Fight Hunger and Ho-Hum Language (2007-11-05)
For every word you get right on this vocab game, Free Rice donates ten grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. So much more fun than reading the thesaurus -- and for a good cause.

I think I'll put this one on my business card... (2007-03-14)
"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
- Frederick Douglass"

Beware Cops With Computers (2007-03-13)
The ACLU recently filed suit against a Denver cop who got a warrant based only on a single, non-criminal database search for a person's name.

The cop used a database name search to investigate a complaint that a person named Valerie Rodriguez hit someone. He entered the name into the database, found a person with that name, and then wrote up a criminal complaint and warrant application with her date of birth, social security number, and driver's license number. The hitch? The woman he found had nothing to do with the crime and didn't even live in the area.

It gets worse --the officer obtained an arrest warrant by falsely stating that the victim had identified the innocent Valeria Rodriguez as the person responsible for a criminal assault. He did not show any photographs to the victim or check out the nearby address of the suspect that the victim provided.

The innocent Mrs. Rodriguez didn't know anything about the warrant out for her arrest until she got turned down for a job at the post office because of it. When she went to the Denver Police Department to straighten it out they threw her in jail.

Privacy advocates point to just this kind of police misconduct as one (of many) reasons we should be worried when the government collects and stores information on us. Valerie Rodriguez isn't that common a name. I pity Joe Smith.

Learning, living, struggle and progress (2005-04-08)
I am almost finished with my second year of law school -- I have done okay in school but have failed utterly in my quixotic quest to continue writing. So, in the spirit of tilting at windmills, I am trying to start again. Partly, this is because I am about to go work at a big firm for the summer and I have misgivings about getting used to the chichi lunches and expensive office casual wear this will entail. So, in the spirit of keeping it real, here's a quote for the day (borrowed from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States):

"If there is no struggle...there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."

- Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author, orator, social reformer

Law school ain't so bad (2003-09-05)
Though I've spent more hours than I cared to reading and discussing property rights in a dead fox and a lost brooch.

But in the swirl of hypotheticals that is the Socratic method and the swooping policy and morality discussions, I feel lucky to devote myself to learning again -- even when wild game and ugly jewelry are the subjects du jour.