St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell decided to leave journalism and go teach at a historically black college in order to “give back.” The results are sobering: Part One, Part Two, with Part Three due on May 27th.
Spotted via South of the Suwannee.
In Law School Innovation: Should law schools be developing legal wikis? Doug Berman links to Robert Ambrogi's article Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You, and also says this:
I could readily imagine having a class project centered about building a wiki (my death penalty class blog this past semester has some wiki-like facets). I also would readily approve a student independent study project that was wiki-centric, and I certainly could see student organizations and law reviews working on wikis as an integral part of their activities.
That sounds like fun.
My law school classmate and nice guy Stuart Green is the Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law at Louisiana State University and has written a book called Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime. The explains why he's blogging at the OUPBlog on Sex, Lies, and Petroleum: Lord John Browne.
It's a strange case: the CEO of BP resigned suddenly after it apparently emerged that he'd lied in court about his relationship with a male prostitute.
Assuming that he did lie under oath, Stuart's conclusion is that the balance of factors suggests that Lord John Brown nevertheless should not be prosecutied for perjury.
Stuart's argument seems to me to turn on two things, one overt and one not mentioned. Here's the first turning point:
When asked whether he had had a sexual relationship with a 27-year old former male prostitute, Browne did what any 58-year old titan of industry would do: he lied. It seems unlikely that his perjury significantly hindered anything. As it happened, there was other, compelling evidence of Browne’s relationship with Chevalier, and it did not take long for the truth to come out. His perjury, therefore, did little to harm the judicial process.
Is that right? Browne did what any 58-year old titan of industry would do: he lied. And even if it is the case that standards of veracity among titans of industry are so low, or their reflex against admitting sexual shennanigans so well developed, must the legal system bow to it?
The second point, the one not mentioned, has to do with the identity of the perjurer. There is a strong argument that all, rich and poor, should be held to the same standard so that social position must not be a factor in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. If fact, the Judge's Oath taken in the US makes it clear that wealth (and presumably social position) are not to be factors considered in the provision of equal justice under law.
But there's another view. Just as, as a practical matter, being a titan of industry gets you lots of advantages — deferenticaldeferential cops, a reservoir of credibility in court and so on, so too should those who abuse society's trust be made examples to the others. Stuart's analysis doesn't seem to me to factor this in at all.
I guess I should read Stuart's book to find out why…
(via Jim Henley)
I'm in Nashville for a couple of days of intensive meetings, so I don't have the energy to blog about this important development in the Gonzales scandal: thanks to James Comey's testimony before Congress, it seems that top officials in the White House, including then-counsel Gonzales were so anxious to keep on with a secret, illegal wiretapping program (whose details remain unknown) that the entire Justice Dept. opposed they tried to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was in intensive care. To his credit, Ashcroft, like Comey, refused.
The Comey video is at Talking Points Memo and some good discussions are in my brother's column, and at Hullabaloo, Glenn Greenwald and FireDogLake.
It is now is impossible to dismiss the suspicion is that for more than two years — before the Justice Dept got around to complaining about it — there were illegal domestic wiretaps aimed at the Bush regime's domestic opponents.
Previous post about James Comey: An Honest Man.
Jotwell Blenderlaw