Today, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013 (you can read a primer on the JSVA here). The JSVA would allow federal judges to sentence criminal defendants below all mandatory minimum sentencing provisions. And the JSVA would prevent some of the worst injustices in federal [...]
I haven’t had much opportunity to blog the past couple of weeks because Annie and I have been busy with book promotion. On August 7th, my memoir LAW MAN: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption landed at bookshelves around the country. And in the past two [...]
Booklist Online is a collection of over 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers—from the experts at the American Library Association. I was excited to learn that a few weeks ago, David Pitt wrote a Booklist Online review of Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption. At 23, [...]
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 [...]
In August of 2012, Crown/Random House will release my memoir entitled "Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Cases and Finding Redemption." Crown has started sending copies of the manuscript to people for reviews and blurbs. One of the first people they sent the manuscript to was Michael Santos. Mr. Santos is a [...]
On Wednesday, Annie and I visited the Supreme Court. Although I have studied, filed briefs in, written about, and generally gushed over the Court for eleven years, it was my first visit to the place that has enormously impacted my life. I was kind of nervous that the Court could not possibly [...]
On next Tuesday, March 22nd, I will be speaking at the University of Virginia Law School. The gathering will occur at 12:30, and the UVA Innocence Clinic will be providing lunch. Special thanks to Allison Harnack for putting the event together. The blurb is below. The University of Virginia Innocence Project Presents [...]
I forgot to post about the podcast I did with the Josh Blackman Blog. Josh is a prolific writer: he regularly blogs and writes law reviews. In addition, he is the co-founder of Fantasy SCOTUS and president of the Harlan Institute—a non-profit organization that uses social media to bring a stylized law school experience into the [...]
The “Solo Practitioner”: Pro Se Litigants and Their Obstacles to Justice A panel discussion hosted by the Fordham Law Review On January 25th, I will be speaking about pro se litigation at the Fordham Law Review Symposium. My esteemed co-panelists will include: Judge James C. Francis, a federal Magistrate for the Southern [...]
Last week I wrote about a case that Cockle Contributor Jacob Huebert and I are involved with that is before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case involves a Lawrence v. Texas/due process challenge to the application of a state sodomy statute. Today, Adam Liptak at the New York Times continues the discussion--the article is entitled, "A Place on [...]