Welcome to the second stop of the journey I announced in November as a way to gain perspective on the state of western democracy in general and American politics in particular. If you are just joining me, here is what came before: Why I am Setting out on a Journey and Inviting You Along (November

Last month, I talked about a philosophical journey for perspective on today’s politics. Plato is always a good place to start. If you’ve never delved into Plato, you’re in for a treat. I’ll try to be a helpful tour guide. I’ll also talk about TV lawyers and the spirit of liberty because . . .

This week, JJ died suddenly of a pulmonary blood clot. You wouldn’t have known from his puppy looks and constant puppy energy, but he was a senior dog diagnosed with bronchitis and a heart murmur that was getting worse. Given how suddenly and peacefully JJ passed, the vet said it was most likely a pulmonary

Welcome back to Everything You Ever Wanted To Know (and presumably more than you’ll ever need to know) about Criminal Law and Procedure. Last week, in Part 1, the Basics, I covered: What is a crime and how do we decide which behavior to criminalize? Types of Crimes When Rape Was a Property Crime Financial

A reader offered this suggestion for my blog: I’d really like to understand the entire process better. How does a criminal case go from arrest to indictment, trial, and appeal? Another reader pointed out that I’ve talked about many aspects of criminal law and criminal procedure over the years and asked: Why not start at

This one is all about criminal appeals. It also includes insights into the life of a criminal appellate defense lawyer. I think I know why people have been asking about appeals. There was what you might call a high-profile criminal conviction in the news this week. However, I plan to talk about criminal appeals in

Because I’ll be talking about the case of Crown v. Peter Zenger, you know this blog post will be fun. What? You’ve never heard of Peter Zenger? Well, read on. I ended last week’s post with this question: Because jurors can’t un-hear or un-see, how does having things stricken from the record work? The routine goes

Last week I summarized Peter Arenella’s 1998 piece, The Perils of Legal Punditry. Among other things, Arenella argues that much of legal punditry is “Hot air that passes for legal commentary.” If you missed it, start here. I suggested that people don’t need lawyers to decode the news. I turned off my comments and added

This blog post could have been called “Why you don’t need a lawyer to answer your questions about legal issues in the news.” Mostly it’s about former TV pundit Peter Arenella’s scathing assessment of legal punditry published in 1998 in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. His piece, written 26 years ago, has renewed relevance

After I wrote this blog post, I realized it’s really about how laws evolve. Citations and sources for much of the material in this blog post are in this book. *  *  * During the 1788 debates about whether to add a Bill of Rights, some people worried that including a Bill of Rights would

Welcome to this week’s blog post, where I will (1) discuss the criminal liability for behaving like a gold-plated bucket of slime and (2) offer a few mind-bending legal puzzles. Two weeks ago, here, I laid out the facts as we know them in Trump’s Falsifying Business Records / Hush Money criminal case and offered

This post will build on last week’s post, where I laid out the facts as we know them and offered explainers on the law. If you missed it, start here. The Theory of the Case Good advocates organize their cases around a theme or focal point called the theory of the case. Because there are

It’s Trump’s first criminal trial, but not his first trial: a jury found him liable for sexual assault, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 felonies, and the State of New York won a $355 million civil fraud verdict against him, and more. But now we come to the first criminal proceeding against Trump himself. Any legal

Something unusual happened last week in the comments to my blog post. I logged in on Sunday to find more than 90 comments on my blog, some of them quite heated. I didn’t have the time to read them or moderate a heated discussion. I therefore disabled the comments. Initially, I removed about 25 comments.