Last week, the House passed a bill that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts (by cutting off the funds to do so). The Senate is now considering it as part of the 1,900-page omnibus spending bill. This is largely seen as a reaction to...
In today’s environment, where law schools are churning out way more lawyers than the market really wants, plenty of law students and recent grads are wondering if it’s really worth it. We’re asked this question, in various forms, all the time. And we see it asked every day on various...
A quick link to start your Monday morning. The exam question is either incredibly trite, or incredibly profound. Enjoy.
Last year, we posted an analysis of capital punishment as practiced in the U.S., and concluded that it ought to be scrapped. Not for the usual “killing is wrong” or “what about the innocent” reasons, but because as practiced it fails to serve the purposes of punishment. It doesn’t deter...
Now that Julian Assange has been arrested in the U.K., his fight for the moment is to prevent extradition to Sweden, which wants to arrest him for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct. But given the comparative laxity of any punitive measures Sweden might impose even in the worst case...
Plenty of us are familiar with the basic skills of cross-examination: Always lead, Don’t ask that one last question that lets the witness deny the conclusion you want to draw, Don’t ask a question if you’re not pretty sure of the answer, Don’t let the witness explain, Take it...
The Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law has released a troubling study of prosecutorial misconduct in California. The report, “Preventable Error: A Report on Prosecutorial Misconduct in California 1997-2009,” opens by pointing out that of course the majority of prosecutors behave ethically, but then it...
So everyone from the Washington Post to Fark is reporting gleefully about the recent acquittal of a Northern Virginia man charged with failing to stop for a school bus picking up kids. The defense attorney is getting kudos for pointing out that the law, when rewritten 40 years ago,...
Every defense attorney has their own favorite metaphor for what we do. Some talk of it like a street fight, envisioning a slugfest with the cops or the court or DA (or all three). Others speak as if it’s a poker game (with the other side usually holding all the...
On our main website, we wrote a brief primer on international law, mostly for our own enjoyment. (The same reason why we write this blog, actually.) To our constant amazement, it gets cited heavily around the internet, and has been on the syllabus of at least a couple law school...
The feds are really ramping up their insider-trading enforcement. But instead of going after real insiders, they’re going after consultants and investors who use them. This is a big risk for the feds, and they could lose big. It started a year ago, when the feds indicted a bunch...
When we were kids, the police were the good guys. They were who you could turn to if you got lost. They were the ones who protected us from the bad guys. They were on our side. When we were kids, of course, we learned a simplified version of reality....
For a while there, it seemed like not a day went by without us reading of some firm or other laying off a mess of lawyers. Things have changed. Now, it seems as if not a day goes by without us reading of some law student getting upset at the...
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