People v. State

I wouldn’t write this blog if part of me didn’t love the law.

But one of the greatest lawyers who’ve ever lived, Lysander Spooner, never “practiced” much law. One of the greatest lawyers alive today, Tony Serra, confessed to his biographer that he regarded “going into law” as for him “a fall from grace.”

I suspect being a lawyer is like being a priest. The priest can repudiate the Church. He can be excommunicated by the Church. But he’s still a priest.

(H/T Matt Brown)

Norm Pattis has a very interesting post up today about Lysander Spooner and his Essay on the Trial by Jury. (Norm, a prominent Connecticut trial lawyer whose recent book includes a Foreword by F. Lee Bailey and an Introduction by Gerry Spence, credits yours truly with directing his attention to Spooner. I’ve sometimes second-guessed the value and purpose of this blog. Posts about the actual practice of law or actual court decisions have been few and far between, and, on the other hand, the folks at the Center for a Stateless Society illuminate the principles of anarchism more eruditely than I. But if I’ve facilitated a little cross-pollination, bringing some anarchism to trial lawyers, maybe some Georgism to anarchists, and maybe even a little religion to anarchists and trial lawyers, maybe this blog hasn’t been a complete waste of time.)

Norm’s post concludes:

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From “The Fundamentals of Voluntaryism” by Carl Watner, via Wendy McElroy:

Common sense and reason tell us that nothing can be right by legislative enactment if it is not already right by nature. Epictetus, the Stoic, urged men to defy tryants in such a way as to cast doubt on the necessity of government itself. “If the government directed them to do something that their reason opposed, they were to defy the government. If it told them to do what their reason would have told them to do anyway, they did not need a government.” As Lysander Spooner pointed out, “all legislation is an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime.” Just as we do not require a State to dictate what is right or wrong in growing food, manufacturing textiles, or in steel-making, we do not need a government to dictate standards and procedures in any field of endeavor. “In spite of the legislature, the snow will fall when the sun is in Capricorn, and the flowers will bloom when it is in Cancer.”

. . .

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Debbie Harbeson in the July 7th New Albany News & Tribune:

Let’s say you — or someone you care about — had a few drinks one night and, knowing it would not be a good idea to drive, decided to let a sober person take the wheel.

Did you realize you can still be charged with a criminal offense? It’s true. The Indiana Supreme Court just affirmed this in Moore v. State.

. . .

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— reversing the Indiana Court of Appeals to reinstate a criminal conviction for no good reason (as they also recently did in Barnes and Coleman).

The facts in Brenda Moore v. State were not in dispute:

The defendant had consumed two tall cans of beer at her sister’s house on the evening of December 5, 2008. A friend of the defendant’s brother asked for a ride to visit a friend. The defendant explained to him that she could not drive because she had been drinking but that he could drive her car if he had a license. The brother’s friend then drove the defendant’s car with the defendant riding as a front seat passenger. When an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Officer pulled over the car because the license plate light was not working, the officer determined that the driver did not have a valid driver’s license and that the defendant could not operate the vehicle because she was intoxicated.

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How is it that the supposed anarchist and proprietor of lysanderspooner.org has come to write this drivel (comments closed) at the Volokh Conspiracy about what he calls “The Dangerous Effort to Delegitimate Supreme Court Justices” (emphasis added) — and in particular, Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Alito?

Has Barnett read the recent USA Today retrospective which “lays bare the complete disdain Justice Thomas has shown for those accused of and convicted of crimes” during his 20 years on the SCOTUS?

I can only assume that he has, and that the former prosecutor shares Thomas’ disdain, as it would be consistent with Barnett’s apparent disdain for the innocent victims of War.

For my part, I prefer to highlight as edifying stories like this one about the Wisconsin Supreme Court, this one about the Michigan Supreme Court, this one about the Indiana Supreme Court, and yes, the USA Today story about Justice Thomas referenced above as well as this recent NYT story, which Barnett characterizes as “advancing another empty charge against Justice Thomas.”

Lysander Spooner would be so very proud.

Despite writing about jury nullification yesterday, I forgot that yesterday, January 19th, was also the birthday of Lysander Spooner, the patron saint of jury nullification and this blog. I want to take this auspicious occasion to make a couple observations:

First, I want to acknowledge that I’ve perhaps been too harsh in my implicit criticism of Julian Heicklen for planning to represent himself in a criminal case charging him with jury tampering for allegedly distributing pamphlets about jury nullification outside a federal courthouse. There may be some method to his madness. He’s stated that he plans to represent himself “because I can and will say and do things that could disbar any attorney.” But by that he may “just” mean what he meant when he later explained:

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This is great stuff:

When I say that I am not alone in thinking sometimes violence is a necessary response to our own government, I am referring to the Founders of the United States of America. We may not like to think about it, but if they had not violently responded to what was then “our government,” the United States of America would not exist today; would never have existed.

But the words and actions of the Founders are instructive for us today not because they violently overthrew the government in place at the time. Or maybe not “just because.”     (more…)