A couple of months ago, when the Mississippi Supreme Court's clerk refused to file a dissenting opinion in a nursing home wrongful death action, I thought, "thank you, Mississippi, for providing Texas with some solid competition in the 'worst courts anywhere' contest."This week Texas is coming back strong. We have reports (WSJ Law Blog [H/T SHG], Burnt Orange Report) that the clerk of Texas's Third Court of

1. DUI (in Texas, called DWI) / POM (Possession of Marijuana) charge. Turned wrong way onto one-way street. NT/NA (No Test, No Accident). Field sobriety tests on video with patchy audio administered by rookie APD cop on uneven ground. The standardized field sobriety tests (FSTs or SFSTs) have three components: Walk-and-Turn, One Leg Stand, and Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus. In this case, W&T-3 (officer claimed 6), OLS-2 (officer

Last week John McCain found himself telling his scared supporters that they don't have to be afraid of President Obama.Might "make people afraid" not be such a great idea?

I've bet HCCLA past-president Pat McCann lunch that the DJIA will close below 6000 before it closes above 9,000 (all in 2007 dollars) again. Anyone else want a piece of that action?

Thanks to a reader, I downloaded the Houston Bar Association's 2008 Judicial Preference Poll, an incumbent lovefest. I'm guessing that among the 1300 attorneys who rated the criminal district court judges, half have never set foot in the criminal courthouse, except possibly as defendants because of a serious crack problem.How is it that more people think that Brian Rains should keep his bench than that Roger Bridgwater

There's sometimes talk about who the best criminal-defense lawyer in Houston is, as though we are show dogs or golfers. The truth, of course, is that there is no "best" overall. The lawyer who is best for one case might not be best for another; nobody can say that the thousand-dollar lawyer who gets a case dismissed was not the best lawyer for that case, nor that

Okay, so I finally got around to downloading and reading Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum's e-book, The Truth About Hiring a Criminal Defense Lawyer. (After Brian asked me to review it, I found it by googling the title; I was pleased to see Defending People pop up in the first page of search results.)Subtitled, "The whole truth and nothing but the truth, and not the 'truth that

David Sklansky's fundamental theorem of poker: Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they

• Houston DWI lawyer Paul B. Kennedy (The Defense Rests) notes the similarities between coaching 6-and-under soccer and communicating with a jury. (I like seeing other lawyers looking for clues to better lawyering in other areas . . . other, that is, than The Art of War.)• Maryland criminal-defense lawyer Jon Katz (Underdog Blog; note the new URL) talks about the power of mu. Mu: it's not

As one of America's foremost scholars of Imaginary History, I am compelled to correct the record on Sarah Palin's slightly erroneous fictional Jefferson misquote (Americablog). What Imaginary History tells us Jefferson in fact said is, "One cannot underestimate the wisdom of the people."Fantastohistorical academia is riven over the issue of whether this was intended by Mr. Jefferson as an observation or an admonishment.