Category Archives: Law: Everything Else

Lawrence Lessig and John Hardwicke Fight Sexual Abuse and the American Boychoir School. Awful. Amazing. (Spotted via the increasingly indispensable Ernest Miller.)

Larry Lessig is a brave guy.

This looks useful!

The Volokh Conspiracy – PDF Copies of the United States Reports: Most lawyers and law students know that that the U.S. Supreme Court website posts slip opinions of recent cases. What you might not know is that as the Court publications unit finalizes its slip opinions and eventually compiles them into bound volumes of the United States Reports, it also makes the entire contents of individual volumes of the United States Reports available as individual .pdf files. The service begins with Volume 502 (October 1991), and currently goes as far as Volume 538 (through May 27, 2003). This means that you can download entire volumes of the U.S. Reports and save them to your hard drive for subsequent searching and use offline — with the correct pagination, italics, appendices, charts, and graphs — all for free. Really cool, at least if you're into that kind of thing.

It must be fun to teach the kind of students who start interesting new Internet-based law journals.

Somehow I will have to find the time to read Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left…but maybe not until after I write some exams.

The last weeks of the semester are always such a busy time: so much to do, and less energy than usual…

This motion in Monica Santiago v. Sherwin-Williams Company, posted by Mark A. R. Kleiman, seems too good to be true. And it's funny.

Jaye Ramsey Sutter (“in a bad mood & telling you about it since 1962”) walks much, much a harder road than I do:

Today the Supreme Court did a good thing, no more death penalty for those who commit crimes when they are juveniles. To hear people discuss it,however, you would think that the Supreme Court took away everyone's Christmas present. For a bunch of Christians, these Americans are strangely pro-death penalty. I am positive that Christ himself would support the execution of juveniles while they are still juveniles. Amen.

I wanted to discuss the opinion with my students. I wanted them to see what an actual opinion looks like. We went up on line in the classroom and saw it. As we talked about what it meant my students opened up about their legal issues and problems.

I was stunned.

One young woman asked about what to do when her boyfriend beat her. Should she call the police from their appartment, should she leave the scene, should she sleep on it and call the next day.

I feel odd discussing the elegance of a Supreme Court decision with its beautiful citations and form when these students experience such violence.

One young man, so full of energy and intelligence asked if his girl friend had a restraining order against him and she walked into their favorite club and he was there, should he leave or should she? I told him bluntly to be a man, don't argue over some childish right to be drinking in their favorite club, and leave. Just walk away. Why don't she have to do that, he begged. Why don't we skip over that part and you be the adult and leave, I replied.

How can we teach the civilization of this Supreme Court decision to people who live with such violence as part of their lives?

I don't think it was a wasted class. I think our textbooks and our curriculum should address the violence that is our students' lives. They asked me who to call if the neighbors are abusing their children. I replied that a call to the police would certainly work and that Child Protective Services would investigate. I told them if they did not call the police they were making the abuse possible because they are aware of it and are doing nothing.

And I'm going to conferences.

Eugene Volokh posts an entry on (well, really, against) Legalese in which a judge complains, with some justice, that the Normans have conquered Lorain County, Ohio.