From Therapeutic Metaphors & Clinical Hypnosis, by David Puchol Esparza: [Milton] Erickson told many stories and told them to a variety of clients. As he said of his treatment for a young, anorexic girl, "My treatment for Barbie was to tell her short stories, metaphors, suspenseful stories, intriguing stories, boring stories. I told her all kinds of stories, little stories" (Zeig, 1980). He illustrated the experiences he

I can't figure out a way to phrase this search on Westlaw, so I thought I'd turn to the the hive mind of the blawgosphere: Has Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller ever voted in favor of a defendant in a criminal appeal? I'll send a valuable prize to the first person to offer either an answer, or an easy way to find a trustworthy

In this post about Gerry Spence's defense of Geoffrey Fieger (well, it's not really about that; it's about the egos of Gerry Spence [who boasts he's never lost a criminal case] and Geoffrey Fieger . . . or maybe all criticism is autobiographical and it's not really about that either . . .), my New York brother Scott Greenfield wrote: Bear in mind that Gerry Spence was

Today my copy of Ray Moses's "Jury Argument in Criminal Cases: A Trial Lawyer's Guide (Second Edition)" arrived in the mail. (Bookmark the book's website.) This is one of my favorite resources, but I had never gotten around to ordering a copy before now (Professor Moses doesn't make it particularly easy to order) -- I'd used it at one law library or another. This is a wonderful

Harris County has separate courthouses, both built in the last seven years, for its civil and criminal courts. Courthouse number one is a dingy-looking beige building, solid and generally functional; courthouse number two is ornate, with a dome on top. In courthouse number one, a judge enters her courtroom from a door to the side and climbs up to her bench; in courthouse two, a judges enters

This guy is back. Now he's been retained to represent another of my former clients. It's beyond me why people hire this guy. He has handled five federal criminal cases to completion, all at least six years ago. Between 2001 and this year he didn't have his name attached to a single federal criminal case in the Southern District of Texas. From a brief telephone conversation with

When Texas legislator Scott Hochberg sought to ban probation for murder, he was able to get a bill passed preventing juries from recommending probation in murder cases. Judges can still, if prosecutors play along by agreeing not to have jury trials, put people on probation for murder. If things had to change (there really was no good reason; Rep. Hochberg's yearning to change the law was reportedly

I proposed to my alma mater that someone should teach its students how to start a law practice, and volunteered to teach the course myself. I got this response: Teaching law office management courses at the law school causes problems. The University doesn?t think they are ?law. Of course! Any fool can see that teaching law students how to actually function as lawyers is clearly outside the

This comment on Scott Greenfield's blog by one of the authors of the recent Dallas Morning News article on probation for murder in Texas got me thinking a bit. "A closer read of our series," he wrote, "shows that prosecutors still can offer probation through plea bargains with defendants." Here is the article about which we're talking. There may have been other articles, but I haven't seen

There has been some ado in the blawgosphere lately about the fact that Texas juries could convict people of murder, and then give them probation. (It's not the law anymore -- for murders after September 1, 2007, probation will not be an option for the jury.) Furriners (anyone unfamiliar with Texas culture, including reporters from the Dallas Morning News) express surprise that, in a state well-known for