Bookworm Room

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 graphic [...]

2 Comments »

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 site, [...]

25 Comments »

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 she’s [...]

34 Comments »

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 seem [...]

19 Comments »

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 spent [...]

4 Comments »

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 into [...]

15 Comments »

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 peculiar [...]

3 Comments »

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 and [...]

13 Comments »

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.  Hardback [...]

12 Comments »

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, there’s [...]

1 Comment »

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 for [...]

3 Comments »

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 department [...]

8 Comments »

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 ‘is’ [...]

6 Comments »

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, Harvard. [...]

2 Comments »

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 would [...]

4 Comments »

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

1 Comment »

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 and [...]

5 Comments »

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 time [...]

18 Comments »

I am not conversant with the details of the Patriot Act, nor am I a Constitutional lawyer. I simply find it interesting that, more often than not, when a Federal District Court judge rules something about the Patriot Act unlawful, that judge is a Clinton appointee. The most recent case in point is a decision [...]

6 Comments »

I just read that a federal judge has temporarily canceled the Patriot Act’s wire tapping provisions. I’m very much not a Constitutional lawyer, so I can’t comment on the validity of this decision at a legal level. Immediately upon reading that story, though, I was pretty willing to bet that Judge Victor Marrero, who operates [...]

6 Comments »

Don Quixote will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think one of the core things about being a libertarian is that you don’t try to control people’s conduct, but you do step in if they break certain clearly stated rules. Indeed, you don’t need to be a libertarian to have that view. As a [...]

3 Comments »

My son’s Nintendo DS crashed and, as it turned out, he hadn’t saved for quite a while.  He lost several special moves and weapons that he’d gathered since the last save.  I suggested (sympathetically) that he might want to save more often.  His response:  “I’m going to sue Nintendo.”  I may be a lawyer, but [...]

7 Comments »

DQ here.  I’ll be dropping in while Bookworm is on vacation.  Danny L. picked up on one of my earlier comments and suggested I make a topic out of my belief that we should legalize drugs.  Good idea.  I’d also legalize gambling, prostitution, and other “victimless” crimes.  I take this stand on principle — what [...]

27 Comments »

Sean Hannity isn’t one of my favorite conservative talking heads. He has some good points, but he functions off of an anger and emotionalism that stops just short of (or maybe drifts over into) demagoguery. I thought this was very clearly displayed in his attack last night on Johnny Sutton, the U.S. Attorney out of [...]

24 Comments »

You’ve no doubt heard that the Six Imams, as part of their legal strategy, have named as “John Doe” defendants in their lawsuit some of the people who alerted the authorities about the fact that the Imam’s were behaving in a peculiar and threatening way. That threat, to drag citizens into litigation, might have been a [...]

1 Comment »