Circumlocutions

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.

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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.

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arolyn Elefant’s recent post on her blog asks the ques­tion, what should we do with the small and solo firms who are behind the times and don’t even seem to be aware that there are times to be behind? In short (don’t believe me, go there and read it your­self) she sug­gests that we should lend a help­ing hand to the technologically-stunted for the sake of their clients.

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I’m not con­tent to let the old firms sim­ply rot and die off if they take clients down in the process.

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his arti­cle in the Washig­ton Post (h/t @marylandmoment) describes how the Mary­land House of Del­e­gates have passed a bill to allow Mary­lan­ders to cre­ate trusts for their pets.

This is truly a ground­break­ing piece of leg­is­la­tion; pre­cisely what Mary­land needs. Crime? Hous­ing slump? Unem­ploy­ment? Reces­sion? Death penalty? No, let’s focus our efforts on an impor­tant topic — pet trusts. I had dogs grow­ing up, and they were part of the fam­ily; I shed tears when they died. There was no bur­ial or memo­r­ial ser­vice for them.

Do peo­ple need trust accounts for their pets? Maybe — accord­ing to the arti­cle, 39 other states already allow their cit­i­zens to cre­ate trusts for their pets. How­ever, when our state Sen­ate decides to put the issue of repeal­ing the death penalty to rest for this ses­sion by not repeal­ing the death penalty, why is our leg­is­la­tion spend­ing the time on pet trust funds?

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he Mary­land State Sen­ate has voted to amend the death penalty bill. I guess at the last minute they decided that the bill, instead of repeal­ing the death penalty, should not repeal the death penalty.

I think Sen. Raskin said it best:

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Amend­ments say­ing that the death penalty can be imposed only with DNA evi­dence and with more than just eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony do not change cur­rent law but are merely “cam­ou­flage for the sta­tus quo.”

Why is our state leg­is­la­ture wast­ing everyone’s time mak­ing bills that serve absolutely no pur­pose whatsoever?

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et me give you some back­ground about myself: I’m more attuned to absorb broad knowl­edge than deep under­stand­ing. I can work at truly inci­sive wis­dom about a topic, but my default mode is sound-bites and head­lines. What can I say, at least I rec­og­nize it. For that rea­son, I was aware of some Supreme Court nom­i­na­tions and cases that came and went, but I had no more than a vague aware­ness that they were there.

   Jef­frey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court was a fas­ci­nat­ing read. It gave me his­tor­i­cal and legal back­ground about the major Supreme Court cases of my time. It gave me his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal back­ground about the Supreme Court jus­tices of my time. I found the style engag­ing and inter­est­ing, if a bit long winded. There were entirely too many occa­sions when I said to myself, “haven’t I read this before?” How­ever, Toobin repeated entire pas­sages for rea­sons — obvi­ously he didn’t repeat him­self by mis­take — and it’s a nit-pick when view­ing the entirety of the work.

   There are crit­ics of Toobin who claim he is too par­ti­san one way or another; too pro or con one jus­tice or another. I know that the Volokh Con­spir­acy in par­tic­u­lar has issues with his views. They are prob­a­bly right, but I wasn’t expect­ing an eru­dite trea­tise on con­sti­tu­tional law; I was expect­ing a descrip­tion of the Supreme Court, and that’s exactly what I got.

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Let me be hon­est here: I know very lit­tle about SEO. I have vague ideas of links and head­ers, but I know that there are a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous. (10 points to who gets the movie ref­er­ence) One thing that both­ers me about the SEO craze, how­ever, is that most peo­ple aren’t look­ing to gen­er­ate their rev­enue from the web.

If you have a web-based busi­ness or you’re specif­i­cally look­ing to get cus­tomers via the web, by all means, opti­mize to your heart’s con­tent. I would assume that most peo­ple, includ­ing law firms, are not look­ing at web surfers for the bulk of their busi­ness. If you’re in this cat­e­gory, why spend time, effort and pos­si­bly money on SEOiz­ing your site? (I know that’s con­ju­gated incor­rectly. I don’t care.) Every firm should have a web­site, but the web­site is some­thing you point poten­tial cus­tomers to rather than the site point­ing poten­tial cus­tomers to you.

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Reli­gious insti­tu­tions hold a par­tic­u­lar niche in our soci­ety. After all, Amer­ica was founded on reli­gious free­dom (and turkey din­ners). We have to respect each other’s reli­gious beliefs, and a reli­gious insti­tu­tion — such as a school — has the right to fol­low its tenets even in the face of Con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected rights. The ques­tion I find myself ask­ing is: how steep is that slope?

Sure, a pri­vate, reli­gious school can only accept stu­dents of the same faith; that’s a given. What about if the stu­dents are doing things the reli­gion reviles? Can a Lutheran pri­vate school expel two girls for being sus­pected les­bians?
http://​www​.latimes​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​l​a​-​m​e​-​s​c​h​o​o​l​2​8​-​2​0​0​9​j​a​n​2​8​,​0​,​3​5​0​3​1​1​4​.​s​t​o​r​y​?​t​r​a​c​k​=​rss

The truth is, there are two dif­fer­ent issues at play here. One is the pri­vate own­er­ship of the insti­tu­tions; since the State is not offi­cially involved, there is no Con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion. Now, there are all sorts of argu­ments that any school, pri­vate or oth­er­wise, should con­sti­tute “State actors”, but the cur­rent legal cli­mate is that pri­vate schools are not sub­ject to the State Action Doc­trine.
The other issue is that a reli­gious insti­tu­tion must be allowed to prac­tice and adhere to its faith. To para­phrase Bill Cosby, “I know reli­gion! I prac­tice reli­gion!” Are there aspects of most reli­gions that those not within the faith would take offense at? Yes; hell, I know peo­ple in my reli­gion who have a hard time with some of it.

Nor­mally I would view a case like the one linked to above as cor­rect since the per­son has two outs: she can choose to use a dif­fer­ent school and she can choose not to take part in the offend­ing reli­gious prac­tices (again by leav­ing the school by choice). How­ever, since this is a school sit­u­a­tion, and the stu­dent is notfree to make the choices I just men­tioned, this deci­sion does not sit soundly with me — but what are the alternatives?

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The most recent Lawyer2Lawyer pod­cast had guest appear­ances by @KevinOKeefe and @ScottGreenfield con­cern­ing the use of twit­ter by lawyers.

Kevin had requested ques­tions or con­cerns peo­ple had with twit­ter, and the first thing that popped into my mind was over­shar­ing. I’m obvi­ously not talk­ing about when you give too many graphic details at the din­ner table; rather, when you share infor­ma­tion regard­ing what you are work­ing on.

I recently vol­un­teered to help do research on a case. (As an aside, this is the first bit of prac­ti­cal legal expe­ri­ence I am get­ting. To give credit where due, I was referred to the attor­ney through my law school. One of my pro­fes­sors men­tioned — in pass­ing — that he knew some­one who was look­ing for help and I approached the pro­fes­sor after class to get the attorney’s con­tact infor­ma­tion.) In my excite­ment to be work­ing on some­thing real, I twit­ted the gen­eral issue I was research­ing. Before I hit the “tweet” but­ton, how­ever, I hes­i­tated. How much infor­ma­tion does some­one really need to piece together the rest of the picture?

That started me think­ing about the pos­si­ble pit­falls of twit­ter in gen­eral — the biggest one being the com­pla­cency we fall into when there is a per­cep­tion of secu­rity. Pass­word breaches aside, twitter’s “direct mes­sage” fea­ture poses a huge risk for peo­ple hop­ing to direct mes­sage sen­si­tive, con­fi­den­tial or pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions. If some­one uses the wrong for­mat in send­ing the mes­sage, even if it’s only a sin­gle char­ac­ter dis­crep­ancy, the pri­vate mes­sage is posted for the entire globe to read.

I hardly ever use the SMS func­tion­al­ity to update my twit­ter sta­tus, yet I still allow SMS noti­fi­ca­tion of direct mes­sages. When I tried to respond to some­one with my email address I com­pletely failed to pref­ace my mes­sage with a “d”, thereby pub­lish­ing my per­sonal email address for all to see. For­tu­nately I’m a nobody, so I’m safe and unhassled.

Pri­vacy Dis­as­ter At Twit­ter: Direct Mes­sages Exposed (Update: GroupTweet Is Likely Culprit)

dm fail!

There are a myr­iad of arti­cles on how to use twit­ter (some days it seems that’s all any­one ever writes about. And it’s not as if each arti­cle is chock-full of orig­i­nal infor­ma­tion…) and many of them sug­gest that you use the direct mes­sage func­tion rather than @replies so as not to over­bur­den the poor peo­ple who vol­un­tar­ily asked to be shown your every last fleet­ing thought. This the­ory works hand-in-hand with the the­ory that twit­ter is a use­ful way to com­mu­ni­cate with cowork­ers, as a sort of mass IM mech­a­nism. I think that it’s safe to assume that your com­mu­ni­ca­tions with your cowork­ers will include priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion. Try to remem­ber that unless you very, very care­fully direct mes­sage some­one, the infor­ma­tion is know­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion. Or peo­ple sit­ting next to some­one with an inter­net connection.

I don’t mean to harp on twit­ter — the issue is the same with all social media:
Apple staffer’s online leak points to new iPhone proces­sor | Betanews
I sim­ply feel that the nature of twit­ter more eas­ily lends itself to be misused.

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I read with inter­est the blawr­gu­ment (I might need an inter­ven­tion with all these pseudo-words) regard­ing whether break­ing the law is, in itself, an immoral act. The dis­cus­sion went from pros­e­cu­tor to defender, across the coun­try, and it cov­ered most of the issues, specif­i­cally revolv­ing around the moral­ity of plead­ing not guilty when the defen­dant did com­mit a crime.

The point I found myself pon­der­ing is this: When the found­ing fathers rebelled against the Eng­lish, break­ing the laws of their par­ent nation, did that make them immoral? Are we, as Amer­i­cans, a nation founded on immoral­ity? If not, where lies the difference?

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