It was a simple question: Is this going to be his life?

One of my co-defendants in  Rakofsky v. Internet came to the realization that the  Rakofsky Effect was playing out, meaning that  Bennett’s first rule might apply.  When a second amended complaint with 1248 paragraphs covering more than 300 pages arrives, it’s a pretty good indication that the synapses aren’t shooting the same way they do in other people’s lobes.

My co-defendant went on:

I can see him sitting alone in his room in the middle of the night, laughing maniacally, tapping away at his keyboard, muttering “this will get ’em,” as he wipes drool from the corner of the mouth hole in his Guy Fawkes mask.

Every time a cop kills a person, there’s a story.  The problem is that sometimes, it’s hard to come up with a story that makes much sense, but there’s still a dead body on the ground and a cop whose brain is whirling a million miles an hour. You can’t kill a guy and just say, “oops.” Even among cops, it’s frowned upon.

So when an unnamed Downey, California, police officer shot and killed an unarmed Michael Nida, he did the best he could.

A Downey officer responding to the Saturday night robbery call spotted Michael Nida, a 31-year-old unarmed father of four who matched the description of the suspect, said Lt. Dave Dolson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has taken over the shooting investigation.

Customers at a nearby ATM had been robbed at gunpoint minutes earlier and Dolson said it was believed Nida was the suspect.

“It very well looks like it could be a matter of perception,” Dolson told KNX radio. “This individual somewhat matches the description of an armed robber who robbed people at the ATM.”

Somewhat matches the description is awfully vague.  Maybe he was a human being of the male persuasion, walking upright, just like the ATM bandit? 

Family members told CBS News station KCBS-TV that Nida had jaywalked across a busy street to buy cigarettes as his wife bought gas. Nida was spotted by a Downey officer, who said he was acting suspiciously. The officer asked Nida to sit down.

“He got up and ran away,” Dolson said.

Guys who jaywalk will do that, you know.  Act suspiciously, I mean.  And run away from a cop because he didn’t want to go down on jaywalking.  They take jaywalking very seriously in California.

Nida was found a short distance away and officers ordered him to get on the ground, but he got up and ran again, Dolson said. Officers never checked Nida for a weapon and, believing he was armed, an officer shot him, the lieutenant said. No gun was found.

When a guy flees once, he’s just your run of the mill jaywalker. Twice? Well, that’s a threat if ever there was one.

The officer apparently “believed in his mind that this man presented quite a danger to the people around him,” Dolson said.

And really, a guy running away from a bunch of cops with guns because of jaywalking, because you have to remember that Nida knew nothing about the ATM robbery, is obviously the sort of thing that makes a cop “believe in his mind” (as opposed the various other places a cop might be inclined to believe) that he’s about to go on a murderous spree and harm everyone around them, cops included.

This may be one of the all-time worst stories ever devised to justify a police shooting.  There is nothing, no part of it, that rings true.  And it goes from ridiculous to absurd, and yet what makes it so significant is that everyone, most notably the investigating officer at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, talks about it without breaking out laughing.

Sure, it means that the unnamed Downey cop (who is likely going on long term leave at full pay for therapeutic purposes given the traumatic stress of killing an innocent, unarmed man) didn’t have a throwaway to plant on Nida.  Boy, wouldn’t that have made life simpler?

If nothing else, couldn’t he have come up with a story that amused?  Maybe armed space aliens? 

That Michael Nida lies dead for having the misfortune of coming within the line of fire of this unnamed Downey cop is tragic.  He had a family. He had four children.  When a cop goes down, there’s a fund for the children.  It’s unlikely that the police will start a fund for Nida’s children.  They won’t get a medal for their father being a hero.  They will just go to a funeral and walk away wondering why this had to happen.

The family has  started a fund to give Nida a “proper burial.”  They probably didn’t expect that he would be shot and killed by a Downey cop for jaywalking and hadn’t saved enough money to lay him to rest.  Maybe they’ll get an anonymous donation with a Downey postmark.

The least the unnamed Downey cop could have done is come up with a better story.  This one sucks.

H/T Radley Balko

Via Eugene Volokh, Edward Bloches at  creativity_unbound offers a Plan B (no, nothing to do with sex) if the Occupy Movement ends up going home now that the temperature in Zuccotti Park is dropping. 

Here’s my idea for saving America in case the Occupy Movement doesn’t work. It’s an idea that could help us increase empathy. It takes full advantage of social media’s true potential. It’s a program that steals from the military and juries — practices that do work — when it comes to creating interdependency.

Mandatory social media service

• We require every 18-year-old in America to participate in mandatory social media service as part of a daily or weekly routine for one year.


• We assign our young adults to a racially diverse online social group comprised of 12 people from different regions, backgrounds, income brackets. (Google+ is a potential platform.)


• We present each group with a social challenge -– obesity, jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn — and we ask them to solve the problem.


• We give them benchmarks, goals, and require an outcome in the form of an idea, a program, a new policy or maybe just a video.


• Finally we aggregate all of the solutions on one public website where the press, our legislatures, businesses and educators can access, rate and maybe even implement the ideas.

The good news is that the strains of Kumbaya aren’t on autostart.  The bad news is that there are 7 million trolls applauding this idea already.

Personally, I think this is a stroke of genius, especially the part about 18 year olds crowdsouring a solution to “jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even  the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn.”  Because all of these things can be solve, if only we force 18 year olds to sit on the couch in their parents basement, while munching on Cheetos, and type on a computer keyboard.

Obesity doesn’t stand a chance.  Right on, brother.

Mainstream media isn’t dead.  At least not when it’s the New York Times, as was proven when Clifford Winston’s op-ed,  Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary? appeared.  Cackles were raised around the blawgosphere, as debunkers typed furiously to show how simplistic, ignorant and dangerous Winston’s ideas were.

Winston’s a dolt.  But he did get his op-ed into the Times. 

The reason is the Winston, a senior fellow at Brookings, got space in the Times is that he and another Brookings guy, Robert Crandall, wrote a book entitled “First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers.” Cute title, right? It feeds into all the paranoid tendencies of people angry that they can’t afford a lawyer but have no clue what lawyers do.  They just know they need lawyers and hate them for it.

So they came up with a solution: Make everyone a lawyer, only  incompetent.  It’s like a $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, but most of the food tastes awful and every once in a while, someone is going to get salmonella and die.  The price is right, but you take your chances.

This evoked sharp, thoughtful and powerful reactions in many, including such luminaries as  Elie Mystal, Carolyn Elefant and Nathan(s) Burney.  This Winston wasn’t going to get away with such idiotic heresy, destined to bend stupid minds to his moronic scheme.  Nuh uh.

But what if this was nothing new?  Not the issue, which has been bandied about for a while, but the particulars of Winston’s book?  You see, this gave rise to a whole freakin’ symposium called “Unlocking the Law: Deregulating the Legal Profession,” at Truth on the Market.  There, Bob Crandall argued his case, as did a bunch of lawprofs who, by and large, proved they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students or sharp objects.

You missed it?  I didn’t.  I read much of what was written.  I would have read all of it but I kept nodding off.  And then I wrote a post about it.  No really, I wrote a post.  And it sent ripples through the world legal community a few people who had nothing better to do that day.

Walter Olson  knew about it.  He participated in the symposium, where they likely suspected he would be a full-fledged backer of the He-Man Lawyer Haters Club. Instead, he showed the lawprofs up by being the most thoughtful, reasonable guy in the whole symposium.  Worse still, he wrote in language comprehensible to the English speaking world. 

You didn’t read the symposium posts, did you?  Not the ones by the lawprofs. Not the ones by Wally. Not even the ones by Winston’s co-conspirator, Bob Crandall.  You didn’t even read my post.  It’s okay, you won’t hurt my feelings.  There were a great many posts by a variety of people, all of similar mind since there’s no point to an academic symposium if not to be an echo chamber for unsound thoughts, but still, there’s strength in numbers.  And you couldn’t have cared less.

But you did read Winston’s New York Times op-ed.  And it made your blood boil, wondering why the Times would publish something so insipid, so baseless, so…so…wrong.  All those non-lawyers, from pseudo-intellectuals to hipsters to angry birds in Guy Fawkes masks, cheering on this idea without the slightest clue how ill-conceived the arguments and empty the rhetoric.

Aargh.  You’re angry.  Not too angry. Just the right amount of angry.

This time it matters because Clifford Winston’s op-ed appeared in the New York Times.  And that’s because the New York Times still matters.

Don’t cancel your subscription yet. 

Matt Brown at  Tempe Criminal Defense posts about clients who find him from a distance, as opposed to those referred by other lawyers or clients, and the “interview” process.

Whereas the majority of people only care that someone they trust told them to call me and that I have a nice office, suits that fit (more or less), and a bar number, some people need numbers. They want numbers about my experience, my practice, the system, and their case. It’s because numbers make an unscientific decision like hiring a lawyer seem somewhat scientific. It’s a complex decision, and the idea of boiling the process down to comparing statistics comforts some people.

Unfortunately, a little knowledge can be a bad thing. A numbers-obsessed prospective client can easily end up worse-informed than someone who doesn’t ask any questions. The problem isn’t the information, but their perspective. Information, especially numbers, can be misleading without context.

Matt writes of an “interview” where the potential client’s final question pushed the envelope:

They wanted an exact number, so I told them. At the time, the number was fourteen. I immediately realized they weren’t going to hire me.

The number startled them. They asked me how I kept them all straight. Fourteen seemed like a huge number to them. Without a frame of reference, I might as well have told them I was too busy to handle the case.

Chalk this up to the wags who have nothing better to do than post lists of questions on the internet that people should ask lawyers before retaining them.  A well educated consumer researches such things.  And ends up worse off than they began.

The phenomenon Matt describes didn’t exist ten years ago.  Rarely did people run around interviewing a dozen criminal defense lawyers whose names they found online.  They sought recommendations and then acted upon them.  Weeks and months weren’t lost to interviews, not to mention many hours of both lawyer’s and potential client’s lives, in this strange new process.

These lists are asinine.  Even assuming, as was the case with Matt, that the lawyer answers honestly — which those who are desperate may not be inclined to do — it remains what the answers to inane questions mean to the potential client. 

Common questions, such as how many such cases have you done, have become the norm, inevitably followed up by how many did you win.  Except the former ignores that each case is different, and the result in past cases means nothing to future cases.  Still they ask.  Still we answer.  And they walk away worse for knowing.

In Matt’s case, the question about how many cases he had clearly related to whether he has the time to give the potential client the close, personal contact the client demands.  There was a problem with the prior attorney, who Matt describes in glowing terms, not being constantly available to the client. 

The irony is that the client wants the lawyer who has done the particular type of case in question a thousand times before, with great success, but now only carries a couple of cases on his docket.  And while it isn’t mentioned, likely charges of fraction of what others would charge to defend the same case.

Every client seems to dream of the once-a-mega-volume lawyer with an unbelievable amount of experience who decided to pare his practice down to a select few cases. Although that’s not completely unheard of, it’s unusual. I’ve yet to see it on such a grand scale and in under a couple decades of experience.

A little math would’ve made them see that fourteen isn’t that much. A little math would’ve made it clear that thousands of clients in a decade, something indicative of the experience factor most people consider very important in a lawyer, is a lot more than fourteen.

Don’t blame the client.  They don’t do the math.  They don’t think it through.  The don’t add up the experience they want, plus the availability they demand, with the price they can afford.  Sure, they have the capacity (well, some at least) to make sense of the craziness of their interviewing process, but they’ve learned from the internet, from the blogosphere, that they must ask a list of questions or they will make a bad decision.  They read blog posts, and are stupider for having done so. They just don’t realize it. Yet.

In Matt’s case, the potential client left a great lawyer, interviewed Matt, and ended up elsewhere.

Curious, I looked up the lawyer I think they hired. They didn’t stick with the one they had, who’s actually great. The guy they chose had a great website. That’s about it. It boasts that he’s handled “thousands” of cases in ten years of practice. Assuming “thousands” means at least two thousand, I calculate that to be over two hundred cases a year.

Matt doesn’t bad-mouth the lawyer they hired, though the statement that he had a great website suggest more sizzle than beef.  If there’s any good news in this scenario, it’s that this isn’t the client that anyone really wants, as they will flee the next lawyer as well for not being available 24/7 for hand-holding, or not producing the huge win in the impossible case. 

This is the product of those who pretend transparency comes from a grocery clerk’s list, and that everything in law can be comoditized.  The claims of doing it for the client is nonsense.  It doesn’t serve the client. It doesn’t serve the honest lawyer.  The only person who benefits is the lawyer who will say anything to score a case, the one who really wants to get clients from a website who know nothing about him and believe that he’s truly “experienced, aggressive and caring.” 

And even he will end up ruing the day he answered these inane questions, because these are the clients from hell.

The rallying cry of “do it for the children” has grown to meme proportions to those who feel more comfortable at the defense table in the well.  In the past, those who don’t realize the joke have used it to induce something akin to traumatic stress, such as when police and MADD  drove high school students to hysteria believing that one of their own had died in a drunk driving accident as part of a designed program to scare them.

At Wolcott High School in Connecticut, they decided to play the Virginia Tech-card instead.  From Rick Green at the Hartford Courant :

At Wolcott High School one morning this week, an urgent announcement crackled over the intercom: a threatening intruder was in the building and students were told to immediately take refuge in classrooms.

Doors were locked and police, with dogs, moved in. Students stayed huddled in classrooms where they were told to stay away from the windows.

Only kidding.  No armed intruder.  No threat.  No one was going to be murdered. At least not that day.  You see, the dogs were there for an entirely different reason, and since the students were huddled in their locked classroom, not looking out the windows, they wouldn’t know.

But what sounded like a frightening situation was just a search for narcotics. Drug-sniffing dogs combed the school while students stayed in locked classrooms, believing that an attacker was roaming the halls.

Was there a plague of drug abuse at Wolcott High?  Were students overdosing in the hallways, necessitating such an extreme charade to cleanse the school of demon-drugs?

School officials told me it was a routine lockdown drill, the kind that schools are required to do.

“We wanted to practice,” said Superintendent of Schools Joseph McCary. “We said there was a lockdown with an intruder inside. Doors are locked, shades are drawn and the lights are turned off and students are told to move to a corner of the room.”

That’s a double charade, twice fooled. Not only was there no intruder, but no particular drug issue. It was just for practice.

Every fine play has rehearsals, including the passion play of school-wide lockdowns for drug searches under the guise of an armed intruder about to murder students.  What a knee slapper!

Not all parents got the joke, or appreciated the “routine” nature of the show.

“I don’t think the school administration and police department have any right to mislead these kids, under any circumstances, to conduct a public safety drill,” said Carl Glendening, a parent of two high school students. “The kids are told there is an intruder and there is a lockdown and then they see cops coming in with dogs.”

“Some kids were freaked out by it. The notion of Columbine was in the back of their minds,” Glendening said. “We didn’t think this through clearly.”

The school officials may not have the right, but they clearly have the authority.  They need to practice? They have the power. They need to bring in police with drug sniffing dogs? They have the power. Parents don’t like it?  They are the parents, at least during school hours, and extending longer and farther away with every passing court decision. 

The school superintendent, however, was not about to let some overly sensitive parents muck up their rehearsal.

Maybe there’s a few people who get nervous. When we say it’s a surprise drill, it’s a surprise drill,” she said. “We have a very active group of citizens against substance abuse.”

The drug search is “something that is good to do periodically. It says we don’t have drugs in the school,” she said. “Either way it’s a win-win. I know people get concerned … there seems to be an overreaction.”

McCary, the Wolcott superintendent, said they want to teach students to take their safety seriously, so making them think it was real was essential. “If you say it’s just a drill, would you move as quickly?”

But as Green notes, you don’t set the school on fire to run a fire drill.  Granted no one was hurt.  In fact, no drugs were found during the “practice” run of drug dogs through the hallways.  I wonder if anybody told the dogs it was just practice.  But the lack of recognition that they are screwing with children’s heads, in the name of protecting children from themselves, doesn’t seem to matter at all.

It’s not there weren’t lessons to be learned in all this, that school officials are liars, that police are happy to be part of the lying conspiracy, that no at Wolcott cares what the parents think of their children being used in a charade and that the things the fear will be used to scare them into compliance and obedience for the benefit of law enforcement.  This may not be an appropriate way to teach these things to students, but I bet it’s effective.

What makes these ploys so troubling isn’t that the high school students won’t survive the charade, but that they, the very target of so much devotion that they are invoked as the justification for the never ending parade of new laws to make their world perfect, are little more than props in the play.  School administrators show little concern for how the parents feel about their children being lied to, and even less for the students themsevles.

And these are the people in whom we repose trust to care for our children showing their best judgment.

H/T Radley Balko

While blawgers, and even marketing lawyers, think our efforts online are touching a few lives here and there, we’re deluding ourselves.  In the grand scheme of the ether. we are but pikers, tiny gnats of no consequence.  At least compared to the Mommy Bloggers.

I just watched a Good Morning America segment on “mommy bloggers,” the point of which is that there are a host of mommies out there blogging away for loot.  Some get free stuff for their kids from, and I quote, “hundreds of companies,” while another held herself out as professional, supporting her family on her blogging income. 

One of the complaints was by a reader, who wanted to know the best stroller, and later realized that the blogger upon whom she relied was a paid shill.  This was offered as the genesis of the FTCs consideration of bringing blogs under their control, to prevent the mommies of the world from promoting goods without disclosing that they are on the dole.

• Check out KitchenAid’s website and tell me what’s at the top of your wish list.  At the top of my wish list, you’d find this Raspberry Ice Stand Mixer! 
  
• Follow @KitchenAidUSA on twitter, and tell them that @alltheweigh says hi! (one entry)
  
• Tweet about this giveaway on twitter by sharing a link to this post.  (one entry)
  
• Like KitchenAid on Facebook, and tell them Kenlie from alltheweigh.com sent you! (one entry)
  
• Feel free to say hi to me on Facebook too though you won’t receive an entry for that.  I just like connecting with you.  src=”http://www.alltheweigh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif”>
  
• Blog about this giveaway (linking to this post) on your own blog!  Come back and leave a link so I can see it.  (two entries)

Get the picture?  And when the entry requires someone to say KitchenAid is the greatest thing since sliced bread, they will. Why not, if it will get you something free.

In comparison, lawyers get squat.  There’s no appliance company throwing swag our way.  Maybe a book here and there, but that’s about as good as it gets.  I suspect this is a good thing, that blawgers aren’t offered big time swag for writing “reviews” about anything that people really want, as we could be every bit as shameless as the mommies, if not more.

Still, that doesn’t forgive the massive fraud permeating the blogosphere when it comes to shills.  Some mommy bloggers contend that while they’re thrilled to get free valuable stuff, it doesn’t influence their reviews.  Reading some, you realize that the “review” is right out of the manufacturer’s brochure, but still, it’s impossible to prove they weren’t happy with the product.  Of course, when the price is free, happiness is easy to come by.

Some of the mommy bloggers note that they are reviewing products in exchange for a freebie, complying with the FTC requirement.  Others, not so much.  Not only are they enjoying the benefits of swag, but the giveaway allows them to fabricate a level of interest, both in the product as well as their blog, by requiring twits and likes and even expressions of love and adoration.  If it could get you a free blender, would it really be a problem to twit “KitchenAid blenders are the grooviest thing ever?”  After all, you know it’s nonsense.

The point is manufacture the appearance of quality and interest on the internet so that others, considering actually purchasing a good (meaning either too stupid to play the giveaway game, in actual need of an appliance or not such a cheapskate that they will pay for the things they want) see this vast outpouring of positive support.  And it’s total nonsense.

At the same time, it turns up the volume of happy noise and drowns out legitimate voices about the problems suffered by those unfortunates who were foolish enough to buy the stuff. 

In a recent series of posts, Ken at  Popehat went through a detailed analysis of The Anatomy of a Scam.  In the scam Ken describes, there’s nothing legitimate about the scammers efforts at all.  He’s just a scoundrel.

But this involves well-known corporations that produce real products, and yet engage in widespread and overwhelmingly embraced deception of a magnitude that dwarfs the low rent scoundrel.  For a free blender, all you need to do is show how much you love them.  Hardly much of a price to pay for a freebie.

Which brings us to the one things that hasn’t changed since I learned of the great swag being thrown at mommy bloggers: Why is it that lawyers are still deemed so inconsequential that no one throws anything good our way?  We could learn to love you too.

* As for my running battle with the nice folks at KitchenAid who happily took my money but found it inconvenient to satisfy their obligations, though they did apologize for the inconvenience, they have yet to perform their end of the contract and continue to keep my money and ignore me.  On the bright side, my experiment in using social media as a means of addressing their failure to honor their obligations continues, and it appears that significant headway has been made in alerting others that, as much as KitchenAid loves your money, they want nothing to do with standing behind their very expensive products.  The experiment continues, as does some more conventional means of teaching sellers a lesson in honoring commitments.

It’s good to be a senior federal judge. You’ve got nobody to impress and no concern that anything you might do is going to impact your elevation to the Supreme Court. Your climb to greatness has come to an end, and it’s now only about doing the right things.  John Kane in Denver is proof.

From the Denver Post :

The email was from an unfamiliar name, but the subject line was well known.  So I opened it.  First, the introduction, that the writer was an associate of a lawyer who represented a defendant in a large, multi-defendant conspiracy case.  Then came the meat of the communication.

We have been reviewing the discovery materials provided by the government and we are trying to locate a conversation between Smith and Jones in which they discuss 91 kilograms of heroin.  We would like to determine if our client was present during that conversation and/or participated in it. 

If your office has located that conversation, could you kindly please direct our attention to where it’s contained in the discovery materials.

I am unaware of any conversation in which any person discussed any controlled substances at any time.

During a panel discussion at the Asian American Bar Association of New York, Vivia Chen from ALM’s  The Careerist asserted that the blawgosphere has helped to educate and inform non-lawyers on the law, thus making them more knowledgeable.  I strongly disagreed.

My take is that non-lawyers latch on to whatever writings support their preconceived notions, using the fact that a lawyer agrees with them as proof of their validity of their position.  No matter how batshit crazy it may be. Confirmation bias at its finest, if you will.  Do you not think lawyers get fitted for tin foil hats too?

During some recent romps through the blogosphere, I’ve read a variety of posts about law, decisions and governmental actions written by IANAL bloggers with significant followings that were shockingly misguided.  Whether overly simplistic or just plain wrong, there was a theme to be found: They disclaimed adequate knowledge to proffer their opinion, but did so anyway. 

And from comments that followed, they were applauded by a great many other IANAL commenters whose anger and ignorance was bolstered by this public validation of their beliefs.  Then came the kicker, a link thrown in here and there to some lawyer somewhere who supported their position.  Professional confirmation. 

If I was a law professor, I would explain this phenomenon this way:

Earlier this month, I blogged about assertionism — my label for usage claims that sound like prescriptivism, but are actually bare assertions: They don’t rely on any claims about what the (supposed) Linguistic Authorities say, on any detailed logical arguments, or on claims about allegedly superior clarity or precision; they just consist of a person’s bare assertions. And when one asks for evidence supporting the claim, all one gets is more bare assertions. Prescriptivists ought to dislike assertionism as much as descriptivists do, partly because assertionism often comes across as unintentional parody of prescriptivism.

I hope this paragraph makes your head hurt as much as it did mine.  Yes, I’m that cruel.  But I’m not that smart, and so I explain things using smaller words.  We, lawyers, do not have the authority to make naked claims, unsupported by law or reason, that make non-lawyers stupider for having read them.

Lawyers have an ethical duty to educate the public in the law.  We have a concomitant duty not to make deceive them.  While we don’t forfeit our right to free speech upon taking the oath, at least not exactly, we undertake certain responsibilities that constrain our ability to assert whatever we please when it comes to something where our specialized knowledge gives us the appearance of credibility.  We can’t just spew.

You want to spew?  You have fee-eee-eeelings?  You are angry and frustrated because the law sucks, truth to power, David versus Goliath?  How nice for you, the freedom to assert whatever pops into your head, cloaking yourself in your legal education, your expertise, so that the mere assertion by you carries the weight of a professional opinion that others can embrace and hold to their breast.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of lawyers trying to use the internet to market themselves.  There is no inherent conflict with demonstrating expertise in a particular niche of law for the purpose of showing potential clients that you possess the knowledge and abilities they want from a lawyer.  But if you find it hard to crank out a substantive blog post, or become taken with your ability to reveal your deepest, darkest peeve despite the utter absence of any rational basis, and fill in the blank blog space with it, then there is a problem.

The Hippocratic oath is rumored to begin, Primum non nocere, First, do no harm.  Blawgers take no oath.  The barriers to a lawyer showing up on the internet and offering opinions to as many people as will read them is a dollar and a dream. 

Despite the fact that every lawyer is brilliant (it’s those other lawyers who are blithering idiots), some of the brethren have blogs that offer opinions that are wholly unsupportable, that reflect the pathetic reality that they are wearing tin foil hats.  They confirm the wildest and most bizarre beliefs of non-lawyers. They validate confusion and misunderstanding.

All this leads up to an aspiration that we should all make the core of our efforts in public expression as lawyers. 

Leave no one stupider for having read what we write.

Before anyone points out the obvious, not everything I’ve written comports with this idea, and I apologize for my trespasses.  I promise to do better.  And if you are writing as a lawyer, offering naked assertions that serve to bolster non-lawyers beliefs in the bizarre and ridiculous, do better as well. 

Society is suffering from a lot of maladies lately, and it’s not entirely clear that we have the capacity to cure every disease.  Let’s not inflame the boil of stupidity.  We may not be able to fix anything, but we can certainly not make things worse.