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.

I just might love law school (2003-08-16)
I haven't started classes yet, but I'm chugging through my homework and just read some juicy stuff, in, of all places, my property law case book. In an 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case over the power of Native Americans to convey title to land, Justice Marshall wrote that "discovery" of land gave title to the (European) government whose subjects found it. He states that the Indians' rights to complete sovereignty "were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it."

Seems absurd, that the people who have lived somewhere for hundreds, maybe thousands of years haven't "discovered" it, and so don't own it. I've always wondered how early Americans glossed over the genocide of the Native American tribes and while at the same time reveling in freedom from tyranny and affirming human dignity.

Here's what Marshall said, "The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence."

Doesn't seem like a fair trade to me.

Prosecutors and misconduct (2003-06-26)
A new study from the Center for Public Integrity shows a pattern of proscutors who are bending or breaking the rules to uphold the law. The study showed that, since 1970, individual judges and appellate court panels cited prosecutorial misconduct as a factor when dismissing charges at trial, reversing convictions or reducing sentences in at least 2,017 cases. Some of the most common allegations of prosecutorial misconduct involved improper closing arguments and excluding jurors on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or some other discriminatory grounds.

In 28 cases, involving 32 separate defendants, misconduct by prosecutors led to the conviction of innocent individuals who were later exonerated.

The Center has a map that lets you look up information on prosecutorial misconduct in every state. They also offer a searchable database of judicial rulings on misconduct.