s finally confirmation.  There’s a reason why law review articles written by professors of law are both painful and almost invariably useless:  that’s how they are taught to write them.

Dan Markel at Prawfsblawg offers Advice for Beginning Scholars.  If you respect and admire the intellect and scholarship of lawprofs, as I do, you may not want to read any further.  It’s like watching sausage being made.  It isn’t pretty.

Dan offers three suggestions for those practitioners hoping to break into the Academy.  The first is benign enough: use footnotes rather than endnotes.  This hardly seems worth saying, since footnotes are easy enough to do these days, unlike the days when I went to law school and papers were typed on typewriters.  Back then, footnotes were a major pain to produce, and endnotes were so much easier.  With a computer, that problem has been totally eliminated.

The second suggestion is a preview of what’s to come:


The overwhelming burden is to demonstrate to law professors that you think and write like a law professor, not a practitioner.  Be careful, therefore, about not falling into a practitioner’s trap of using case cites to support empirical assertions.  If you are making an empirical assertion, one needs empirical data, or one needs to weaken the point, like “courts are still struggling with the issue.” 

I like that, the “practitioner’s trap.”  But he is, of course, quite correct.  Practitioners are constrained by precedent, and its mere existence is reason enough to rely on a decision for an empirical assertion.  If the court says so, then so it is.  From a scholar’s perspective, however, this is lazy and inadequate.  The fact that a court ruled that the sun rises in the west doesn’t make it so, and no self-respecting scholar is going to rely on such an decision.

But it’s Dan’s third point that is most telling. 


Remember your audience.  It’s not judges or practitioners.  It’s other law professors.  Pure doctrinal work nowadays [is a risk] without sufficient theoretical or social science orientation for a hiring committee to say “whoa, now there’s a practitioner who really gets it.”

First of all, every suggestion that begins with the words “Remember the . . . ” is bound for greatness.  It may not be original, but it works every time.  You may not have a clue what happened to the “Maine”, but you remember the battle cry, right?

Seriously, this is where the rubber hits the road.  We practitioners have suffered from our own self-absorption in thinking that law review articles were written to serve some purpose relative to the law.  Whether to inform lawyers, or persuade judges, to impact and improve the way in which the law served society.  How selfish we are.  How egocentric to think that scholars were talking to us. 

Law review articles are a conversation amongst themselves.  Colloquially, perhaps they are best thought of as a circle-jerk, where neither judge nor practitioner is allowed to rub up against any tweed-covered elbow.  Dan’s suggestions are meant for those practitioners, and I use that word in the broadest possible sense because most have about 12 minutes of practical experience under their belt, who find life in the well of the court distasteful and are looking for a different environment.  Dan’s trying to teach wannabe lawprofs how to shift gears.

For so many of us, Dan’s words come as an epiphany.  Who knew that this was all a big set-up?  Who knew that law review was never meant for the working stiffs, whether in blue pinstripe or black robes, but to curry favor with a secret society of scholars for whom the internal debate was the sole and exclusive end?  I didn’t.  I always thought that these articles were intended to have some application to the law.  I thought that they were meant to actually do something for real people.  I am such a maroon.

And as an aside to all those law students who were deluded by the glossy law porn into believing that their tuition was tendered in exchange for their being taught how to be lawyers, pay careful attention.  The first thing the Academy demands of your “teachers” is that they disconnect themselves from anything having any connection to the law and prove their mettle by devolving into theoreticians of some extra-legal, multi-disciplinary voodoo designed to never serve any purpose for humanity.  No wonder you come out of law school lacking any marketable skills.

I can’t help but wonder whether Jim Chen subscribes to this as well.  Is it really true that entry into the Academy requires the shedding of all semblance of social or legal utility?  Is that the price of scholar-hood?  Is this the best we can do for those students who will some day be expected to actually practice law, an idea so filthy as to bring to a screeching halt any practitioner’s hope of passing along his knowledge and experience to those who will follow in his footsteps?

Update:  Heard from Dan Markel, who informs me that the three points were from Jeff Lipshaw, about whom Dan says:



FWIW, Jeff is someone who was in practice for 25 years as a partner and GC at a major company b/f he became a professor and wrote those comments.


Now that’s really weird.

Update 2:  Heard from Jeff Lipshaw who, with tongue partially fixed in cheek (I think), mentioned something about people in glass houses.  He reminded me that lawyer writing is similarly viewed by the public as a tad, oh, incomprehensible.  So is it the same?

I don’t think we’re living in the same glass house.  For one thing, many of us in the blawgosphere are constantly advocating for better lawyer writing, less legalese and painfully outmoded language, and just better, clearer writing in general.  Second, when we write briefs or motions, it’s done for the purpose of persuading judges because people pay us to do so.  In other words, the brief isn’t the end in itself, but a means to an end.  We write for a greater purpose.

If lawprofs are writing solely for the benefit of acceptance by other lawprofs, then that’s where the game ends for them.  What bothers me most about this is not its insularity, but the waste of so many good minds and so much effort without any greater purpose.  Practitioners try to help one client, and in the process may help many.  Lawprofs could offer so much more, by changing the course of the law.  Why not try to do so?  Wouldn’t they feel pretty good if people were still talking about the “[insert lawprof surname] Rule” one hundred years from now?

House Votes NO (Update)

Led by Republicans, the House of Representatives voted down the bailout.  Wall Street reacted like junkies needing a fix, dropping the Dow over 700 points until they realized that this wasn’t the end of the bill, which will still be in play after some backroom horse-trading.

But two things are clear.  Give these junkies their fix and they will own this government.  The Dow has been down all day, and this bailout is nothing but a salve for the traders.  Once they get this one, they will still need a fix tomorrow.

Second, the House Republicans have rejected McCain and Bush, who put his butt on the line by a rare public appearance to tell his followers to vote for the bill this morning.  They don’t have enough faith in McCain to believe that he will win in November and they will ride his coattails. 

The ride is not over yet.

Update:  From Jonah Gelbach at PrawfsBlawg,

The House has just voted 206-227 to kill the bailout bill. It seem unclear what will happen next.

Unclear, that is, except that if nothing is done, our economy is headed for disaster.

What disaster?  If you know something, Jonah, let us in on it.  If not, is it a disaster because Bush, McCain or Obama says so?  Or are you just playing the Chicken Little du jour?  So explain yourself, why is the economy heading for disaster without this bailout?

Update 2:  House Republicans held a press conference after the vote, and explained that it’s not their fault that the vote failed, as they were just responding to Nancy Pelosi’s partisan speech before the vote, plus the Dems are in the majority and 94 Dems voted no as well. 

So the Republicans are saying that they voted it down not because they were against it, but because they were being partisan because Pelosi was being partisan? 

Update 3:  From Mike at C :


How did Henry Paulson and his corrupt friends comes up with $700 billion?  Here’s how :


“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”


And I was worried that they didn’t have a good reason for pulling that number out of their hat.

The Bonus for being Main Street (Updates)

The hoopla is back with the news of a new, improved $700 billion dollar bailout.  Listening to the sounds emanating from the mouths of those who want to be our leaders, I keep hearing the words “Main Street” contrasted with “Wall Street.”  Ah, they love to come up with catch-phrases that grab people’s hearts and minds.

But the words “Main Street,” despite their fine juxtaposition with the dreaded “Wall Street,” make me cringe.  First, the implication that these people are fighting for the people in small towns that still have a Main Street strikes me as unbearably disingenuous.  Main Street died long ago, when the Mall of America was built, together with its innumerable relatives across the country. 

Everyone who is not “Wall Street” isn’t necessarily “Main Street.”  In fact, I doubt that anyone is anymore.  In their effort to pigeonhole the rest of us in a single catch-phrase, they reflect the fact that they don’t have the slightest clue who the rest of us are, or that we aren’t one monolithic interest group rooting for our saviors to remember us. 

During the debate, Obama described “Main Street” as being police officers, teachers and nurses.  Notice anything special about these occupations, aside from their shared love of unions?  They all tend to be public employees.  Do we all work for the government?  He didn’t mention farmers.  He didn’t mention lawyers.  On the flip side, McCain didn’t even try to articulate who exactly he thinks “Main Street” might be, but then he hasn’t seen Main Street from any of his many homes in generations.  How would he know?

To prove how much they care about Main Street, we learn (with sufficient plausible deniability that when this plan goes bust by about noon today, they can claim they never really liked it) that there has been some amorphous non-quantifiable limitation placed on the “golden parachute” available to any CEO who accepts the government’s bailout.  (See the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, at Section 111, page 30.  Notice how this law has no cute acronym?) 

The phrase “golden parachute,” like “Main Street,” was crafted to create a pejorative impression.  The fact that our protectors in government have chosen to fix on this term hardly seems accidental.  It’s the Orwellian use of a phrase that they hope will capture the very small, very confused minds of the denizens of Main Street and, in a mindless flash, assure them that our government is doing all of this to protect them.  “Golden parachute” is bad.  We hear you, Main Street. (This is the point where I can hear them chuckling in the background). We fixed it.  Vote for us.

The problem is that the money has been paid.  The ten million dollar bonus checks already went out, were negotiated, and have since been put to good use at the shower curtain store.  The stock options have vested.  The incentive payments are already built in, and ready to kick in as soon as the stock price hits their mark.  And as for the dreaded “golden parachute,” which phrase is actually used in the law, there is a room full of gnomes working feverishly to come up with another, maybe even cuter, name that will circumvent this law altogether.

Don’t kid yourself.  There will be no CEOs on line at the soup kitchen.

But all this does lend itself to a finer understanding of just what our politicians mean when they utter the phrase “Main Street” over and over.  “Main Street” is a euphemism for people too stupid, too dense, too naive, too uninitiated to recognize when their politicians are treating them like the ignorant lemmings they believe them to be. 

Just keep saying that they’re doing all of this for us, for Main Street, and we’ll believe it. 

This new plan is the proverbial camel, a horse built by committee.  It tries to accommodate all the political fingers that stuck themselves in, providing at least enough to craft a sound bite to prove to their “Main Street” constituents that they are there for them, that they love them, so that next election round they won’t be skewered when this turns out to be a debacle. 

How many people will go beyond the sound bite and read the law?  Twelve?  Maybe Fifteen?  Not too many, that’s for sure.  So it’s all about the sound bite, and “golden parachute” makes for a pretty good one.  But I asked for the bonus back, and no one in Washington heard me.  Not just the parachute, but the billions paid out to fail.  No one is talking about those billions.  And the smart money on Wall Street knows enough to keep a low profile and negotiate the check as quickly as possible.

So as each of our candidates, our President, our congressional leaders, utter the word “Main Street” going forward, make no mistake who they are talking about.  The lemmings.  If you agree, perhaps you should get out of line and avoid the cliff at the end of Main Street, because you don’t have a parachute. 

And if you’re wondering about alternative uses for the $700 billion earmarked for the bailout, which would equate to $3,100 for each American, stop wasting brain cells.  There will be no bonus for being Main Street. 

Update:  It’s 10 a.m.  Do you know how your portfolio is doing?  Apparently, Wall Street isn’t impressed with Washington Street any more than Main Street.  Dow Jones Industrial Average down 292 at the moment.  Glad to see that our $700 bil isn’t wasted.

Update 2:  Last week, J.P. Morgan Chase bought WaMu.  Today, it has just been announced the Citigroup bought Wachovia in an FDIC brokered deal for $1 per share.  Had I known it was going to sell so cheaply, I would have considered it.

So what are the chances that Main Streeters will reach a sympathetic ear when calling Citibank customer service to renegotiate their Wachovia paper?  They used to be so nice to their customers, those deeply concerned Citibankers.

Update 3:  You’re probably asking yourself, but what would Sarah Palins have to say about all this?  Glad you asked.  From David Post at VC :

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

You can breath now.  Breath.

Confusing an Execution with a Right

This time, there can be little doubt that there is a peculiar disease in the air around Laredo, Texas, where the meaning of the Castle Doctrine has become so bizarrely twisted as to reflect a Kafkaesque vision of justice.

From J-dog comes this AP report of the glorious acquittal of Jose Luis Gonzalez:

It took the jury of eight men and four women three hours Friday to find Jose Luis Gonzalez, 63, not guilty of murdering Francisco Anguiano, who was 13 when he and three friends broke into Gonzalez’s trailer to rummage for snacks and soda one night in July 2007.

“I thank God and my attorney, the jury and the judge,” Gonzalez said in Spanish after the verdict. “It was a case where it was my life or theirs, and it’s a very good thing that they (the jurors) decided in my favor.”

Their life of his?  Well then, it certainly seems just that Gonzalez was acquitted for killing the vicious 13 year old Anguiano.  After all, no one wants Gonzalez killed in his own house, right?  Except for one problem.  It seems that Gonzalez’s, and the jury’s, perceptions of right and wrong differ from those of disinterested observers.

The facts of the case tell a very different story.


Gonzalez had endured several break-ins at his trailer when the four boys, ranging in age from 11 to 15, broke in. Gonzalez, who was in a nearby building at the time, went into the trailer and confronted the boys with a 16-gauge shotgun. Then he forced the boys, who were unarmed, to their knees, attorneys on both sides say.

The boys say they were begging for forgiveness when Gonzalez hit them with the barrel of the shotgun and kicked them repeatedly. Then, the medical examiner testified, Anguiano was shot in the back at close range. Two mashed Twinkies and some cookies were stuffed in the pockets of his shorts.

Gonzalez claimed that the 13 year old was about to lung at him when he blew him away.  You know, one of those dreaded backwards killer lunges.  So he shot him in the back.

Up to this point, it’s bad enough.  No, it’s worse than bad enough, but not as bad as it’s about to get.

You see, this was a case that “sparked outrage” in Laredo.  Not because of what Gonzalez did to a 13 year old boy, but because “many thought the man should not have even been charged.” 

Can it even be possible for people to believe so blindly, so absolutely, that killing people is given right, no matter what the facts, circumstances or result?  The problem is not necessarily with the Castle Doctrine, but the doctrinaire way in which some view the power this gives them to murder at will.  And when there is no need to harm another, no less kill them, than shooting them in the back as they kneel before you on the floor is an execution.  But then, they just love executions in Texas.

Imagine the pride one must feel to be a citizen of Laredo in the Sovereign Nation of Texas.

Why the Ferrari? Why?

In most instances, the damage done by police in the execution of a search warrant, though usually needlessly extensive and intrusive, can be repaired.  But there are times when the police are seeking an item so unique, so extraordinary, that it could be almost painful to let them lay hands upon it.  This is one such time.

From Orin Kerr at VC, the Connecticut State Police sought and obtained a search warrant for the garage of a Sharon classic car collector, Paul Hallingby, to seize a 1958 Ferrari 250 GT Pininfarina Series 1 Cabriolet.  There were 40 made.  And they are quite special.  Why would they do such a thing?  From the local CBS affiliate :


Connecticut state police say a rare Ferrari worth millions of dollars that was stolen in Spain 15 years ago has been found in Sharon.

State police say car thieves falsified documents and records for the 1958 Ferrari 250 PF, then sold it in 2000 to an apparently unsuspecting car enthusiast in Sharon for $550,000. It’s worth somewhere between $4 million and $5 million.

State police say they began their investigation in June after learning the car was registered in Connecticut.

Authorities say the thieves smuggled the Ferrari into the United States and registered it in New Jersey in 1994 with a false vehicle identification number. They say the owner is a resident of Switzerland.

But the story, like so many, isn’t necessarily the story, like so many.  But before we even consider the tale behind the purported theft, consider what it’s like to be Hallingby.  He was, if my law school memories serve me well, what we call a bona fide purchaser for value.  He wasn’t involved any alleged theft, and was just a buyer of the car down the line.  He owns a total of 22 classic cars, 5 of which are Ferraris.

Ironically, anyone who knows classic cars knows that Hallingby had the Ferrari.  He showed it at the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance.  The funniest part of this is that the police officer noted this in the warrant, though he couldn’t figure out why it was pictured in the 2005 Concours, but not the next year.  Of course, if he had the slightest clue how the Concours worked, he would know that a car cannot enter two years in a row, but only once every four years.

Nonetheless, the State Police Officer “swore” in the seizure warrant that:


The affiants know through training and experience that individuals who collect high priced collectors vehicle . . . would know to take reasonable steps to confirm the legitimacy of his purchase of the 1958 Ferrari 250 PF with vehicle identification number 0799GT.

Do they teach them all about Ferraris at the police academy?  Perhaps the police and guys like Hallingby hang out together after their shifts?  Maybe the cop swearing out the affidavit has a few classic Ferraris of his own?  After all, at about $4 million each, he could afford them with a little overtime.  But then, he would have seen it at the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance, or at least known something about the show.  Apparently, the judge didn’t either.

But there is another problem with this seizure.  It was based on an interpol report of a stolen car, and a demand for its seizure and return by the person claiming to be its owner, a Swiss national who says it was stolen in Spain. 

But the inside story, known to those who might actually have a clue about classic Ferraris, is a little different than what the cops took as gospel.


The PF Cabriolet was supposedly by owned by two Italians. They got into a disagreement over the car, and one of the partners, the one holding the title paperwork, sold it, and provided the new owner with everything necessary to register the car. However, the seller didn’t give his partner any of the proceeds from the sale.

According to our sources, the other partner was understandably irritated when he discovered he no longer had a Ferrari or any money, and filed a stolen car report. This also might explain why the seller refused an insurance settlement, as to have accepted might have created further legal complications.

Note the crucial detail, confirmed here, that the alleged victim rejected payment of the insurance settlement.  Fifteen years later, and he had still never accepted payment for the loss.  The Connecticut State Police received a “tip” that Hallingby had the car, which was explained as their “confidential  source” who ratted Hallingby out.  Apparently, someone decided to get Hallingby, and used the police to do so.  And police were happy to blindly oblige.

Rather than simply go to Hallingby and speak with him about his car (remember, he was just a purchaser down the line, not an alleged car thief), the cops felt it absolutely necessary to seize it, lest he what?  Spirit it away in the middle of the night?  Why would they assume that some 15 year old dubious complaint from some unknown person in Europe is more likely true than the bona fides of a pretty well-established resident of their state, particularly when his ownership of the Ferrari was widely known?  Why would they treat a bona fide purchaser as a criminal?  Why wouldn’t they show some respect for the car? 

Hallingby kept his cars in garages built for the purpose of preserving them.  The Connecticut State Police are unlikely to have a facility quite as purposed as Hallingby, and are more likely to have one of those great big yards with chain-link fences topped by barbed wire and protected by dogs to hold their seized vehicles.  

We can only hope that this Ferrari 250 GT PF cabrio survives this ordeal.   Please don’t hurt the car.

Full Disclosure:  I am the owner of a classic car (though not a Ferrari and not worth $4 million).  Still, this story strikes at the heart of classic car owners everywhere.

The “Claymore Mine” of Tasers

Woo Hoo!  Taser International has been busy, developing ever more fascinating ways to use their “nonlethal” zapper, and they’ve really come up with a great idea this time, the Shockwave. It’s a “remote area denial system.”  I know, just the name sounds so exciting.

In the past, the use of a Taser required at minimum the active choice of a someone, usually a police officer, to decide that if you didn’t show enough respect, or respect fast enough, a good jolt would usually solve the problem (provided it didn’t kill someone).  But how often does “human error” take a great weapon like Taser and turn it into the misunderstood victim?  After all, some dopey officer would have to taser some individual miscreant.  Such a great weapon, and only one writhing scoundrel on the ground at a time.  How unfulfilling.

Well, Taser (it’s motto is “protect life”, though it doesn’t mention whose life it’s talking about) has solve the problem!  Check this out. 


via videosift.com

The idea, I guess, is that this new taser can zap a whole crowd at one time, no individual discriminatory use potential at all.  You’re there, you’re down.  Media?  Down.  Peaceful protester exercising first amendment rights?  Down.  Off duty cop walking off a heavy night of drinking?  Down.  This sucker doesn’t discriminate.  It drops everyone to the ground.

And if you really want to know what the chicks think of this, just check out this PoliceOne “interview”.  To say the interviewer is gushing is an understatement.  I guess there’s nothing like dozens of zapping tasers to make a gal’s heart go aflutter.

What a shame they didn’t have this in time for the national political conventions.  How much “safer” it all would have been.  For the cops, at least.

H/T to Karl Mansoor, who provided numerous “views” of this marvel of modern law enforcement science.

Grades Make Them Feel Bad

While the world is in turmoil over the financial crisis, Harvard Law School has quietly adopted the Yale law grading method.  According to Eugene at VC, who let the cat out of the bag,


According to the e-mail that I had forwarded to me (and whose authenticity I have no reason to question), Harvard would technically have four grades — Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. My guess, though, is that Low Pass and Fail would be extremely rare, and 98%+ of all grades would be Honors or Pass, as they are at Yale. The shift then is basically from at least five commonly used grades (A, A-, B+, B, and B-, unless I’m mistaken) to two.

Apparently, Standford already went this route.  Now I was unaware of Yale’s grading system, or Stanford’s change, but now that it’s hit Harvard, another law school a neglected to attend, enough is enough.   Is nothing sacred?

Notice how Eugene described the “five commonly used grades” as involving only two letters of the alphabet, “A” and “B”.  Did the academy have to sell off the other letters to afford lawprof condominiums?  What happened to my good old friends, “C”, “D” and “F”?  Were they excessed?

This exercise in grade inflation happened when the rest of us were busy working, I guess, as my memory of law school was that some students did poorly.  Some flunked out.  Many got a bad grade in one course or another, usually the one involving the professor who insisted on long lectures in barely cognizable English.  That was always a pleasure, and a great opportunity to hone your Times crossword puzzle or Scrabble skills.

This is over, apparently.  All those resumes with astronomical GPAs meant nothing.  You had to be near brain-dead not to look like a star.  To do otherwise would have meant low self-esteem, and we certainly can’t have lawyers with low self-esteem.

This didn’t make sense to me until Orin Kerr stepped in and explained things for a dope like me:

So here’s a puzzle about the psychology of grading. Harvard and Stanford Law schools have recently announced moving from a letter grade system with pluses and minuses to a High/Pass/Low-Pass/Fail system. My sense is that most students like the change: Students perceive that it takes pressure off them.

But imagine a slight change. Imagine that instead of adopting the High/Pass/Low-Pass/Fail system, the schools kept the letter system and simply dropped pluses and minuses and the “D” grade. In other words, the possible grades became just A, B, C, and F.

My sense is that students would object strongly to such a system. They would object that it was too arbitrary and unfair, because a student who earned a very high B or a very high A would get no credit for it: They would just get the flat grade that didn’t reflect their achievement. Indeed, I suspect some students would say that removing pluses and minuses would increase the pressure on students by giving students a single bar to hit rather than more of a sliding scale.

Why is this a puzzle?

Because the two systems are exactly the same.  Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.  So why are these fine institutions of higher legal learning bothering with a shell game?  And are the brilliant students who attend these find institutions that stupid that they can’t tell it’s a shell game? 

But more importantly, are these same brilliant students, who will one day walk out in the world of lawyering so unbearably fragile that they can’t handle the standard grades that have, for better or worse, managed to characterize academic success and failure all these years? 

There is one thing that the academy has done a particularly poor job teaching, and appears still determined to screw up.  Once these young men and women embark on a career in the law, they will all lose at one time or another.  They need to learn to lose.  They need to learn to fight.  They need to learn to handle adversity and rise up to continue the fight.  As I wrote here :

A well-conceived law school education serves one purpose only:  to prepare you to confront the abuse of being a lawyer and prevail.  How to prevail comes later.  You’re not ready for that now.  For now, you need to learn how to toughen up and take abuse without crying and whining.  How to keep a smile on your face and deflect the humiliation that is designed to make even the most macho man shrivel.  If your lawprof doesn’t abuse you, she hasn’t done her job.  If your lawprof doesn’t toughen you up, then you’ve gained nothing.

If a law student has not done well in a course, then flunk him.  If he’s only done mediocre, then give him a “C”, or even a “C-“.  A client will thank you one day if you do.  Practicing law is not about feeling good about yourself, but learning how it feels to lose, and then still be able to fight again.  Don’t steal this from law students, even though they don’t know that they need it yet.

Debate Lessons, Volume I

I watched the debate as long as nature would allow.  It was hard, as I normally don’t stay up that late.  There’s just so many fun things to do in the early morning, and I’m reluctant to miss any of them.  But I did see enough to realize that if Barak Obama had been a trial lawyer, rather than a law professor, he would have been far less likely to make a rookie mistake.

But first, a quick review.  It was a bore.  Listening to men who would be president facilely avoid answering any actual question by masterful segue into their prepared script of talking points, the same ones that they say over and over and over, is tedious, bordering on painful.  What a shame that they had so many eyeballs and ears at their command, and wasted it by repeating the script.

But McCain, in his twisting answers to fit his talking points, goaded Obama, with phrases like he “doesn’t understand” or “$18 billion in earmarks.”  And Obama took the bait.  A relatively reasonable question by Jim Lehrer turned into an attack by McCain and defense by Obama.  Obama let himself be put on the defense time and again, and let McCain turn question after question into his own.

Had Obama ever stood in the well of a court, he would have known that you don’t let your adversary turn the question to his topic, and thus goad you into limiting your opportunity into defending against his attack.  Obama got owned.  If I was his trial tactics (not strategy, but tactics) teacher, he would get a “C”, except that they don’t give C’s anymore, but that’s a different discussion.

By attacking Obama’s past votes and positions, McCain sought to force Obama do two things:  Spend his time defending himself and spend his time discussing only those things that McCain chose to raise.  Obama was playing on McCain’s field.

The lesson is well known to trial lawyers:  Don’t let your adversary dictate your position. 

The master of this tactic was none other than Ronald Reagan, with his famous, “There you go again…”  When these words came out of Reagan’s mouth, with his amused smile and fatherly demeanor, the game was over.  He owned the point.

It would have only taken Obama about 10 second to preface his response with, “rather than waste the public’s time with responding to John’s tired, false, scripted talking points, I would rather spend my time telling the American public about what the future can be…” or some variation thereon.  Dispute the inaccuracies and move on in one quick move. 

But then there was the opening to go after one of the more bothersome of McCain’s talking points that has thus far been left untouched.  He keeps talking about “corruption” on Wall Street.  The public loves the word corruption, because they are sure that it must be there.  But has anyone else noticed that McCain’s talking points, repeated innumerable times over the past few days, has been studiously vague.  Obama certainly should have picked up on this, and turned it against him.


“Sen. McCain, I’ve now heard you say that Wall Street is “corrupt” dozens of times since last Wednesday.  Who, Senator, is this corrupt Wall Streeter?  Give us a name, just one single name, of that corrupt person you’ve been talking about.  Corruption is a crime, and if you know of a crime, then give us the name of that criminal you’ve been talking about?”

Now that would have been a fun moment.

And if you want to give credit for speed in the face of disingenuousness, try this overnight McCain ad:



Is anybody else tired of vapid rhetoric?