My friend Scott Greenfield has tagged me for the Second Annual Lawyers Appreciate Meme, which started at Life at the Bar. I appreciate the U.S. Constitution. The Founders knew -- from direct experience -- that government is a threat to freedom. The saw that government was necessary, though, or at least inevitable. So, rather than leave the form of the government to chance, they created one, making

I am not one inclined to judge the morals of others. Who a prosecutor is lusting after (committing "adultery in his heart", as Jimmy Carter might say) is not something I consider to be my business, or anyone else's, except . . . Except that the prosecutor in question is the individual who orders the DA's office's policy not to agree to less than 10 days in

Don't forget to check out the Blawg Council Wiki and add to the catalog of blawgs. Someone had the right idea with CrimLaw -- he added it to the catalog page for prosecutors' blawgs and created a page describing it (though, now that I look at it, the creation of a page describing it may have been a happy accident -- the PHPWiki software interprets a word

Scott Greenfield is taking nominations for Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year: This will not be a Beauty Pageant for the usual suspects, the big name lawyers in the high-profile cases, but rather the unsung heroes in the trenches, doing the dirty work that flies under the radar. Please nominate a criminal-defense lawyer who has done something to deserve recognition. Please let us know what it is

I closed yesterday's post on justice and winning by asking, "Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) we try cases because we have nothing to lose: the inevitable result of a trial is no worse than the result of a plea. If we have no hope of winning, why do we try those cases?" We're not trying these cases for justice, and we're not trying them to win (though arguably

Both are correct. “Pleaded” is the standard past tense; “pled” is an accepted variant used widely in American courts and legal writing. “Plead,” however, is not the past tense of “to plea.” If you’re here because you or someone you know is facing a decision about whether to plead guilty, that’s a different question entirely, and one worth talking through with a lawyer who knows grammar.My fellow

Something that should cheer those who hold that "The Sun rises and falls on the sole question of the client's interest" and feel that "if serving the client harms another, so be it" . . . . Here, if the federal government is to be believed, is a lawyer who doesn't just pay lip service to the notion that the client's interests are paramount, but truly "without

Several denizens of the practical blawgosphere have started a wiki for the practical blawgers. Please check it out, and begin editing it to add other practical blawgs, and other fields of practice, to the catalog. Editing instructions are here.

Gideon wrote: Maybe I’m naive, but I thought it - what we do, this side and the other - was about justice. Righting wrongs. Then why, for some, is it about winning and losing? What this side does is different than what the other side does. The other side has (but of course doesn't always follow) an ethical and legal mandate to seek justice. We have an

Bennett & Bennett are back from seven days in Paris. A few of the things the French do exceedingly well: Food and drink. Subterranean transport. Historic preservation. Clothing. Something the French do less well: Technology. While the hotel at which we stayed in the 7th Arrondissement provided, in theory, a high-speed internet connection, that mostly-theoretical connection didn't work well enough to stay online for long enough to