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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.

February 9, 2007

Litigation ::
legal photos — tagged , , , and
1:11 pm


Litigation
Originally uploaded by vignettes.

I wish I understood the context of this photo, but I have very little to go on. There’s enough information, though, for me to say that it is law-related, if only vaguely.

In any event, I was just looking for an excuse to link to it here.

January 30, 2007

Executive (dis)order ::
politics — tagged , , and
12:15 pm

I haven’t read the Bush Administration’s executive order that the New York Times reported on this morning (note, it seems not to have been posted yet over at the FR website here it is), but I have to say I’m kind of intrigued by the idea, but for different reasons than the liberal political blogs are dwelling on. Sure, there are many who are saying that it’s another step in politicizing what should be an area of pure regulation that functions well only when it’s based on the best evidence and best practices and not on ideology. And I would agree if I thought there was any possibility of the program working. But look—how many federal regulatory agencies are there out there? (I really have no idea, so it’s not just a rhetorical question.) And how many of them are going to report to the White House? And with all the problems the Bush administration is currently facing, is there any way that any group of humans could handle this new bit of chaos? It just seems too overwhelming a project to manage in any coherent way.

So it makes me wonder if maybe it’s something of a back door strategy on the part of the Bush administration. While everyone is screaming that this is just another attempt to coddle regulated industries, in reality what is happening is the Bush administration is taking down regulations by simply performing an impossible task incompetently.

Incidentally, this is a perfect example of micromanagers are really not effective leaders. They just can’t do the amount of work that is required to in order to exercise the amount of control their pathologies demand.

January 25, 2007

How doctors (and attorneys) think ::
personal — tagged , and
9:20 pm

At first glance, this week’s New Yorker looked like a dud, but then I read this article about how doctors think. More specifically, it was about the fallibility of how doctors think. The author, who is a physician, notes that the method of training MD’s, in which students are “expected to assimilate large amounts of basic science and apply that knowledge as they are taught practical aspects of patient care,” has not changed much over the years, and has on the whole created some truly great physicians. However, it does not create doctors that are complete rational actors— “when people are confronted with uncertainty—the situation of every doctor attempting to diagnose a patient—they are susceptible to unconscious emotions and personal biases, and are more likely to make cognitive errors.” As much as we’d like to think that medical doctors are calculating machines, in reality they are susceptible to human error as anyone else.

Now, I write all this not to slam the medical profession. On the contrary, I find it interesting because it seems to be a condition that all professionals—especially us attorneys—are vulnerable to. Like for example, I remember when I was a second year law student working in criminal defense, our office was dealing with an extradition case. Not sure of the mechanics of extradition, I found I had a hard time getting past the misconception that, because the case was effectively a fight between two states, the U.S. Supreme court had original jurisdiction over the matter. (I was freshly out of Federal Courts class, mind you—not that that’s any excuse.) Although my mistakes over the past two years have become less wild, I definitely make them from time to time, and it’s something I need to be aware of if I want to stay out of trouble.

January 24, 2007

Law-related photo: visual aid ::
legal photos — tagged , , , , and
2:44 pm


Law Class: Project Visual Aid
Originally uploaded by Hackintosh.

Oh my god, what better way for this blog to come out of semiretirement than to bring you this most excellent photograph of a courtroom scene constructed from Legos. Just totally brilliant. I’m not sure which I like best—the droid as court reporter, the prosecutor as pirate (what?), or the janitor who brought his push broom with him to jury duty (if only they let you get away with such things in a real court room, I might consider going into litigation).

Check out the actual flickr photograph for some equally entertaining notes that further explain the scene.

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.

December 21, 2006

Legal photo: disappointment ::
legal photos — tagged , , and
12:06 pm


disappointment
Originally uploaded by molleland.

A pretty good legal photo, to help me get back into the swing of things on this site. Sometimes the law can hurt, and the only consolation one might provide is to say “sorry, kid.”

December 4, 2006

Today’s legal photo: work ::
legal photos — tagged , , , and
1:39 pm


work
Originally uploaded by cut paste.

We (those of us who work in the law, I mean) have all been there.

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

Sunday morning news blogging ::
politics — tagged , , , , and
11:08 am

Now that I live without a television, my Sunday mornings are usually spent reading news sources and political blogs rather than idly worshipping the institution of Sunday morning punditry. So with that, let me start what I hope to be an ongoing tradition here at The Pages Within: Sunday morning news blogging. With that, two interesting articles worthy of reading.

The first is an LA Times piece on the products allowed into US markets that other countries ban. At the top of the list is Chinese-produced plywood coated in formaldehyde, which incidentally the Chinese government has banned in its own country. The lack of regulation in the US, however, has created two separate camps of corporations—one that is self-regulating, and the other that chooses to take advantage of the lack of health regulations in this country. The self-regulating companies instead “comply with EU standards, the most stringent chemical laws in the world.”

“We don’t operate to different standards in different parts of the globe, regardless of differing environmental standards,” said John Frey, manager of corporate environmental strategies at Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard.

Those companies that choose to adhere only to the minimal US regulations have a predictable argument:

[T]heir products have undergone rigorous reviews in the United States and are not only legal here but safe. They say some governments, particularly the EU, have overreacted and banned chemicals with little or no evidence of a human health threat.

Similar to this case, his book Collapse Jared Diamond contrasts the business practices of two oil companies, and talks about how one company—Chevron—discovered it was better to self-regulate, setting the bar higher than the law necessarily requires, both because taking precautions is always cheaper than dealing with a disaster, and because, like it or not, the tendency of government is to implement more stringent health and safety requirements. So it’s good to be ready for it.

The second article is a slightly more self-explanatory piece in Slate about Congress’ use of the language of addiction. You might not have thought that the Foley scandal and the passage of the (likely unconstitutional) detainee bill are related, but apparently they are.

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.

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