Imagine that you have small children.   Imagine that you have a big date planned with your spouse and desperately need a baby sitter. Imagine that you hear about a local high school boy, who comes highly recommended, is smart and charming, a stand out scholar, who baby sits. It’s a little weird, a boy baby sitter, but you don’t want to be sexist so you hire him. The morning of the big dinner date, you get a call. It’s a girl who says that the boy baby sitter held her down at a party and sexually molested her, after he and another boy locked her in a room. What would you do? Say, “Oh, Heck ..read more

My point in writing these ditties, in addition to shameless self-promotion, is to try to demonstrate how various issues in the news would play out in the world of lawyers. I try to give equal time to cops shooting fleeing felons and the Nunes memo. The cop piece was viewed by many readers as pro-cop and anti-fleeing black man. It was neither. It was about the law governing use of force by the police officers. The Nunes memo was viewed as a biased political anti-Trump piece by Trump supporters. It had nothing to do with Trump, actually. It was about search warrant law. In that last piece, I sim ..read more

Last week the airwaves were a-twitter with talk of a dramatic Memo prepared by Representative Nunes, which would destroy the Mueller investigation. Then, when it was finally released on Friday, the pundits appeared to be confused. They seemed confused by their own political views as much as anything. As always, I’ll take a different approach to analyzing “The Memo” business: The “lawyer approach”. What is going on? What are the Republicans talking about when they argue that alleged defects in the application for a FISA warrant mean that any evidence obtained as a result is tainted, illegal and ..read more

I watched with interest the TV coverage of Larry Nassar’s sentencing, the pervert doctor who sexually assaulted young female gymnasts. Allegedly. Until he entered a guilty plea. Then it was for sure. Which is why his defense attorney’s attitude may have perplexed some viewers. He seemed upset and wanted to complain. He spoke about the Constitution and ‘whined’ about the way he had been treated by the public. But I got it. Been there, done that, got a closet full of t-shirts. He was lost in his case, plugged into all he had left, the Constitution and its protections, and the World can go t ..read more

Simply put, there’s such a huge number of new legal topics to pick from these days that it has become impossible to keep up. An embarrassment of riches. It used to be that interesting legal issues, worthy of comment, came up in the news every week or so. IF we were lucky. Frequently they involved famous sports figures or celebrities behaving badly in unexpected ways. Now? Celebs barely get the time of day. There is just so much insanity coming out of D.C. in the past year that that the misbehaving superstars get left in the dust. Honestly, I was going to write a post last week about the u ..read more

I grew up fantasizing about killing Nazis. In fact I did that almost every day. We called it “Playing Army”, with real WWII guns and uniforms. All of our dads had served. We all had war souvenirs in boxes in our basements. There was a bit of a rift between those of us who wanted to pretend to kill Nazis and those who preferred to kill Japanese soldiers. We split according to whose dad had served where. Since my dad had a German Luger and a coupla real swastika arm bands in the bottom drawer of his dresser, taken off a dead German, I liked killing Nazis best. It was in my blood. My dad forbade ..read more

It’s been nearly impossible to write blogs over the past year or two. There has been such an embarrassment of riches in terms of legal subject matter in the news. And since January, as we all know if we have working brains, it has been coming so fast and furiously that by the time I have written something it is already old news, replaced by whatever strange goings-on have occurred in the past hour or two. Used to be that a good legal issue worthy of writing about came up about once a week if you were lucky. Sometimes you would get two or three in one week and have trouble picking out one to fo ..read more

Who knew? I’m afraid I have some serious explaining to do. Some of my former clients are probably not happy with me right now. If they follow the news, they just learned that I gave them bad advice. Until yesterday this Stanford Lawyer actually thought that ignorance of the law was NOT a defense! You see, yesterday I saw no less of a personage than the Speaker of the House of The United States House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, say that ignorance of the law is a defense… IF you are the President and IF you are a Republican, like him. WOW, as the Donald himself might tweet. Again, Who Knew? I ..read more

  The “Beauty Queen” Murder Case: I hate it when they call it that. It really has absolutely nothing to do with the case. But it sure sells “widgets”. It just goes to show you how hard it can be to get a fair trial when the media, especially the silly social media, decides they are experts on something they know nothing about. They are so good at doing that, after all. The heavy hitters came out in force for Peggy’s case. They just couldn’t get enough of the idea that a “Beauty Queen” had committed murder. That was so much more interesting than the boring presumption of innocence an ..read more

Structure and rules, fairly applied, hold our society together. They save us from chaos and injustice. You can have structure and rules, but without fairness it doesn’t work. Just think Nazi Germany.  You can have fairness, but without structure it fails. Woodstock may have been a few days of communal fun, but after a week or two the lack of organization (people crashing without paying, no food, etc.) it would have been an unbearable mess. These principles are critical for anyone working in service industries, like waiters and baristas; but also like teachers and airline employees and law ..read more