Here's a quick summary (more than a soundbite, less than a brief) of the status of the remains of Texas's online-solicitation-of-a-minor statute. The statute forbids adults soliciting people whom they believe are minors to have sex, but it also forbids their soliciting other adults whom they believe to be adults to have sex, as well as soliciting people to not have sex (that is, fantasy communications or

From Texas Penal Code Section 43.02, effective September 1: (a) A person commits an offense if, in return for receipt of a fee, the person knowingly: (1) offers to engage, agrees to engage, or engages in sexual conduct; or (2) solicits another in a public place to engage with the actor in sexual conduct for hire. (b) A person commits an offense if, based on the payment

You've probably heard about the bakers in Oregon penalized $135k for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. You probably haven't read the order. I have so that you won't have to. (It's long—3,000-plus words—so tl;dr: The facts are fascinating, but if you must, jump over the facts to the conclusion.) You may have heard that the bakers were also ordered not to talk about the case

I described in An Apostrophe too Far why, despite the undeniable truth that the criminal justice system would crash if every defendant refused to plead guilty, defense lawyers cannot crash the system. Tl;dr: "Prisoner's dilemma writ large." I hypothesized a criminal-justice system, ours in micro, processing 100 defendants a year, with capacity for four jury trials (for Harris County, multiply by about 300). Twenty defendants of the hundred don't plead guilty, and eighteen

In medieval Europe litigants would arm themselves and beat the hell out of each other to resolve what might now be considered legal issues. The loser was obviously in the wrong. Some litigants could select champions to do their fighting for them. I doubt that this happened often ((Most lawyers are exceedingly trial-averse; how much more trial-averse would litigants and their representatives be if losing meant disfigurement

This is totally adorable: Jim, a litigator with a busy practice, spends 20 minutes each morning practicing something called mindfulness meditation. Meditation is great, but meditation is to mindfulness as "litigators" are to trial lawyers. I've written about mindfulness before; the topic is getting some attention now. Scott Greenfield sees two threads of discussion: a) stress release for lawyers (which should be uncontroversial; and b) "put[ting] personal happiness

Public defender "Norm DeGuerre" asks: Bringing the system to its knees is in you clients' best interest. Why aren't we doing it? @nytimes https://t.co/S0i8NG1lP6 — Norm DeGuerre (@NormDeGuerreEsq) July 7, 2015 The answer is simple: because we do not serve our clients' best interest. We serve our client's best interest. And what is in the clients' best interest has nothing to do with what is in the

Texas's new revenge-porn statute, Texas Penal Code Section 21.16, is effective 9/1/2015. It's unconstitutional (content-based restriction on speech, and no recognized exception applies), but it's "only" a class A misdemeanor, so defendants will be less motivated to take the time and spend the money to hire me to fight it, and lawyers taking their cases will be less motivated to seek my help: Sec. 21.16. UNLAWFUL DISCLOSURE

I'll admit it: I sometimes envy guys like Steve Fairlie a bit. Meet Steve Fairlie of North Wales, Pennsylvania. Steve is: A "National Trial Lawyers Association" (the Givens boys of Dothan, Alabama) "Top 100 Trial Lawyer"; A "National Academy of Criminal Defense Attorneys" (Oklahoma City) "Top 10"; A National Advocacy for DUI Defense ("NAFDD"?) (Steven Glazer of Flagstaff, Arizona) "Superior DUI Attorney"; and An "American Society of

If I were to write a penal statute that was a content-based restriction on speech, I would come prepared with an explanation of how the statute passed constitutional muster, since such restrictions are presumptively invalid. The proponents of revenge-porn-criminalization statutes never have picked a constitutional justification for their statutes. Instead they have, in post after article after column, thrown a bunch of possible justifications at the wall,