If a high-level federal bureaucrat wants you dead, you are dead. That is all you really need to need know of the Department of Justice's white paper on extrajudicial killing. Because once the executive branch claims authority to choose—secretly, uniramerally* and without review—whom to kill and where, it doesn't matter what legal justification it claims gives it that authority, and it doesn't matter what rules it claims

When Tim Cushing at TechDirt wrote about Teri Buhl's "unpublishable tweets" and her attempts to bully Gideon with lawsuit threats, then me with veiled threats of a libel lawsuit, Buhl left a comment: ("Jurno"?) Then she asked Jim Romenesko to post her response to the TechDirt article: I can say silly things some times and I’d like to apologized for my knee jerk reaction to Gideon. Of course

My friend "Gideon" (of A Public Defender fame) asked an intriguing question on Twitter: @tbuhl's twitter profile proclaims "no tweets are publishable". What does that mean? By "not publishable," I suspected that "investigative journalist" Teri Buhl (you'll see the reason for the doubt quotes in a moment) meant "not worth publishing," which is ironic and funny because posting on Twitter is publication. But no. Buhl responded to

This is cool. (H/t Nathaniel Burney; buy his book.) If you are close to the car in front of you and the brake lights of that car go on, you have to hit your brakes—your default reaction has to be "brake until I understand what is going on." If the other driver is braking for no good reason (as a rule of thumb, people are bad drivers)

Photography has been recognized as a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. While conceding that, the court of appeals nevertheless concluded that the statute “regulates a person’s intent in creating a visual record and not the contents of the record itself.” But that conclusion does not necessarily exempt the statute from the First Amendment’s protections. The Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment includes, as

I've been fighting a battle against Texas Penal Code Section 33.021, the Texas Online Solicitation of a Child statute, for some time now. In one pending case, I was brought in by trial counsel to be the "law man," filing a pretrial writ of habeas corpus alleging that the statute was overbroad as written, was void for vagueness, and violated the "dormant Commerce Clause." The trial court

The thing that has always bugged me most about the business of law is potential clients making appointments, and then failing to post. When someone fails to appear for an appointment, I have wasted my time, which raises my blood pressure and makes me cranky. I have, through the years, contemplated or tried various solutions—don't make appointments more than 24 hours out; require a credit-card number to

Geraldo G. Acosta: 255 juvenile cases / 387 misdemeanor cases/ 278 felony cases / 4.1 times the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended public-defender caseload (i.e. 200 juvenile cases or 400 misdemeanor cases or 150 felony cases per lawyer). David L. Garza: 599 misdemeanor cases / 295 felony cases / 3.5 times the recommended caseload. Ricardo N. Gonzalez: 444 misdemeanor cases / 63 felony cases

Jury selection, properly conducted, is an unscripted improvisational exercise. In Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch writes of the need for "technique to burn" to an improviser: Galurnphing ensures that we rernain on the upside of the law of requisite variety. This fundanmental law of nature states that a system intended to handle x amount of information must be able to lake on at

Recalling one of the proudest moments of my career. I'd been practicing law for about five months. My client, who had been badly "hometowned" in court in Palestine, Texas, in the Piney Woods, had moved from there to Houston with her child. I moved to transfer the case to Houston while there was a motion to enforce pending against her in Palestine, so transfer would have deprived