When people complain that “there are too many lawyers,” what they really mean is that there are too many bad ones. There is always demand for good lawyers to deal with the intricacies of modern life. If anything, people need more good lawyers than ever before — smart, wise, honorable...
With a hat tip to our Uncle Ralph, here’s a link to yet another fMRI study bearing on criminal law. Makiko Yamada and colleagues have published in Nature Communications their study “Neural Circuits in the Brain that are Activated when Mitigating Criminal Sentences.” The researchers asked people to review the...
Judgment is the criminal lawyer’s stock-in-trade. The ability to assess the risks of a situation, and choose the better course of action, is the value that lawyers bring to the criminal justice system. It doesn’t matter if they’re defense attorneys negotiating a deal or fighting it out at trial, or...
Almost from our first post, we’ve written here about developments in brain-scan technology and its applicability to criminal law (see here, here, here and here, for example). So needless to say, the past nine days have been of great interest, as the research behind neuroimaging’s claims has come into hot...
Tomorrow’s issue of the Economist has a brief piece on some new drug policing in Virginia: “Cleaning Up the Hood: Focusing on drug markets rather than users means less crime.” The article is on DMI, or Drug-Market Intervention, a law-enforcement strategy that has been spreading around the country since...
Prompted by a tweet from Scott Greenfield this morning, we read a short editorial the New York Times did a couple of days ago, arguing that federal and state prosecutors should adopt open-file discovery policies, in order to limit Brady violations and promote justice. We’d missed it the first time...
In lieu of a regular blog post, I figured I’d leave a sample of the illustrated guide to crimlaw I’m doing on Tumblr (a link to the full series is over there on the right). Regular writing will resume shortly. Enjoy.
The January 30 issue of the New Yorker has an intriguing article by Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” Perhaps we’ve grown a bit cynical, but we expected yet another inane media whine about increasing rates of imprisonment “despite” fewer crimes being...
Andrei Chikatilo was serial killer who murdered at least 56 young women and children starting in 1978 until his capture in 1990. The details are as bad as one might expect, and apparently the murders and mutilations were how he achieved sexual release. His killings seemed unpredictable to investigators at...
In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures that lived scores of millions of years ago, that terrorist hijackers flew planes into the...
We haven’t gone anywhere. Well, actually we did. We spent a couple of weeks visiting family for Christmas and New Year’s. And then took a week getting back on top of work. In the meantime, a dozen great post topics have come to mind only to be forgotten (or, if...
Any SEO guru worth his fee will tell you that, once your blog gets some mention or award or whatnot, you need to pump out a lot of content right away. Otherwise, people who come to visit out of curiosity will stop coming back when they don’t see updates. And...
One of our bugbears here at The Criminal Lawyer is the excessive number of federal crimes — particularly those that are created by regulators rather than by elected legislators. We’re not alone in this concern, and over the past several months we’ve noticed what can only be called a growing...
Harry Morgan died this week. When we were in grade school, we knew him as Col. Potter on M*A*S*H and as the Sheriff in “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” two characters that seemed to our young eyes to be the most “real” on either show. But of course he did a...
So now we have a Tumblr. It was bound to happen, really. There are plenty of questions, issues and misconceptions about criminal law; we like explaining things; we like drawing things (poorly); people like learning stuff with pictures… So doing a webcomic sort of guide to criminal law just...
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