My managing editor, Marilou Auer, sent a link over to a 4th Circuit opinion that shocked and outraged her.  She wondered whether I felt the same about it, and while I share her outrage, I cannot share her shock.  It’s business as usual.

The opinion in United States v. Crawford affirms a sentence of 135 months following a plea to crack dealing.  The indictment charged distributing 38.3 grams of crack, bad enough but hardly stratospheric.  But as is the federal way, that was just the starting point.

The district court deviated from the PSR and found that Crawford’s relevant conduct period began in October 2005, not 2003. The court consequently attributed 321.9 grams of crack cocaine to Crawford, including 38.3 grams from the six offenses of conviction and 283.6 grams that Ready, Latta, and drug dealer Lionel Lewis described. Continue reading →

The New York Times does a feature-length profile of Gary Vaynerchuk, who went from wine seller in New Jersey to social media phenomenon. It took forever in social media terms, days, but he got there. clawing his way to the top of twitter, where he’s known as @garyvee with almost 100,000 twits and more than 1 million followers.

He’s bootstrapped his social media fame into a thriving ad agency, though I doubt he would call it that since ad agencies are so 1950’s Mad Men-ish.  Gary is early-adopter all the way.

Mr. Vaynerchuk, 37, is a social media marketer with some very big clients, and he’s a tireless self-promoter. Anyone fitting that description is all but required to find novel ways to win attention and coin catchphrases, and his new favorite is “jab, jab, jab, right hook.” Continue reading →

Transparency on Facebook is a two-way street, which is clearly shown in the screen cap from Ken at Popehat:

After the Columbia Police Department announced its latest victory in the War on Drugs, which somehow failed to thrill at least one local nearly as much as Richard Nixon would have expected, Continue reading →

One of the core contentions of the future of the new normal of the @reinvent law crowd is that our changing paradigm demands that we throw off the chains of law firm ownership so that non-lawyers (as in for-profit corporations) can own law firms. The usual justification is the infusion of capital and systems to make lawyers more 21st Century-ish, which will allow us to maximize profits due to less costly iPads.

But in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog (of all places), Jennifer Smith writes of a new, largely unimagined reason to let Verizon take the lion’s share of DLA Piper: To bring legal representation to the underserved working poor, who can read all about it if only they have a WSJ subscription. Continue reading →

At his blog (which is fortunately not within the ambit of the Second Circuit), Nebraska federal Judge Richard Kopf asks a “simple” question.

Should jurors in criminal or civil cases be allowed to ask questions of witnesses during trial?

There are such things as simple questions. Chocolate or vanilla?  One lump or two? Continue reading →

In a brief opinion, three judges of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse (thrown in simply for the irony) smacked Southern District of New York Judge Shira Scheindlin for telling the truth. She said:

“I don’t think I’m the favorite of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District. Because I’m independent. I believe in the Constitution. I believe in the Bill of Rights. These issues come up, and I take them quite seriously. I’m not afraid to rule against the government.”

If you ask the government, the Mayor of New York City or the cops, on a day when they tell the truth, they will confirm that she’s not their favorite judge. Continue reading →

When Tim Cushing twitted me a link to a post called Disrupting the Legal Industry, I shrugged. Another website dedicated to promoting the blind adoration of idiotic schemes to make money off lawyers. Nothing new there. But I was wrong.

Included within the post, among the flotsam and jetsam of drivel that has no chance of either making money or achieving anything worthwhile, was a gem. A diamond.  The name is at first disturbing. Lawdingo.

Continue reading →

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick risks life and limb by posting a c-span link to an “absolutely incredible exchange between Intel Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers and law professor Stephen Vladeck.”  Rogers figured he could easily outmaneuver Vladeck (and two others on the panel before the committee) with some tricky rhetoric, as Kevin Underhill explains:

In what was intended as his wrap-up question, Rogers asked each of the three panelists for a “quick yes or no answer” as to whether they thought “the government should have the ability to try to find a nexus between a foreign connection and a business record in the United States that would indicate the identity of someone who may be working with a terrorist organization.” Well, I think you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand that this is not a “yes-or-no” question. Continue reading →

Regular readers are painfully aware of the issues that have appeared here and at Mark Bennett’s Defending People with Miami lawprof Mary Anne Franks’ revenge porn law, and more particularly with her nasty, childish and dismissive responses to anything shy of adoration.

Sadly, Mr. Bennett, I do not have endless amounts of time to read everything that people write about me or my ideas. I also do not have time to review basic principles of reading comprehension or logic with every commenter with an axe to grind.

She is so brilliant. Bennett (and I) are such lowly trench lawyers, unworthy of her time and attention. Continue reading →

We met a few times in real life, but I heard from him often in emails. It was either to let me know of a story that he thought would interest me, or to tell me how wrong I was about something, or to correct my typos.  You see, “Ed” stood for Editor, and he was the editor of Blawg Review.

Ed had a few rules: First, no one ever showed a picture of his face. He was anonymous, and it was his desire to stay that way.  To my knowledge, no one has been so unkind as to ever post a pic of Ed. Second, everyone called him Ed. He spoke of his life, but he was still always Ed. That’s how he wanted it, and so it was respected.

Continue reading →