As you may or may not know, my webcomic The Illustrated Guide to Law is an offshoot of my old law blog The Criminal Lawyer. The old blawgosphere was great, because it was this huge ongoing conversation—lawyers around the country interacting every day, more or less thoughtfully, through their own...
Over on my comic, reader Martenzo this morning asked: While this is off-topic for the current chapter, I got curious after reading about the recent Bundy acquittal in Oregon. Are you ever going to cover jury duty in greater detail, and will you mention jury nullification? Are you, as a...
Yesterday, I was raptly following the sentencing of Matthew Keys as it was live-tweeted by Sarah Jeong. If you haven’t read the dozens of articles about it today, the short story is Mr. Keys was sentenced to 2 years in federal prison, for sharing his login info online — info...
Readers of my Illustrated Guide to Law have frequently asked about a seeming double standard in criminal law when it comes to drunkenness. On the one hand, a person who is too drunk to think will be liable for crimes he commits; but on the other hand, a person who...
In the “class participation” section of my comic, commenter G. T. Bogosian this morning asked: Why does the supreme court keep guaranteeing that we have a right to counsel, but only in situations that almost never come up in real life? Is there some guiding constitutional interpretive philosophy that explains...
Last summer, I made a little ‘splainer for the Washington Post briefly explaining how Qualified Immunity works (and doesn’t). [Link] This afternoon, a very nice reporter reached out to me for some followup. She’s doing a longer piece on QI, and had some questions specifically about the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence here. I dashed...
It’s fairly well-established that eyewitness identification sucks, as a rule. There have been tons of scientific studies going back decades — and more are conducted all the time — on the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The studies generally conclude that we’re really bad at noticing things, remembering them accurately, and identifying...
A couple of weeks ago, Wikimedia’s lawsuit against the NSA got thrown out. Wikimedia (and the ACLU, NACDL, Amnesty International, and many more) claimed the NSA was violating everyone’s rights with its “upstream” surveillance of internet communications. The court dismissed the case because nobody could prove that they had “standing”...
Over at Vox.com, Dara Lind has posted the shocking “One chart that puts mass incarceration in historical context.” Lind painstakingly sifted through Bureau of Justice Statistics reports to create a graph of U.S. prisoners per 100,000 of population, from 1880 to 2013. Focusing on those sentenced to prison (i.e., for more...
My comic was on hold for a bit this summer during a trial and the run-up to trial beforehand. I periodically reassured my readers that I was still here, and would be back once the “work” work was done. This spawned its own variety of reader comments. I had to...
I made a thing for Radley Balko at the Washington Post on Qualified Immunity. Some people had questions about it over on my comic, which was about something completely different. One of the WaPo pages mentioned the elimination of the KKK under President Grant. Wait I thought that the KKK...
The officer gets his overtime. The defendant gets his freedom. But the victim doesn’t get his property back. If someone steals all of the money in my bank account, the police find a paper trail that shows who did it, but the courts suppress the evidence because the evidence was...
Hey Nathan, I’m ????????, an AI MSc student. Your comic is great! : ) I have some questions. (1) The Good Wife, a show about lawyers, makes law knowledge seem a bit like a weapon to be used for attack and defence to help one navigate the civilized world....
I’m writing a response to an essay on “consent as a felt sense” and looking for a deeper explanation of mens rea and the reason why it ought form the basis for not just a legal system, but for the social norms of a community. I know there is some...
I get a lot of questions over at my comic and on Tumblr, and try to answer most of them as best I can. Some get answered privately, but some are out there for all to see. It occurs to me that there may be readers of this blog who may not want...
Recent Comments