Circumlocutions

cott Green­field over at Sim­ple Jus­tice posted today about the cus­tom of lay­ing wreaths on the graves of those who have made the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice for their coun­try, thanks to a pro­gram called Wreaths Across Amer­ica.

   Scott also intro­duced the new pro­gram called Wreaths Over the Water that was started this year in Florida. The pro­gram hon­ors those brave fallen who are with­out graves; those lost to the sea, those miss­ing in action and those pris­on­ers of war. 

   As Scott puts it:

‘

The pol­i­tics of war bears no con­nec­tion to the sac­ri­fice of these men and women, or the loss of their fam­i­lies and friends. Hav­ing given their lives, the least we can do is remem­ber them, offer com­fort to their fam­i­lies and honor their sac­ri­fice.
The hope is that this is the birth of a tra­di­tion that will find its way into the hearts and minds of Amer­i­cans across the nation. This Decem­ber 12^th, there was but one cer­e­mony held in Florida. Next year, let this cer­e­mony be repeated across the nation. Those whose bod­ies were lost to the water are no less deserv­ing of our thoughts.

   No mat­ter what peo­ple have said regard­ing reli­gious orna­ments being used in hon­or­ing the fallen, I agree with Jus­tice Scalia’s view:

‘

It’s erected as a war memo­r­ial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead…What would you have them erect?…Some con­glom­er­ate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Mus­lim half moon and star?”

   Writ­ing as an ortho­dox Jew, acknowl­edg­ing that a wreath and the time is Christian-centric, I have no qualms in adding my hopes to Scott’s — that this cer­e­mony be repeated next year across the nation.

Continue Reading

hile perus­ing the twit­ter­stream yes­ter­day, @ProfJonathon shared a link to a new web ser­vice named CMP.ly. Accord­ing to the web­site, it pur­ports to be a “dis­clo­sure engine” for every­one online — from blog­gers to Agen­cies.
   My first ques­tion to ProfJonathon was whether it was rec­og­nized by the FTC. Since he was merely shar­ing a link and was in no way asso­ci­ated with the ser­vice, we agreed that it was an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tual exer­cise and we each went our sep­a­rate ways. Then, I got a response from @cmply:

‘

@ProfJonathan @mglickman — Good ques­tion. Although the FTC can­not endorse a par­tic­u­lar solu­tion we met and reviewed our sys­tem. DM for info.

Continue Reading

UPDATE
Please take a moment and read Scott’s and Rick’s posts. I severely abridged their posts to the point of ruin­ing their mean­ings, and I apol­o­gize about that.
This post has been mod­i­fied in response to Rick’s com­ment below.

ester­day brought another inter­est­ing post from Scott Greenfield’s Sim­ple Jus­tice. He had been made aware of a blog by a new law school grad­u­ate with hopes of enter­ing the world of crim­i­nal defense. The author mono­logued about the moral dilemma a defense attor­ney has when rep­re­sent­ing a “guilty-as-charged” client. Her ulti­mate answer to it was that a defense attor­ney has a duty to tell her client’s story in order to achieve a fair outcome.

   Scott, lodged in a les­son about the dan­gers of blog­ging (Loose blog posts Sink egos, or some­thing of the sort), explained that there is no moral dilemma. A defense attor­ney is there to beat the pros­e­cu­tion and win free­dom for his client. It is, after all, an adver­sar­ial sys­tem. (Dis­claimer: This is my sum­mary. Read his com­ment.)

That was yesterday.

Continue Reading

had an idea the other day for a ser­vice twit­ter should offer to corporate/registered accounts.
One thing peo­ple have noticed is that twit­ter seems to have very high search engine rank­ing; so that if I were to Google my name, one of the top links is my twit­ter page. That has raised some con­cerns in the past about how a lawyer can be viewed by poten­tial clients who look the lawyer up online.
My idea is to allow firms to lever­age this strong search engine rank­ing of twit­ter. A firm can have its own twit­ter ID, but, as any social media guru will tell you, it’s bet­ter to have an indi­vid­ual face peo­ple can relate to. So a firm will appoint an indi­vid­ual to be the face of the firm on twit­ter (and what­ever other social net­work it deems nec­es­sary). That’s pretty darn straightforward.

Continue Reading

ear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
   Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

   Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue. 

Continue Reading

cott Green­field at Sim­ple Jus­tice adds to an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion regard­ing trans­parency in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.
   The orig­i­nat­ing post came from Doug Berman who sug­gested the idea there should be reg­is­tra­tion for all con­vic­tions in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.
   The next sally came from Bobby Fred­er­ick who raises the very valid con­cerns of mis­takes and poor representation. 

Continue Reading

ith apolo­gies to Jeff Foxworthy.

• If the joke you heard last night about Arti­cle 9 of the UCC had a punch­line based on Jus­tice Frankfurter’s opin­ion on stomach-pumping under the 4^th Amend­ment… you might be in law school. 
  • If you got the joke and laughed… you are def­i­nitely in law school… and you’re a geek.
• If, some­where in your sub­con­scious, you feel guilty when you’re not car­ry­ing roughly 200 lbs of text­books… you might be in law school.
• If you have dreamed of a § key on your key­board.… you might be in law school. 
  • If you even know what the § sym­bol means… you might be in law school.
• If you have ever com­plained that Bar­Bri is a monop­oly… you might be in law school. 
  • If you know that Bar­Bri was a monop­oly… you might be in law school.
• If you have a stated pref­er­ence between West­law and Lex­is­Nexis… you might be in law school. 
  • If you have run the exact same search through both… you are def­i­nitely in law school.
• If you think a para­graph feels naked with­out the word “how­ever” or the phrase “in regard to”… you might be in law school.
• If you have ever been asked a ques­tion which has no cor­rect answer… you might be in law school… or you might just be married.

Continue Reading

n case any­one who reads this blog is unaware, I’m a non-traditional law stu­dent. I work full-time and attend classes in the evening. The nor­mal time­line for evening stu­dents at my school is 4 years until grad­u­a­tion; I’m an impa­tient type, so I opted to take a full course load each sum­mer as well. This deci­sion — not nec­es­sar­ily good for my san­ity — cuts down the time it will take me to grad­u­ate by 2 full semes­ters (roughly one year).

Now that that’s out of the way, allow me to get to the point: I par­tic­i­pated in my schools Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Clinic this sum­mer. For­merly based in an incu­ba­tor (it has since moved to a school cam­pus), the clien­tele ranged from authors to web-based busi­ness to bio-engineers to finan­cial audit­ing contractors.

Continue Reading

irst of all, I’d like to thank every­one who con­tacted me about my blog being down.
I was in the midst of upgrad­ing Word­Press when I real­ized that I had no idea what I was doing. After finally fig­ur­ing out how to com­plete the upgrade, I no longer had time to do so.

Until now.

For the incred­i­bly few of you who occa­sion­ally glance at this blog, I hope to start post­ing again soon.

Continue Reading

finally got around to actu­ally read­ing the deci­sion in State of Wis­con­sin v. Michael Sveum instead of view­ing all the typ­ing heads. (On the blog cir­cuit they’re all typ­ing heads, not talk­ing heads.)
    At first glance, I felt that the court came to the dif­fi­cult but cor­rect deci­sion — after all, we do drive in pub­lic. I was going to go my merry way when I real­ized that the deci­sion still both­ered me, so sat back and tried to think it through.

Continue Reading