The legal world was shocked when the infamous Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit announced his retirement last week, effective immediately. Judge Posner is well-known in the legal community for being witty and outspoken, sometimes courting controversy with his statements. Though his retirement is seen as abrupt, [...]
Remember those early days of your legal career? Perhaps as a student clerk, or a freshly minted JD, remember those first few steps out of the classroom, and into the real world? Remember the terror? For three years they poured legal knowledge into your head, and perhaps more significantly, they gave you the tools to [...]
Over the next couple of months, the CockleBur will provide a series of conversations about the law with a number of prominent legal journalists, practitioners, scholars, policy makers, and social justice advocates. I chose these particular people because I think they can bring a unique perspective about topics such as advocacy, legal [...]
Over the next three months, the CockleBur will provide a series of conversations about the law from a number of prominent legal journalists, practitioners, scholars, policy makers, and social justice advocates. I chose these particular people because I think they can bring a unique perspective about topics such as advocacy, legal education, how the media [...]
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 [...]
The 2012 Greenbag Almanac and Reader was recently published. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Greenbag is "a quarterly journal of short, readable, useful, and sometimes entertaining legal scholarship." The Greenbag has a distinguished Board of Advisors that includes Linda Greenhouse, Howard Bashman, Adam Liptak, Judges Alex Kozinki, Diane Wood, and J. Harvie [...]
The greatest lawyer in the Anglo-American common law tradition would have been 460 today, had he lived.
Query: What is the connection between famine (on the one hand) and the current tangle of issues regarding the undersupply or oversupply of lawyers and legal services (on the other)? Answer: The problem in both instances may be one of distribution. As to famine… Thomas Keneally’s new book Three Famines traces the great [...]
A few weeks ago the New York Times published this piece addressing the serious issue that “most low-income Americans cannot afford a lawyer to defend their legal interests, no matter how urgent the issue.” The Times suggested several ways to provide better access to justice for low-income people. Those suggestions included allowing [...]
Ann E. Tenbrunsel and Max H. Bazerman in Freakonomics, Wednesday, June 01, 2011, Launching Into Unethical Behavior: Lessons from the Challenger Disaster Tenbrunsel and Bazerman evaluate the decision processes that led to the 1986 Challenger explosion “through a modern day ‘behavioral ethics’ lens.” The piece ties the ethical fallacies apparent in the [...]