As our first bureau chief, a wise and gifted man, would often say to us: “Oy.” Last Friday, we blogged about how this Rakofsky fellow had done something very foolish. After being reported to have done some pretty bad lawyering, and being roundly disparaged by the blawgosphere as a result,...
Last month, we posted on the senate hearings on whether the feds need to get a warrant before getting emails and other stuff stored in the cloud. The Obama administration would rather let the feds continue to get such stuff without bothering to get a warrant, as they now can...
Interesting Fourth Amendment decision from the Supreme Court this morning, in a case which at first glance didn’t seem all that cert-worthy. The facts are as run-of-the-mill as they come — an undercover buy-and-bust, the dealer ran into a building, arrest team followed in just as one of the doors...
You’ve probably heard, by now, of this Joseph Rakofsky kid. You know the one — the newly-licensed lawyer who took on a murder trial without any trial experience, who is alleged to have told his investigator to “trick” an eyewitness into denying having seen anything, and whose performance was so...
The other day, we said the short answer is that the killing of Osama bin Laden was lawful. Some have asked for a bit more detail in the answer. We can’t give the full answer, of course, but we can give a slightly longer one than we did. A full...
It’s only been a few days since Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. military assault on his compound in Pakistan. And in those few days, the internet has been buzzing with discussions, debates and hand-wringing over whether the U.S. acted lawfully. We’ve been reading thoughts of people on...
It’s rare that we agree with a NY Times editorial. Yesterday, we came close. In a blurb titled “Recidivism’s High Cost and a Way to Cut It,” the editors said one solution to the high cost of imprisoning repeat offenders would be to adopt what Oregon’s doing, in letting...
Let this be a lesson to any young appellate lawyers who might be reading this: Focus on the result, not on the argument. We’re wading through the various slip opinions and decisions that came down during March and April while we were on trial, and the Supreme Court decision...
When we were just starting out in the law, we frankly had no problem with the concept of profiling. Not racial profiling — that’s just a logical absurdity along the lines of “most people who commit crime X are of race Y, therefore it’s reasonable to suspect people of race...
Wiretaps are arguably the greatest invasion of privacy that the government can do. They’re listening in on private conversations, not intended to be overheard by anyone else. So to get a wiretapping warrant, the government has to do more than for a normal search warrant. There has to be...
We didn’t post as often as usual during the six-week trial we just wrapped up. Common wisdom says that can be deadly for a blog’s readership. So we checked our stats to see what happened (we use Google Analytics, which we’ve found to be the most reliable though not the...
Our jury’s still out, and there’s so much stuff to catch up on. There’s the 5th Circuit’s denial of Jeff Skilling’s appeal, even though the Supreme Court had struck down the “honest services fraud” charge last summer. We were so ready to write something about it yesterday, but work intervened,...
Well, the jury’s finally out on that trial we started a month ago. Expect regular postings to resume shortly.
So on Thursday the WSJ reported that the Obama administration has changed the rules of investigating terror suspects, to permit interrogation without Miranda warnings in certain circumstances: A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that...
We have some strong feelings on the nature of the law as a profession. And by “profession,” we don’t mean the colloquial usage of “job description.” We’re talking about the concept of a calling — a calling to the service of others where one’s own personal interest must be secondary...
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