Engineers and clerks love systems. They’re repetitive, conceptually sound and facilitate the movement of huge numbers of widgets, be they ball bearings or human beings, from the beginning to the end of the system. When the occasional bad widget comes out the end, it can be chalked up to an expected failure rate.

When the bad widget turns out to be a human being, the consequences can be devastating and nearly impossible to undo.  Systems, it turns out, are designed to move widgets only in one direction, and are not designed to take into account their own fallibility. Systems don’t like to admit to failure, and fight efforts to correct their mistakes.

The findings and conclusions of Northern District of California Judge William Haskell Alsup in the case of Stanford Ph.D student Rahinah Ibrahim has issued, having been duly redacted by that other branch of government who is in charge of none of its secrets are revealed. Continue reading →

Like most maxims, it sounds better in Latin: Inter arma enim silent leges.  Its message, however, is not merely important, but provides a deep insight into the dynamic of jurisprudence.  At Volokh/WaPo, Ilya Somin writes about Nino Scalia’s extrajudicial observations:

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,”  and Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

With regard to the controversial Kelo decision, Nino offered his view that it “will not survive.” Continue reading →

Among the weird things that happen in the blawgosphere is the sudden, unexpected appearance of a comment long after a post appeared.  More than a year ago, I posted about a Ft. Lauderdale lawyer named Gary Ostrow, who you may recall from his “press release,” announced his intention “to take on all celebrity criminal cases in the state of Florida, effective immediately.”

Okay, stop your snickering. That’s old news.  There’s new news. Just calm down.

It’s hard to know for sure why Gary stumbled upon my old post. Perhaps he was doing a vanity Google search of his name, or maybe he was checking on whether it was worthwhile to send another check to Bangalore’s finest to promote his brand, but there it was. Continue reading →

Before jumping into my review, two points must be made. First, I have been an admirer of Kevin Underhill’s work at Lowering the Bar for as long as I’ve been part of the blawgosphere.  In other words, I’m biased.  Second, he did not send me a cupcake with the book, despite my admonition that he do so to assure a positive review.  I really could have used the cupcake.

I started reading The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill, published by ABA Books, on the train into the City. It was awful, as people kept staring at the crazy guy who couldn’t stop laughing.  I was unable to make it through the Introduction and Disclaimer without embarrassing myself by violating basic train etiquette and annoying all around me with my loud laughter. Continue reading →

When I mentioned #ReinventLaw, Silicon Valley edition, my bona fides to question its glorious exposition were challenged because I wasn’t in the room. Ironic for people with an affinity for distant connections via the internet, but there it was.

Scott – you owe me a retraction.

You were not in the room.  Really?  but you feel like making the sort of sweeping statements about what occurred via the prism of twitter?

Seriously – I would hope you are better than this?

I leave it to you to decide the level of irony in Dan’s demand. And so, when Reinvent Law came to New York City, and it became clear that neither of its young lawprof sponsors, Dan Katz or Renee Knake, planned to ask me to speak as a juxtaposition to cries for passion, pyrotechnics and safety glasses, I did the only thing left for me to do. Continue reading →

It’s been a long, hard week. Lousy weather, snow and more snow, followed by freezing rain. I was out in the John Deere Gator 6×4 at 5:30 a.m., plowing for an hour and a half to get the snow off the driveway before the freezing rain turned it into a sheet of ice. Lucky the Gator had headlights. Wish it had a roof and heater.

But it’s Friday, and that means my suffering isn’t necessarily over. I’m taking the train to Cooper Union to see ReinventLaw in the flesh.  Given all the less-than-positive things I’ve said, how could I not?

The word on the street is that it’s “sold out,” which is a curious description given that there was nothing to sell in the first place. Tickets were free, and LegalTechNY was in town this week, so the same crowd for one could attend the other. Plus me. Continue reading →

The first time I heard the sound of my voice while going through recordings of a client’s wiretaps was too funny to be disturbing. The client was driving me home from an arraignment for a friend of his, and I had forgotten to call my mother to wish her a happy birthday. It upset her when that happened, and the client was an early adopter of cellphones. I borrowed his, wished her a happy birthday and all was well.

Until the turnover. In there, it said, “Unk Male” was speaking to “Unk Female” in code, “believed to be narcotics.” The code was, “Happy birthday, Mom.” I laughed. The judge laughed. The prosecutor laughed. Even my client laughed.

Of course, there was nothing in my communication to indicate I was a lawyer, and my conversation wasn’t privileged.  In context, it showed how they would turn any conversation, no matter how innocuous, into a secret discussion in furtherance of the conspiracy.  The agents were dopes. Had they known it was a privileged attorney/client conversation, Title III would have required minimization; turn off the recorder and note the privilege in the log. Continue reading →

Jacob Gocheski was a teen with issues, which was why he went to school at the Parsons Child and Family Center. To get there, he took a bus, but the driver wasn’t comfortable with this troubled kid as a passenger, and so the Rotterdam police were called in. From the Albany Times Union:

Police were called after the driver said he felt he could not safely transport Gocheski to school at Parsons Child and Family Center, “based on threats that the student made in an aggressive manner,” police said in the release.

According to his attorney, who likely revealed far too much about a minor’s condition than discretion would have suggested, Continue reading →

When Noam Scheiber began his pitch for socialized law, he opened with the “requisite anecdote.” It’s a rhetorical device, used by those knowledgeable in the art of persuasion against the unwary.  It’s also used by the unwary because they fail to understand that it’s of no conceptual significance and they think it proves their point.  Let me tell you a tale of woe or joy, they begin, and you will then agree with me.

Linda Greenhouse explains the pitch as well as I’ve ever seen in her New York Times op-ed on the little nuns, a grandmother, Hobby Lobby and the murder of two abortion clinic workers.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote in her essay collection “The White Album.” It’s a haunting line, because it’s so universally applicable. We tell ourselves stories not only for profound reasons but for mundane ones as well: to process the ambiguous and complex events that unfold every day around us, or even to try to understand the issues presented in a major Supreme Court case. Continue reading →

Bob Autobee was a corrections officer. His son, Eric, followed in his footsteps, and was murdered by Edward Montour, a prisoner already doing life.  Bob wants to speak at the sentencing of his son’s killer, as is his right under law as a victim, but a legal battle is at hand to stop him, to silence him.

Via Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic:

Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler . . . wants to block one couple’s efforts to speak out against the death penalty for the man who murdered their child. Brauchler has filed a motion in a pending case seeking to bar Bob and Lola Autobee from participating in the sentencing phase of the trial of Edward Montour, their son’s killer. The law only guarantees the rights of victims to “discuss the harm that resulted from the crime,” Brauchler argues.

What distinguishes the Autobees is that they are against the death penalty. Continue reading →