Bookworm Room

Tweet (To win over the electorate, conservatives have to be seen as a party with fresh ideas that benefit all Americans. This is the first in a series of Tipping Point posts, promoting ideas that will appeal to all voters, while becoming signature initiatives for conservatives and Republicans.) Did you know that the Code of [...]

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Tweet I wrote last week about the fact that the lapdog media is finally catching up with Obama’s claim that the problem with America’s economy is that ATMs are job destroyers, and that’s why our economy is a mess.  Many of you commented that, in your own industries, you’ve seen automation chip away at jobs [...]

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Tweet The State Bar of California, which I have to pay into in order to practice law in the State of California, long-ago abandoned its core responsibility of ensuring that people who hold themselves out as lawyers to California citizens are at least minimally qualified.  As with all these mandatory organizations, it’s turned into a [...]

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Tweet The Supreme Court opinion on ObamaCare runs to 193 pages.  It is the size of a book, only more boring than any book anyone would ever want to read — and that is true despite the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the worst writer on the court, didn’t write it.  I’ve been making a [...]

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Tweet Wow! Wow! From a lawyer’s point of view, it’s hard to imagine anything more stupid than for the Obama White House to assert executive privilege as to the Fast and Furious documents.  The subpoenaed documents must have some pretty damning information for the White House to make this move. More than that, by having [...]

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Tweet In ordinary times, criminals disregard the law.  In the PC Obama era, however, elected officials and state government agencies don’t have much use for the law either.  Take Obama, for example.  Contrary to the original headlines regarding Obama’s newly discovered immigration rights, Obama’s recent announcement regarding illegal immigration isn’t an executive order.  Instead, it’s [...]

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Tweet Throughout my legal career, the Harvard Law grads of my generation and after have bewildered me.  The ones I met practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area, more often than not, were distinguished by two things:  lousy legal skills and strident aggression.  I was pretty sure that this perception on my part wasn’t simply [...]

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Tweet We’ve all heard and read about the fact that profiteers are stifling patents.  They buy up patents, not to encourage innovation, but to shake down people who come up with ideas they claim overlap with the patents that they’ve purchased (and that sit, unused, in their faults).  Frugal Dad came up with a charming [...]

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Tweet When I first saw the headline — “A $2.5 Million Libel Judgment Brings The Question : Are  Bloggers Journalists?” — I have to admit that I felt a bit queasy.  When I write something snide about President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or any of the other prominent Democrats I routinely criticize at this [...]

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Tweet This post tells the story of a case on which I worked.  It’s a true story. Picture this: It’s 2001.  You live in California and you own a small business that consists of you and maybe three to five at-will employees.  Your profits are decent. One morning, Jane, one of your employees, announces that [...]

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Tweet A lot of people look at laws that are hard to enforce and say, “let’s get rid of those laws.”  The three major recipients of this line of reasoning are drugs, prostitution and illegal immigration.  People ask, “Why criminalize these inevitable behaviors, especially since criminalizing them draws into the law enforcement net people who [...]

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Tweet Life can be tough when you break the law.  The people who murdered Annie Mae Aquash discovered this fact when they were arrested and tried for murder 35 years after killing Aquash.  Sara Jane Olson, an SLA terrorist during the 1970s, discovered that when her quiet, suburban life in Minnesota was revealed and she [...]

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Tweet I found the following paragraph, culled from the San Francisco Chronicle, fascinating (emphasis mine): From top congressional leaders to online activists, liberals have sought the wisdom of UC Berkeley linguistics Professor George Lakoff for years. They ask him to teach them to do something that conservatives traditionally have done better — frame complex policy [...]

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Tweet One of the lesser known, but very dangerous fronts, in the jihad war against the west is the Islamists’ habit of using our own Western laws against us.  Right now, a front in that particular battle is being waged in Canada, where McMaster University is suing Dr. Paul Williams after he wrote about the [...]

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Tweet One of the main reasons I’ve kept my politics under wraps (stating my views if confronted directly, but not engaging in heated political debate otherwise), is because I’ve been worried that it would affect me professionally.  In my neck of the woods, most of my potential clients had Obama bumper stickers on their cars [...]

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Tweet For my birthday, my husband gave me an Amazon Kindle.  It’s a sensible gift for me, since I read voraciously and often find myself waiting around in various places because of carpools.  Since the Kindle fits in my purse, I always have something to read. The only problem with the Kindle is the expense.  [...]

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Tweet Traditionally, in arguing cases to the court, there have been a very limited number of available types of legal authority:  cases, statutes, administrative rules, and law review articles (with the last being advisory only) have pretty much made up the universe of things the court needs to consider.  In this Age of Obama, though, [...]

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Tweet This just in, over BNO news: BULLETIN — U.S. SUPREME COURT: SENIOR OFFICIALS CANNOT BE SUED FOR ALLEGED POST 9/11 ABUSE. This is good news, because current administration figures should not be suing past administration figures for the latter’s conduct in a crisis.  I mean, can you imagine if Eisenhower’s administration had gone gunning [...]

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Tweet I went to law school in the days when students still took notes by hand. When I started practicing law, secretaries had computers at their desks, but no lawyers did. My first law firm used a “Wang” word processing system, which was really nothing more than a typewriter on the screen. The word processing [...]

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Tweet When I was a young lawyer and an avid Democrat, I was just thrilled that Bill Clinton and his wife were both lawyers. It seemed to vindicate my career decision. As I’ve become less enthralled with being a lawyer, and as the lawyer politicians have proven adept at parsing the truth (“it depends what [...]

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Tweet From the every first paragraph of a lengthy New York Times Magazine article about Sharia law, you know you’re in for an intellectually dishonest voyage through the multi-culti mindset of the New York Times, this time as put forward by Noah Feldman who is, unsurprisingly, a law professor at that bastion of liberal think, [...]

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Tweet Edward Whelan, after pointing out that a President Obama would have the potential to appoint up to six new Supreme Court justices, looks at Obama’s rhetoric about the Constitution and the law, and uses that information to explain clearly what type of justices Obama would appoint: [I]n setting forth the sort of judges he [...]

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Tweet Two excellent articles out of England about the folly behind the Archbishop’s idea: Our British laws are there to protect Muslim women What parallel sharia means in practice

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Tweet I was trying to set up a post that selectively quotes from Melanie Phillips’ articles explaining the utter insanity behind the Archbishop of Canterbury’s muddled remarks about bringing sharia law into the British legal system — but I couldn’t. Each paragraph is so information-packed and important that (a) I couldn’t pick what to quote [...]

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Tweet If you want to witness the interesting spectacle of my going from a fairly mild mannered, motherly lawyer type, to a screaming, foaming-at-the-mouth harridan, mention one acronym:  MCLE.  This stands for Minimum Continuing Legal Education, which I found an inconvenience when I was a big firm attorney and that I find an economic and [...]

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