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November 6, 2007

Why lawyers are protesters in Pakistan ::
legal — tagged , , , and
8:23 am

Slate has a good piece explaining why we’re seeing attorneys at the center of the protests against Musharraf’s recent imposition of Marshall Law. Sure, there’s the whole point that they were the only remaining group who could muster the power to get together after Musharraf took power in 1999 and chased all the opposition parties out of the country; and yes, the courts made for a convenient place for the lawyers to gather. But there’s a historical and cultural context in which all of this occurred:

Lawyers and the law have played a central role in politics since the beginning of Pakistan’s history. The founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a barrister—he mounted a series of successful arguments for how the 1947 separation from India would take place; at heart, Partition was a legal arrangement.

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And throughout the decades of Pakistan’s existence, lawyers have fought for the development of legislative and judicial institutions in opposition to military dictatorship and the existing bureaucratic rule.

October 10, 2007

Concert-going creating potential border security problem? ::
legal — tagged , , and
9:29 am

Brian over at False 45th has a nice review of The National’s recent show up in Montreal. I’m sorry I missed it, and having seen The National at last year’s Pitchfork festival, I understand, at least partially, what I was missing out on. But, unrelated to the show itself is Brian’s increasingly tense and interrogatory interactions with the border guards:

One last note, I think the border agents are becoming increasingly suspicious of my brief three-hour trips to Montreal. The questions are getting more and more detailed and are being asked with an increasingly surly tone. On the way in, I was asked what I did for a living, what company I work for and where they were located. Then the agent quickly mixed in, “Do you have $10,000 in the car?” On the way back, the border agent asked me where the concert was, what street the club was located on, what were the cross streets and what roads I took to get to and from the club.

Brian’s story implies that US Immigration maintains a database of each citizen’s border crossing activities. It’s probably keyed by the the car’s license plate. The government’s doing this is probably not a problem on its own, though it does raise a civil libertarian flag—mostly because it suggests that although border guards are able to collect extensive information on when and how often a person crosses the US border, that by itself isn’t enough to warrant increased suspicion, and potentially raises a lot of false positives. To my mind, making brief trips to Canada every month or so does seem a little out of the ordinary, but on its own I’m not the sort of behavior that suggests nefarious activity. Yet the increased suspicion of the border guard, implied by his pressing questions, seem to suggest that such border-crossing jaunts are treated like that. Yet, Brian’s activity is really very ambiguous, and has a completely innocent explanation. If the guards had a little more information, they’d know that.

December 29, 2006

Carey v. Musladin, a quick analysis ::
legal — tagged , , , and
3:00 pm

I must be feeling better because I find I have a reinvigorated interest in the activities of the Supreme Court. I note particularly the Court’s opinion in Carey v. Musladin, which presented the question of whether the California courts improperly upheld the conviction of a criminal defendant after the victim’s family members were allowed to wear buttons displaying photographs of the victim during the trial. The question was couched within the defendant’s subsequent federal habeas petition, and the Court’s majority opinion stuck to the narrow, technical question of whether upholding the conviction in spite of the buttons was “contrary to” or “an unreasonable application of” clearly established federal law. In a brief opinion by Justice Thomas, the Court quickly answered the question in the negative. But Justice Souter, concurring in the judgment, took a different approach in which he dealt with the question in a more substantive manner:

[O]ne could not seriously deny that allowing spectators at a criminal trial to wear visible buttons with the victim’s photo can raise a risk of improper considerations. The display is no part of the evidence going to guilt or innocence, and the buttons are at once an appeal for sympathy for the victim (and perhaps for those who wear the buttons) and a call for some response from those who see them. On the jurors’ part, that expected response could well seem to be a verdict of guilty, and a sympathetic urge to assuage the grief or rage of survivors with a conviction would be the paradigm of improper consideration.

It’s interesting to compare the majority opinion with Souter’s concurrence. In an effort to build consensus and answer only a narrow, technical question, the majority seems to foreclose the possibility that private actors in a court room could ever do something that would prejudice a criminal defendant during trial. By contrast, Souter’s concurrence does a good job of being just as narrow of an opinion, but leaving open the possibility of prejudice against the defendant based on a different set of facts.

Update: Tony Mauro has an interesting article about Chief Justice Roberts that shades the oddly narrow and technical nature of the Court’s Carey opinion. I noted particularly this paragraph:

Nearly everywhere he goes, Roberts speaks of his desire to preside over a more cohesive and unanimous Court. But with resignation in his voice, he notes that he cannot achieve that goal without active help from his colleagues.

Given Roberts’ intelligence and his overwhelmingly technical mind, as well as this priority he seems to be sticking to, it could be that this opinion simply a product of the type of influence he has over the Court.

October 22, 2006

And what would your community service project look like? ::
legal — tagged , , , and
4:45 pm

Only in LA. On Saturday, Slate’s Today’s Papers had this to say about a new merit badge being offered to Boy Scouts in Los Angeles (check the last paragraph of the story):

The LAT reports that Los Angeles-area Boy Scouts—perhaps those who would rather not learn the finer points of wilderness survival—can earn a new badge being offered in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association of America, the movie industry’s lobbying group. The “Respect Copyrights Activity” badge features the copyright “C” symbol, a film reel, and musical notes. A mom’s take: “This one is tailor-made for the city boy in L.A.” As long as the L.A. city boy is an aspiring studio hack.

Unfortunately, there was no link to the LA Times story when I last checked. I’d love some substantiation of this story, so if anyone knows of anything, send it along?

October 9, 2006

Project Posner ::
legal — tagged , , and
10:00 am

Reading Boing Boing this morning, I came across a post about Project Posner, a searchable database of all of Judge Posner’s opinions dating back to when he first started his job at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals back in 1981. According to the site’s About page:

While Posner’s books and popular writings are easily available to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive for the public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time, collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easily readable database.

So it has just as much to do with freely accessible information as it does with legal geekery. My kind of site!

But in all seriousness, Judge Posner is one of the few icons out there whose ideas I find off the wall and crazy (remember that time he tried to apply his Law and Economics theory to criminal law?) but whose opinions I deeply respect. Plus he exudes a confidence in his legal writing that I can only hope to one day begin to approach.

October 8, 2006

Cornell Law to help with Donald Fell appeal ::
legal — tagged , , , and
9:05 am

Back in the summer of 2005, I was posting pretty regularly on the Donald Fell capital trial. It was, for those who remember it, a big deal around here because capital punishment is rarely used in any of the Northeastern states, and because although Vermont doesn’t have a death penalty statute, the federal statute is still available for federal crimes. With that said, I found this AP piece about the law students at Cornell helping with Fell’s appeal.

October 2, 2006

On this quiet morning, you can almost hear the gavel bang ::
legal — tagged , , , , and
8:07 am

Well, not literally, because according to the Supreme Court calendar oral arguments don’t start up until tomorrow morning. (Which is actually good news because it will give me a chance to catch up on some of the more interesting cases that the court will be hearing this term.) And as Linda Greenhouse notes in this piece in the NY Times, the court will hear some very important cases this term—namely ones dealing with Congress’ Partial Birth Abortion Ban and two schools’ efforts to acheive racial integration in their schools. My take on the two consolidated cases, distilled into one (long) sentence: It’s hard to tell how the abortion cases (summaries here and here) will turn out; however, if the two school integration cases (summaries here and here) wind up standing it may be for the wrong reasons—that is, local control—and not the right ones—i.e., a more honest application of Equal Protection that has less to do with absolute race blindness and more to do with achieving racial equality after hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, and all the disparities that come with them.

With the oncoming October term, our minds should also turn to the thoughts of fun legal reading. And to fill that mental need comes this 600+ page tome on the life of many a liberal lawyer’s hero, Justice Earl Warren. Apparently, far from painting Warren as a standards-bearer for liberal legal causes, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made doesn’t shy away from the type of figure Warren cut before he made it onto the court:

...Warren was an almost stereotypical Republican before joining the high court. As Jim Newton reveals in his meticulously researched and well-told new biography, “Justice for All,” Warren was a zealous prosecutor, passionately anti-Communist, pro-business, anti-New Deal, anti-gambling, anti-pornography, tough on crime (his father was murdered in their Bakersfield home in 1938), and he favored interning California’s Japanese and their American-born children after Pearl Harbor.

How interesting! One assertion I made in the past was that it was precisely because Republicans of the 1950’s had no political ties to Southern segregationists that they had the freedom to act as both their conscience and the Constitution required them to. Based on the review, it sounds that Warren’s actions once he got on the court were quite consistent with that. But we’ll see what I think after I read the book.

October 1, 2006

A serious downside to judicial elections ::
legal — tagged , and
8:55 am

There are some things you never want to hear a judge—much less a state supreme court justice—utter. I think this line takes it:

Even sitting justices have started to question the current system. “I never felt so much like a hooker down by the bus station in any race I’ve ever been in as I did in a judicial race,” said Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, a Republican member of the Ohio Supreme Court. “Everyone interested in contributing has very specific interests.”

From the New York Times: Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court’s Rulings.

September 25, 2006

The large abuses of tiny courts ::
legal — tagged , , , and
7:56 am

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the small, rather unceremonious courts of limited jurisdiction in New York State and the types of abuses that go on there. Since these courts lack the high profile of general jurisdiction courts and often have people substantially less qualified presiding over them, they do not get the same level of attention as the Supreme Court of New York. The article, noting first that “[n]early three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers…have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles, [and] never got through high school,” goes on to explain why the underqualified nature of these judges is such a Big Deal:

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

Given the lack of attention that these courts garner (who really cares how your challenge to that traffic ticket was resolved?) what springs to mind for me is the dialogue between Holmes and Watson in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, in which Holmes notes that it is places isolated from greater society and hidden from public scrutiny that are ripest for abuses and crime:

But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

September 12, 2006

The bar exam stress index? ::
meta, personal, legal — tagged , and
10:05 am

So, I was looking at my site usage stats this morning, and noticed a pretty clear pattern emerging. Of the top 20 search terms that resulted in links to pageswithin.com, I found six that had something to do with the bar review or the July bar exam: “july 2006 bar exam results,” “pmbr lawsuit,” “bar exam results july 2006,” “pmbr,” “bar exam blogs,” and finally, “bar exam results.” That’s kind of surprising, since I really didn’t post all that much about my bar exam experience.

But then, to be fair, I didn’t post all that much generally to this site during that time.

September 5, 2006

More bar exam-related ridiculousness ::
legal — tagged , , , and
8:22 am

I noticed that James started posting more regularly again. How nice! One post that particularly caught my eye was this one, on the stupidity of bar review courses. He notes specifically the lawsuit that the National Conference of Bar Examiners brought against PMBR, the self-appointed “leader” in Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) test preparation, which PMBR lost. In the opinion, the federal judge presiding over the case noted that PMBR lifted a test question directly from the MBE but actually got the answer wrong.

I remember when I was debating on whether to take the PMBR course, one of the sales representatives noted that lawsuit as a selling point for the program. The inference I was supposed to draw was that PMBR’s questions were so good that NBCE was actually scared of the program, and thus brought a (frivolous?) lawsuit to protect themselves. The disingenous way in which the rep tried to present this suggestion immediately turned me off to the possibility of taking the exam. In the back of my mind since then I’ve found I’ve had a little regret for not taking the exam or, more generally, not taking every opportunity to prepare myself for the bar exam. But after hearing this story, I don’t feel so bad at all.

Which I guess goes to show that some opportunties are best left unexplored.

September 2, 2006

Bar exam results coming soon ::
legal — tagged , , , and
9:01 am

With September here and the Vermont Bar Exam results most likely being released in just a few weeks, I’ve been thinking more lately about that test (and of course more specifically, whether I passed it). With that, I thought this WSJ essay, written back in July and linked at the 2006 Bar Exam Blog is becoming relevant—and to certain degree kind of funny—once again:

Even putting aside the hours of enjoyment you can have packing your test-day clear plastic storage bag, preparing for the bar exam isn’t a heck of a lot of fun. Most people say the worst part is doing hundreds and hundreds of practice multiple choice questions, but I think the worst part is how doing those multiple choice questions makes you feel about the world. Nothing good ever happens to the people in practice bar exam questions. Everyone who crosses the street gets hit by a car, every doctor botches the surgery, parachutes never open, contracts never get fulfilled, anyone who uses a lawnmower ends up in the hospital, as soon as you write a will your whole family dies, employee benefit plans never pay out their benefits, computers all get viruses, your friends are always intoxicated, stealing your farm equipment, and driving it into the barn, police search you all the time for no good reason, you can never find a good place to hide your weapons, banks never recognize a signature as a forgery, and the forger always flees the country.

August 31, 2006

Women clerking at the Supreme Court ::
legal — tagged , , , and
9:33 am

This Linda Greenhouse article in the NY Times on the precipitous drop in the number of women clerking at the US Supreme Court came up in conversation yesterday, and Rick asked me to blog about it. I found the article interesting not so much because of its content—as the SCOTUSBlog people and the article itself noted, Volokh Conspiracy already covered the issue of the underrepresentation of women as Supreme Court clerks—but rather because of how many of the Justices provided interviews that appeared to conflict with each other. Like, e.g., Justices Souter and Breyer both suggested that the drop in the number of women clerking simply “reflected a random variation in the applicant pool.” (Oh, and call me crazy, but I didn’t think David Souter, famous for guarding his privacy, even gave interviews.) By contrast, Justice Ginsburg observed the drop inthe number of women clerking for the Court, declined to give any particular reason, and suggested that Greenhouse “ask a justice who has not hired any women for the coming term….” While such a response doesn’t necessarily call up a reaction of oh, snap!, it does suggest a dynamic among the Justices that is, well, a little less than entirely harmonious.

My memory might not be working right and I may be reading too much into the subtext of the article, but I seem to recall that in the Rehnquist era, Justices were much more reticent when asked to provide this type of information on the inner workings of the court. Could this article foreshadow a new and possible more contentious public face of the Court? I guess time will only tell.

August 4, 2006

Oh yeah, and one other thing ::
personal, legal — No Tags
10:21 am

During all the travel and other excitement over the past week, I forgot to mention here that I took the Vermont Bar Exam. How was it? Well, one day consisted of seven hours of essay questions and the other day consisted of six hours of mulitple choice (200 multiple choice in all). So it was about as great as you might imagine. Not much else to report here, other than to say that with any luck, I won’t have to go through the experience again, at least in this state.

June 9, 2006

All bar exam, all the time ::
legal — No Tags
7:19 am

From my Technorati links page I found the 2006 Bar Exam blog, which is full of the many tales of bar study. It’s a much more focused blog than this one here, so if you want to get a real sense of the overwhelming nature of preparing for the Worst Exam Ever, check it out.

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