So we’ve been hearing about this new blog, “UnemployedJD.com,” where some guy named Ethan is documenting his hunger strike “to bring awareness to the concerns of [his] classmates. Their primary concerns are inaccurate employment statistics, ineffective career counseling, and rising tuition costs. [His] intention is to have these concerns...
Yesterday, President Obama signed S.1789, the long-awaited sentencing fairness act that reduced the appalling 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. It still doesn’t go all the way to undo the hysteria of the crack epidemic, however. For powder cocaine there’s a 10-year minimum for selling or...
On May 8, 2005, we were having a party. It was our birthday, and our firstborn had just turned 1 a few days before, so it called for a big celebration with friends and family. For us, it was a time of new beginnings. But for Jerry Hobbs, May 8...
Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Jonathan Adler posted another critique on Sunday of the New York Times’s silly article claiming the Roberts Court to be the “most conservative in living memory.” Adler makes some of the same points we did last week, finding fault with the Times’s definitions of...
Over the weekend, the NYT printed an article calling the Supreme Court under C.J. Roberts the “most conservative in decades.” “The court not only moved to the right,” the article said, “but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political...
“There has been a spate of particularly brutal and senseless attacks on the police,” according to Eugene O’Donnell, professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a former police officer and prosecutor. “It seems to me, [there is] an unprecedented level of disrespect and willingness to challenge...
The police need a warrant to search your home. Except when they don’t. The warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment is there to protect your privacy, and sorry, but sometimes your privacy isn’t the most important thing at the moment. One exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency Exception. ...
We’re one of the few Republican defense lawyers out here — and perhaps the only one living in Manhattan, so it’s odd that we’re so intrigued by the race for the Democratic nomination for the Florida Attorney General race. Well, maybe not so odd. The issue of character has come...
Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Ilya Somin has a good post today on whether the bar exam ought to be abolished. He agrees with Elizabeth Wurtzel that the exam “is primarily a test of memorization,” the bulk of which will be irrelevant to any given lawyer’s actual practice. We...
Our jury system is supposed to maximize justice. So how come our system only makes it harder for jurors to do the right thing? Take this example: A judge in Florida today began reading some 100 pages of instructions to the jury in a case charging a lawyer with stealing...
Now that we’re all immigration lawyers, we figured we’d better take a gander at the complaint filed yesterday by the feds, seeking to strike down Arizona’s new immigration law. The feds say Arizona’s law is preempted by federal law and policy, and so must be struck down under the...
Dang, the whole week has gone by already? It’s been a week of long days and late nights here in the trenches, so please excuse the lack of posting here. (Our bloodstream must be 70% coffee by now. As we found ourselves saying out loud on the record yesterday,...
There’s an article over on the ABA Journal’s website today called “How Law Schools Can Produce Happier Students and Satisfied Lawyers.” We recommend reading through the comments section. It’s a good glimpse at one of the biggest problems with the legal profession today — namely, that there are too...
It looks like we spotted the trend. Unfortunately. Last week we noted that, when faced with an ambiguous statute, some on the Supreme Court are now willing to read new language into the statute, rather than toss it back to Congress to do it right. And we wondered if that might...
“Hate” is not an element of New York’s “hate crime” law. You don’t have to hate to commit a hate crime. Instead, the law merely requires that you have “a belief or perception” regarding a person’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation. ...
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