Two books that influenced my thinking in 2016 were Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head and Robert Cialdini's Pre-Suasion. Crawford is a philosopher and BMW motorcycle mechanic. His first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft (also recommended) was about the value of making things. The World Beyond Your Head is about how entities — government, media, and corporations — capture our attention to satisfy their own needs. The most

It looks like Harris County prosecutors are making one last-lap effort at proving Murray's anonymous commenters wrong and guaranteeing infamy for the prosecutorial tenure of Devon Anderson. Here's an email from the DA elect to the outgoing First Assistant, Judge Belinda Hill: Judge, Please be advised that I have received several phone calls on my personal cell phone and at my law firm from a sex trafficking victim,

Protip: the government is not in the business of protecting free speech; any apparently pro-speech statute should be viewed most skeptically. Here's the congress.gov summary of HR 5111, the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016: (Sec. 2) This bill makes a provision of a form contract void from the inception if it: (1) prohibits or restricts an individual who is a party to such a contract from engaging

 Scott Greenfield has a visceral reaction to mindfulness for lawyers: being 'in the moment' is for idiots. I find Scott's reaction more than a bit bizarre: While there are apparently charlatans selling a feel-good philosophy by the name of mindfulness to stressed-out lawyers, there also exists an altered mental state, commonly referred to as mindfulness, that it benefits our clients for us to achieve. That an experienced and established trial

Karl went to the store to buy a set of tools to fix his car. Only when he got home did he discover that all of the wrenches were SAE instead of metric. Discouraged, he walked back toward the store. On the way Karl stopped, deep in thought. But while he stood there the freshly poured concrete of the sidewalk set, and Karl lost his best pair of

Donald Trump will keep his campaign promises just like he keeps promises in business: only as and when it continues to suit his interests. The wall will not be built unless Trump invests in the Mexican ladder industry, in which case Mexico will not pay for it. The yard man and the busboy will not be deported. The rust belt will go on rusting. Unemployment will rise. ((Those jobs

Lawyers who have gotten civil judgments against people publishing revenge porn:;Kenton HutchersonKyle Bristow; Marc Randazza;Joseph MathewNotice something about the CCRI's list of attorneys: None of those lawyers who have successfully litigated revenge-porn suits for victims are on it.?While I am certain that penal revenge-porn statutes should and will eventually go the way of the dodo, I don't feel the same way about civil liability for revenge porn. Unlike

In reaction to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights's Dear Colleague Letter of April 4, 2011, American universities have eliminated due process for students accused of sexual misconduct. The Dear Colleague Letter does not relieve public universities of their obligation to provide due process to accused students. So public universities are caught between the anvil of the Dear Colleague Letter and the hammer of a

Atlanta public radio had a story on Jason Clark's and my triumph in the Georgia Supreme Court on Monday. They reached out to neither Jason nor me, but to a "Hollie Manheimer, executive director of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. This "Georgia First Amendment Foundation" was nowhere to be seen when Jason and the Client and I were actually litigating the unconstitutionality of Georgia's insulting-a-bus-driver statute. They didn't

I just finished assisting a Rice University student who had been falsely accused of sexual misconduct and was facing campus discipline. He had been "rusticated" — ordered not to come on campus without permission except for classes — causing him to fail an exam (first the execution, then the trial!) and he could have been expelled, with a permanent mark on his college record.   Did I