There is nothing more sadly amusing than when a civil litigator dips his toe into criminal defense and finds out that they learn less about the evidence against a defendant whose life is on the line than they do in a law suit for a stubbed toe.  Welcome to criminal discovery. The shock and dismay never gets old.

New York Assemblyman Joe Lenthol from the North of Brooklyn has offered a bill to fix the insanity.  From his experience in the Kings County district attorney’s office, he no doubt appreciated the dearth of discovery and how it worked to the terrible disadvantage of the defense in preparing its case.  So he offered a fix, as he explains in the memo to Assembly bill A3801 :

The ever-present reality of the criminal justice process is that most of the information necessary to fair adjudication is in the hands of the State. One purpose of the discovery law is to  disclose  to the  accused  before  trial  inculpatory  evidence making up the State’s case, in order to prevent unfair surprise. An equally critical component of the discovery process is to provide the accused with material in  the hands of the State, with its superior investigatory resources, that may aid in the preparation of a defense.  This duty to disclose what is loosely  referred to as “exculpatory” evidence had been a constitutional requirement since Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).

The basic flaw in the Brady disclosure process is that it places the duty to search, for evidentiary material favorable to the defense in the hands of its adversary. Some prosecutors may take an unduly narrow  view of the Brady obligation, one that does not encompass impeachment material or recognizes only obvious exculpatory evidence. And even the conscientious prosecutor may not understand how an item might fit within a defense theory, or lead to evidence favorable to the defense.

The amendment to CPL §240.40(1)(c) would strengthen the effectuation of the Brady rule. The current version, with the “which the people intend to introduce at trial” restriction, serves only the  discovery  function of  preventing surprise.  It  does little to aid the preparation of the defense function. The part  of  the  information in the  prosecution’s possession  that it selects to introduce at trial will likely not be favorable to the defense. On the other hand, the material that it chooses not to present to the trier of fact is the category where information favorable to the defense is more likely to be found.

 (1)(h)   Anything required to be disclosed, prior to trial, to the defendant by the prosecutor, pursuant to the constitution of this state or of the United States.

AN ACT to amend the criminal procedure law, in relation to discovery

    THE  PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEMBLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

    1    Section 1. Paragraph (c) of subdivision 1 of  section  240.40  of  the
    2  criminal procedure law, as amended by chapter 19 of the laws of 2012, is
    3  amended to read as follows:
    4    (c) may order discovery with respect to any other property[, which the
    5  people  intend to introduce at the trial,] upon a showing by the defend-
    6  ant that discovery with respect to such  property  is  material  to  the
    7  preparation  of  his or her defense, and that the request is reasonable;
    8  and
    9    S 2. This act shall take effect immediately.

Among the many shiny new ideas of the Future of the #ReinventLaw of the New Normal crowd is online dispute resolution. This may come as a surprise to many, since most of us find our time online to give rise to the creation of disputes about, well, everything.

In a  comment to her own post at Legal Ethics Forum, Renee Knake mentioned an Online Dispute Resolution service called Modria, which offers what it calls an online small claims court.  As I am of the view that for most minor legal disputes, the courts are overly expensive, technical and take too damn long, the notion of a simplified dispute resolution process that could quickly address relatively low-value and cross-jurisdictional disputes, a huge but neglected problem with the law, was very interesting.

Even though Renee, one of the founders of #ReinventLaw, to which I’ve been somewhat unkind, likely thinks I’m just a hater of all things new, I decided to use my time to look around Modria.  I soon stumbled upon a claim to fame they thought worthy of promotion, that Richard Susskind, the head cheerleader of shiny, loved the idea. I persisted in trying to give Modria a fair shake nonetheless, because Renee’s point struck a chord.

My concern is that if the legal profession refuses to liberalize in these ways, others will provide the tools that the public demands/needs (Modria is a good example of this – called by the Wall Street Journal “the small-claims court for the 21st Century” – founded by ODR pioneer Colin Rule, a nonlawyer).

When she described Colin Rule as an ODR “pioneer” and a non-lawyer, I have no doubt she meant it as a positive. Non-lawyers, to the Future of the #ReinventLaw of the New Normal crowd have the virtue of not being constrained by the limits of education or precedent. They are free to imagine new ways to do things without having to concern themselves with the past couple hundred years of trial and error.  I get it.

But being all pioneer-y and non-lawyer-y isn’t enough to suggest that Colin Rule has any bona fides for the job, so I checked out his profile.

Colin has worked in the dispute resolution field for more than two decades as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. From 2003 to 2011 he served as the first Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal…

For anyone who has any depth of experience with eBay and Paypal, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.  They deal with a ton of disputes, because people do a lot of things that are definitely dispute worthy on eBay and Paypal (and a lot of good too. I love and use both).  But the virtue of their dispute resolution mechanism is that it exists.  It’s not particularly fast, and it remains a deep, abiding mystery what “law” is applied by the elves working deep in the bowels of a bunker in San Jose, but by playing their game, you have to play by their rules.

This does not extend to the rest of the world, however.  And so it leads me to ask a bunch of questions, the answers to which are utterly missing on the Modria website despite the cool marketing lingo that is meant to sate the curiosity of the believer.

1. Who is deciding things at your small claims court?
2. What are their qualifications? Are they lawyers? Are they nice folks you’ve trained with your special sauce and we should just trust you because you have a cute smile?
3. What makes them neutral, reasonably unbiased, especially with regard to potential corporate account users who might require all disputes be handled there?
4. What “law” is applied in determining disputes? You have no jurisdictional limits, which is good, but then that comes without law. So is there law, or are decisions whatever happens to strike the fancy of one of those nice folks trained with your special sauce?
5. How does a party submit evidence? How does the “judge” know it’s real?
6. How does the opposing party get to see the evidence in advance of being put to the test of disputing it?
7. How does the inarticulate litigant overcome the limits of his skills? Is this done in writing or via live video?
8. Is there an appeal process? Is there anyone to go to when the dispute resolution process falls into the toilet?
9. Does anyone review the “judge’s” determination to make sure it isn’t batshit crazy?
10. What assurance is there that this process can provide a fair, rational and honest means of determining disputes?

There are plenty of other, smaller, questions within these, but since all the futurist types love lists of 10, I’ll stop here.

Is the idea of online dispute resolution a worthwhile idea to pursue? Absolutely. There is a huge gap in the legal system for low-value cross-jurisdictional disputes, and given the flat world of the internet, the gap really needs to be filled.  But is Modria the solution?

Beats the heck out of me. It doesn’t appear likely to be capable of doing the job now, as it seems to have massive failings in its concept and format that need to be overcome before it can fulfill its promise. In other words, right now it fails miserably in execution despite the shininess of its concept.  Does that mean I hate it? Well, yes, unless and until it can do what it purports to do fairly, adequately and properly. Otherwise, it’s just another idea that has found a problem and done a half-baked job of solving it.

We may well have a troubled system, one that doesn’t work particularly well for the world as it exists, but that doesn’t mean we embrace any change without scrutiny.  As I responded to Renee,

The allure of shiny new ideas when things are looking rather dim is understandable, but change isn’t always for the better. Just trying to help.

The new emperor can be just as naked as the old one. The Future of the #ReinventLaw of the New Normal crowd really needs to understand this.

I remember the first time I was told a client was busted for crack. I had no clue what they were talking about, and so I was told it was a concentrated form of cocaine, cooked down into a small, smokable rock, that gave a user a fast, strong high. I was told it made a user a bit crazy, because the high was so intense, and it was cheap, as a tiny vial sold for $5. It was cheap enough that the same guys who were buying pot could now spend the same nickel on crack and get a far better high.

What did I know? That’s what I was told.  It quickly owned a lot of guys on the street, and became a huge business for clients. And a violent business, as new players would fight for the old pot corner, with guns. Pot sellers rarely were violent. Violence was common amongst crack dealers, enough so that gangs like the Wild Cowboys were regularly having gunfights in the streets.

The myth of crack grew mostly because of the violence that arose around it. As a drug, it turns out that it wasn’t really any different than powdered coke, except that it could be purchased for pennies rather than hundred dollar bills the way it was sold at Studio 54 to rich white guys. That was what was really wrong with crack, that it was the suddenly the drug of choice uptown, where blacks and Hispanics used it, sold it, died over it.

So Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided that anyone selling crack should be punished 100 times more harshly than anyone selling powdered cocaine.  It took a couple generations and tens of thousands of dark bodies to realize that it was a baseless, knee-jerk number. And so it was eventually changed, twice reducing the ratio as explained by Judge Merritt of the 6th Circuit in U.S. v. Blewett.

The Fair Sentencing Act was passed in August 2010 to “restore fairness to Federal cocaine sentencing” laws that had unfairly impacted blacks for almost 25 years.  The Fair Sentencing Act repealed portions of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that instituted a 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine, treating one gram of crack as equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine for sentencing purposes.  The 100-to-1 ratio had long been acknowledged by many in the legal system to be unjustified and adopted without empirical support.  The Fair Sentencing Act lowered the ratio to a more lenient 18-to-1 ratio.  However, thousands of inmates, most black, languish in prison under the old, discredited ratio because the Fair Sentencing Act was not made explicitly retroactive by Congress.

In this case, we hold, inter alia, that the federal judicial perpetuation of the racially discriminatory mandatory minimum crack sentences for those defendants sentenced under the old crack sentencing law, as the government advocates, would violate the Equal Protection Clause…

In this opinion, we will set out both the constitutional and statutory reasons the old, racially discriminatory crack sentencing law must now be set aside in favor of the new sentencing law enacted by Congress as the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.  The Act should apply to all defendants, including those sentenced prior to its passage.  We therefore reverse the judgment of the district court and remand for resentencing.

It’s time to undo fully these unjust and irrational sentences, which treated powder cocaine users — who were typically white and often affluent — far more leniently than the mostly black and poor users of crack cocaine.

As anticipated, the huge, monumental story about the National Security Agency collecting every piece of electronic communication generated, just in case, has given way to less lofty stories, even though nothing has changed and the government continues unabated to gather up our every byte and pixel.  No, it’s not because we are suddenly cool with the idea that the government is doing this, but because a shiny squirrel could be seen in our peripheral vision and distracted our attention.

The name of that shiny squirrel is Edward Snowden.  Whether one considers him a hero or ideological provocateur, he’s caught the public’s eye.

At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr raises some interesting question about this.

Whenever Edward Snowden is discussed, I invariably encounter the following response:

Edward Snowden is not the issue. You’re trying to distract people by changing the topic. The real issue is what Snowden disclosed about government surveillance, and anyone who talks about Snowden is not talking about the real issue.

I find this response puzzling. There are two stories here. On one hand, Snowden revealed documents showing how the government was implementing its national surveillance authorities. That’s a big story, and I blogged about it several times. But on the other hand, Snowden himself is a big story, too.

Granted, what Snowden has revealed so far either appears to check out as legal and constitutional or at least was so approved by the federal judges on the FISA court (with too few facts known so far to be able to say much more to question that). So there isn’t quite a “scandal” there. But there are some interesting law nerd issues that I’ve blogged about a few times.

At the same time, there are really interesting legal issues with Snowden, too. Granted, what Snowden did is clearly illegal. Snowden has pretty much admitted to his conduct, so there isn’t much in the way of drama on the legal issues there.

To reduce this to an equation, NSA = legal and constitutional. Snowden = illegal. How then can something that’s legal and constitutional be a big issue when something that’s illegal be, well, less big?

This is where the disconnect between the lawyer mind and reality rears its ugly head. Lawyers, judges and especially lawprofs who are self-described “surveillance law nerds” fail to see what is clear to everybody not laboring under the burden of legal myopia. 

That the government over the years, going way back to when Congress enacted FISA, long before computers, smartphones, Youtube or Facebook were a twinkle in the public’s eye, and nobody, aside from a few of us criminal defense lawyer, gave it any thought, started down the path that led us to laws and constitutional interpretations that render what the NSA is doing lawful. At the time, few noticed. Fewer still cared. But the foundation was built.

So it’s lawful and constitutional? Because of laws created before our digital world existed, and then tweaked as we slid down the slippery slope? And we now find ourselves in a world without privacy, but it’s all okay because laws say so and the Supreme Court agrees?

So the public had a hard time figuring out where all this was going, and didn’t believe, whether it was intentionally blind or just ordinarily stupid, it would eventually reach where we are now. Granted, we let it happen.  But pointing to laws and judicial opinions to say, tough nuggies, this is the world you allowed to happen around you and you can’t complain about it now, isn’t an adequate response to this epiphany. 

For a long time, I’ve argued that the message of Katz, that we as a People want to have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the law has failed to keep pace with technology and put us at the mercy of the government. It may be lawful, but it’s now smacked us in the face that the law has failed to meet a basic expectations of a free people to be left alone, free from governmental intrusion into our every thought and utterance.

Oh wait, there’s a shiny squirrel. What was I saying?

Update:   Jonathan Turley published an op-ed in USA Today likening the Snowden prosecution to Animal Farm.

Of course, none of our politicians is nearly as open and honest as Squealer. There will be no sign proclaiming the different treatment of the governing and governed classes. They prefer the barnyard to return to its previously sleepy existence once the offender has been put away.

The  New York Times editorial calling for a “new safety valve” is one that holds a certain appeal for most of us. Both in its bipartisan support, and its recognition that the magic bullet solution of mandatory minimums, while simple enough for the masses to digest and embrace, lacks a certain reasoned fairness and efficacy, the possibility of changing this hideous concept should bring applause:

Congress’s new bipartisan task force on overcriminalization in the justice system held its first hearing earlier this month. It was a timely meeting: national crime rates are at historic lows, yet the federal prison system is operating at close to 40 percent over capacity.

In the 16-year period through fiscal 2011, the annual number of federal inmates increased from 37,091 to 76,216, with mandatory minimum sentences a driving factor. Almost half of them are in for drugs.

The problem starts with federal drug laws that focus heavily on the type and quantity of drugs involved in a crime rather than the role the defendant played. Federal prosecutors then seek mandatory sentences against defendants who are not leaders and managers of drug enterprises. The result is that 93 percent of those convicted of drug trafficking are low-level offenders.

Whether the details, not to mention the assumption and definitions, are precise isn’t terribly important. The two key sentences, one beginning the third quoted paragraph and the other ending it, are the ones to focus on. 

The final quoted sentence, that 93% of people convicted for drugs are “low-level offenders,” is the sort of argument intended to evoke sympathy, though there is no definition of what makes someone a low-level, as opposed to medium or higher level, offender. But it accepts the premise that any drug offender, even guys selling tons of the stuff, deserve to be punished to a term of imprisonment greater than murder.

What if the entire scheme was fundamentally flawed, a political joke if you will, perpetrated on a trusting but naïve public by a manipulative president and congress, who saw drugs as a bogeyman to be blamed for society’s ills, and used to create a demand for government to save them from it.  It gave politicians an easy punching bag, drug dealers, against whom laws could be passed to show the public what a wonderful job the government was doing protecting them from evil.

What if this scenario had the added virtue of not only getting those in office re-elected by adding a cynical law here and there, but convincing the public to relinquish rights to the government, allow and approve of these same politicians increasing their power and control, as a needed component of effectively fighting the evil enemy and protecting the public?  It’s the perfect set-up, really.

But this sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, right?  And if I told you this had happened, you would tell me to loosen my tin foil hat as it’s clearly pressing too hard on my brain.  But what if it wasn’t me saying this, but former Assistant United States Attorney, now United States District Court Judge John Gleeson?

The flaw is simply stated: the Guidelines ranges for drug trafficking offenses are not based on empirical data, Commission expertise, or the actual culpability of defendants. If they were, they would be much less severe, and judges would respect them more. Instead, they are driven by drug type and quantity, which are poor proxies for culpability.

*  *  *

On June 19, 1986, University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died of a drug overdose. Congress promptly enacted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (“ADAA”), which established a two-tiered scheme of mandatory minimum and enhanced maximum sentences that have now become central features of the federal drug sentencing landscape. The ADAA’s five-year mandatory minimum, with a maximum enlarged from 20 to 40 years, was specifically intended for the managers of drug enterprises, while the ten-year mandatory minimum, with a maximum of life, was intended for the organizers and leaders. 

That Congress is finally prepared to revisit the notion that more than two generations of living under a legal regime driven by news story that caught the public’s interest and fed its naiveté sufficiently to influence our acceptance of the notion that illegal drugs were a plague that had to be stopped at all costs, is a good thing.  But they’re still only looking at the symptoms, one of which is mandatory minimums. 

The revelation that the drugs tables (and its the same from the fraud tables even though you didn’t ask) in the Sentencing Guidelines were made out of whole cloth, reveal the disease.  We have functioned since 1987 under the mistaken belief that the Guidelines offer some empirical basis for sentencing people for crimes. We spent the vast majority of that time praying to the Guidelines, as if the number 161 was infallible, or brought down by Moses and enshrined on the alter of punishment.

What if it’s all just a bunch of numbers that some guys in a room in Washington made up on their own, out of thin air?  After a couple generations of putting people in prison based on them, many people, tens of thousands of people, the made-up numbers that came out of that room took on the appearance of Truth.  Ten years was the sentence because, well, it’s been the sentence for a very long time.

This isn’t to blame the New York Times for thinking small. It’s what the Times does best, and conventional wisdom is to stick with what works for you.  But as reform happens, it’s worthwhile to remember what is being reformed.  Moses didn’t bring the Guidelines down from the mountain. There was no massive empirical study that conclusively proved that 161 months was the right number for drug dealers. 

And here’s a question that will rock the foundations of penal belief: What if drugs, regardless of whether you support legalization or not, aren’t as great a scourge on society as we’ve come to believe, and that drug dealers shouldn’t be punished as harshly as murderers?  What if the worst drug dealer, the one who sold the most drugs in the whole wide world, still wasn’t as bad as a murderer?

But drug dealers commit other crimes too, you say? So they get prosecuted and sentenced for those other crimes. Yet, the days when punishment was calibrated by the relative harm done by a crime got all screwed up because Len Bias happened to OD while Congress was noodling how to screw with our heads over the sentencing guidelines, and here we are, more than two generations later, trying to figure out where we went wrong and what we can do to fix it.

Brian Tannebaum twitted about the final sentence of John Steele’s post at Legal Ethics Forum, calling it “priceless.”

Criminal law is not my forte but the murder two charges seem to me to be clearly beyond what an ethical prosecutor should bring.

At least by the time that probable cause affidavit was filed and the prosecutor prayed with the lawyer for the parents of the deceased, I’ve been of the opinion that the charges were filed not because they were supported and could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt but rather because of the politics. Looking over what evidence the State still has, I don’t see that they’re anywhere close to murder two and I don’t buy that the theory of “let the jury dispose of our over-charging” absolves prosecutors of their responsibilities.

(2) 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

When a prosecutor overcharges – a common practice – the principal purpose is to “bargain” down from that frightening charge to a “negotiated” guilty plea to what the prosecutor should have had to charge and prove to a jury if the system were working pursuant to the Constitution. Too often, the charade of a negotiation is with the connivance of the court-assigned defense lawyer, who helps to con the defendant into thinking that he has gotten a truly negotiated deal to the best plea possible.

Another purpose is to frighten the defendant into asking for a lesser-included offense instruction, which gives the prosecution the possibility of a compromise verdict from the jury to a finding of guilt of a significant offense, although less than what was initially charged.

Freedman has been around forever. He’s got cobwebs in his office older than I am.  But aside from his comment having utterly nothing to do with the Zimmerman case or the discussion between John Steele and me, it is such malignant, simplistic cynicism as to shock even a curmudgeon like me.

Yes, Monroe, there are prosecutors and defense lawyers like that. There are also prosecutors who charge appropriately and believe they are doing their job of protecting the public from harm. There are defense lawyers who will fight to the bitter end for their clients against all odds, and there are defense lawyers who accurately advise clients that the end will be bitter.

Since John Steele’s blog is called Legal Ethics Forum, there ought to be an ethical takeaway. Mine is that Monroe Freedman has his tin foil hat on too tight, and ought to put down his keyboard and rest on laurels before destroying his legacy.  Not even a fixture in academia has the right to make people stupider by proffering such overcharges of hatred and malevolence. Not ethically.

At a website I like to call The Puddle, young lawyers with varying lengths of practice ranging from hours to months tell others how to be a rousing success with crucial issues ranging from the need for a really  cool lawyer logo to what practice management software to use on your iPad.  Others, not necessarily young, who don’t practice law at all, whether because they aren’t lawyers or lack sufficient interest, do the same.

If it sounds absurd, it is. But that doesn’t stop new lawyers from reading and thinking they must know something because if they didn’t, why would they be pundits at The Puddle?

Marcus Schantz hails from Chicago, where he decided to open his practice in 2008.  Aside from trying a bunch of cases, he started a blog. He didn’t do a lot of writing, but what he did was pretty good. It wasn’t about his love of iPads or a listicle of things that might attract the sort of eyeballs inclined to visit the Puddle, but rather about things like his murder trials.  Not nearly as breezy and intellectually stimulating as  how to teach a CLE when everyone else in the room knows more than you.

Marcus has now announced that he’s hanging it up. Not just the blog, but the practice of law. And his reasons offer far more insight than the entirety of the Puddle.

It’s fair to say that in 2009 I was hungry and had a lot of passion for the work. However, in the spring of 2010 when my client was convicted of murder something in me changed. Then a couple months later, another client was convicted of attempted murder. By the end of 2010, I had begun to grow cynical about the work. In short, I was forced to admit the criminal justice system is horribly broken. I also was forced to admit that I had failed two clients in a time of desperate need. As a result, fueling cynicism consumed idealism and I hardened.

In a way, that case was the last straw for me doing this job in Chicago. In the summer of 2012, I decided I needed a change of scenery and no longer wished to practice law. I can’t fully explain it, but I began to feel unhealthy, though physical fitness is a cornerstone in my life. It was my mental health about which I worried. I was on medication for anxiety, depression and had to take pills to sleep. Chicago, and this job, began to make me feel sick inside.

But there was more to it.

Initially in 2009 and 2010, my business was a success and it was profitable. However, in 2011 and 2012, I saw final figures in the red and a resultant escalation in debt as I scrambled to keep things afloat. At the time, I couldn’t understand why business went from great to poor. The eventual answer was marketing. My initial marketing plan worked until it didn’t and I failed to understand why. If I made any errors in running the business, it was this.

That my fiscal problems coincided with my burn out was rather fortuitous. I could have borrowed money and revamped my marketing but I chose not to. It was time to move on.

At Overlawyered, Walter Olson notes that the former Mercedes Benz dealership on Park Avenue in Manhattan, one of a mere three Frank Lloyd Wright projects in New York City, is gone.

“On March 22, the Landmarks Preservation Commission called the owners of 430 Park Ave. to tell them the city was considering designating the Wright showroom … as the city’s 115th interior landmark. … on March 28, the building’s owners, Midwood Investment & Management and Oestreicher Properties, reached out to another city agency, the Department of Buildings, requesting a demolition permit for the Wright showroom. The permit was approved the same day, sealing the showroom’s fate.”

That’s only the latest in a series of incidents in which the prospect of city intervention under Gotham’s famously cumbersome preservation laws has precipitated teardown instead.

In the  New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column, Chuck Klosterman published a letter from a juror.  Well, at least a person [name withheld] who was once a juror, 15 years ago, in St. Louis, and apparently hasn’t been able to sleep well since. St. Louis can do that to you.

During jury selection, I was asked if I supported the death penalty. I don’t. I’m unalterably opposed to capital punishment. But I feared that potential jurors who did not support the death penalty could be automatically disqualified by the prosecution. So I said I agreed with capital punishment. That way, if it came down to it, I might help spare the defendant from execution. But this violated the oath I had taken to tell the truth. Was it ethical for me to lie in order to possibly spare the life of this defendant?

Generally, lying is wrong. But lying is obviously justifiable if telling the truth will get someone unjustifiably killed. You, however, were dealing with a problem with less clarity. The person you were lying for was not necessarily innocent, so your lie was not for his short-term protection; your issue was with the magnitude of the state penalty for those who are authentically guilty.

And while your overall motives were good, you should not have lied in this circumstance. You are negatively complicating a procedure that is already flawed.

Our judicial system is imperfect and married to inflexible rules that occasionally contradict ethical living — but there is no better alternative for the enforcement of collective social laws. Granted, some of those collective laws are bad. But you were not in a position to change legislation; you were in a position to operate within the existing system of community enforcement, which tries to equalize the process by giving lawyers on both sides the ability to eliminate jurors whose views exist on the intractable poles of applied philosophy (which, in this instance, appears to include yourself). The process does not always work, but it has no chance of even coming close if potential jurors don’t tell the truth about what biases they bring to the table.

It’s not your iPad, but your Advanced iPad. 

Program Description

Few technologies have so quickly and positively affected the legal profession as has the iPad®. Join us for this live iPad® demonstration to learn even more amazing things your iPad can do and how it can benefit your law practice. We’ll cover just a few of the practical iPad® tips and then delve deep in to a discussion and demonstration of legal specific apps and forensic iPad® tools.

And you get 1.5 CLE credits for this.  The program faculty will be:

Adriana Linares, Legal Technology Trainer and Consultant, LawTech Partners, Winter Park, FL

Malcolm Harsch (Moderator), Associate Director, American Bar Association, Chicago, IL