On Monday, the Supreme Court will announce some opinions, one of which could be Shelby County v. Holder, the case questioning whether the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. This is not a case that I paid great attention to, until I enrolled in a Supreme Court decisionmaking class at my law school. In class I sat [...]
I recently learned about a new book on how prisoners can write grievances complaining about their conditions in prison. The book, written by Terri LeClercq, is called "Prison Grievances: When to Write, How to Write." The reason why this book is so good for prisoners is because it is written in a simple, and easy [...]
What is the worst form of torture? I’ve been thinking about this subject for the past two weeks after reading an article written by William Blake, a New York State prisoner who has been housed in solitary confinement for the past 26 years because he murdered a sheriff’s deputy. Although I read [...]
There is a debate fermenting at my law school, the University of Washington, over whether the school should fund a criminal prosecution clinic. I weighed in on the debate, and to the surprise of many, I said that I favor a prosecution clinic. I favor it because I think such a clinic, [...]
Judge Richard Posner, of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, recently laid out his view of appellate briefs (you can read the article on the ABA website here). Judge Posner writes: So, my essential advice to the appellate brief writer is to put yourself in the judge’s shoes all the way, as it were. That [...]
Even though the Supreme Court invalidated this country’s sodomy laws ten years ago in Lawrence v. Texas, the State of Virginia has continued to press forward with prosecuting a few people for consensual sex acts. That is until yesterday, when a panel of the Fourth Circuit held the Virginia statue is unconstitutional [...]
The Washington Law Review recently published an interactive article written by Professor Yale Kamisar entitled, The Rise, Decline, and Fall (?) of Miranda. The article provides hyperlinks to source documents, including key cases, memoranda, and recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments. You can find the article here. For those of you unfamiliar with Kamisar's work, he is widely [...]
I often receive the question of whether 10 years of prior legal experience helps or hurts in law school. I think the answer is both. Having a legal background helps in that the learning curve in year one is not so steep. Because I'm used to reading and analyzing cases, I think, as a general [...]
This past week, the Seattle Times published an op-ed I wrote about the need for prison reform. In the article, I talk about how I caught a big break following my release from federal prison. I was released in October of 2008, during the heart of the recession, and everyone found it difficult to obtain [...]
The Supreme Court’s 2012 Term started big and it will finish big. The finish to this Term will include decisions regarding same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act cases. And if that wasn’t enough, there are a number of interesting criminal cases that the Court will decide before the end [...]