People v. State

I did. My decision would have been harder if some other truly excellent criminal justice blawgs weren’t conspicuously missing from the list, like Jeff Gamso’s, Norm Pattis’, and John Regan’s.

I hope Matt Brown, the author of Tempe Criminal Defense, will in honor of the occasion of being nominated to the ABA’s beauty pageant take the opportunity to clean up some of the broken links in his Blogroll (if not remove a couple of the less respectable ones).

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)

The above was the original subtitle of this blog, before I changed it sometime back to “Fairly Undermining Public Confidence in the Administration of Justice.”

But you know who really excels at illuminating the philosophy and practice of law and liberty? Matt Brown, relative to whom I’m a piker. I want to highlight here a couple paragraphs from his latest post.

First:

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One of my favorite blogs has apparently died.

I’m proud to be Belgian (i.e., one-quarter Belgian, through my maternal grandfather, who fought in WWII and received the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He died when I was seven or eight. According to family members he was a very different man after the war than he was before.)

Three genuine war heroes: Smedley Butler, Hugh Thompson, and Bradley Manning.

“We’re All Victims of the System”

“Buy a gun. Get a dog.” And close down all the prisons. The world would be a better and safer place.

In a post so perfect I couldn’t possibly add anything, Matt writes:

If I lived in Texas, I would have had a little more background when I read this post by Murray Newman. I was skeptical about what he perceived as a double standard even reading it without context, but that by itself didn’t seem worth a post on my part. When a prosecutor gets charged and defense lawyers don’t just rant about the presumption of innocence, I hardly see it as cause for concern. We’re still human, right? Defense attorneys live in the same world as everybody else, don’t we?

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