No relief

 1 Response »
Mar 102007
 

Back before I had full-time employment as a lawyer, I’d fill the downtime between jobs doing pro bono work. Some of this was at the free legal-help clinic in East Palo Alto which, as you might guess, handles a lot of immigration problems.

One type of case we saw commonly was the “U Visa”. This is a visa that can be granted to crime victims who cooperate in the prosecution of those who committed crimes against them; primarily, it’s intended to be used by victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, so that they can report their abuse and help prosecute their attackers. It takes away the threat of “if you tell anyone what I am doing to you, you will be arrested and deported.”

Problem was that, although Congress authorized this type of visa, by 2004 they still hadn’t implemented it. Technically, the women we helped were applying for “U Visa interim relief”–a stopgap measure meant to allow them to stay in the country while the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS figured out the requirements for applying for this visa.

Guess what? It’s 2007,  and with no actual visa in sight, some groups representing immigrants have filed lawsuits to get the government off its ass.  USCIS’s response? They want the regulations to be “well thought out.” Because, apparently, if they actually allow women forced into prostitution to apply for legal status, the terrorists have won.

 Posted by mythago at 3:13 pm

Because we need all the help we can get

 1 Response »
Mar 102007
 

No, I wasn’t actually saying The Trial Lawyer’s Prayer this week, but it’s still pretty funny.

 Posted by mythago at 3:02 pm

Think Like a Lawyer

 2 Responses »
Feb 252007
 

Aaron has an excellent post at The Stopped Clock about Ann Althouse’s rant about how law professors nowadays (do I even need to go on?).

It was a long time ago, but I don’t remember ever being told we were going to learn to “think like a lawyer”. It was sort of assumed, perhaps because we knew that if we wanted to “think like a law professor”, we should have gotten into the University of Michigan; since we didn’t, we were by-god going to have to learn to practice law. There were really only two incidents that made it clear how our skull innards were going to be rearranged:

1) One of the traditional methods of education in law school is to start off reading old cases, some of which are ‘foundational’ but many of which are obsolete, to illustrate the development of the law. That’s the ostensible reason, anyway; the real reason, I am convinced, is to get you over the notion that the legally correct result is the “right” one. So you spend a lot of time reading cases about widows being kicked out of their homes, people whose children were injured by products being told that there is no “privity” between the manufacturer and the kid, etcetera.

Early on in Contracts, taught by the impeccably correct Professor Dolan, one of my classmates couldn’t take any more legally-correct injustice and called out “But this is just a game of semantics!” Professor Dolan stopped in mid-Socratic inquiry, ran to the blackboard, seized a piece of chalk and wrote A GAME OF SEMANTICS in foot-high letters.

“Son,” he said, pointing to the blackboard, “welcome to the law.”

2) I was lucky enough to have Civil Procedure taught by a GM products-liability litigator, who was taking a sabbatical because he had just become a father. Civ Pro is generally not what you’d think of as the most exciting subject, and I can’t say Professor Mann actually made it exciting, but he made it important with his very first lecture: “You may think of civil procedure as dull, but let me tell you something: Even if you are not the best lawyer, or you don’t have good facts or the law on your side, if you thoroughly understand civil procedure, you can run rings around your opponent.” It’s a lesson I never forgot, and one I put into practice, to great advantage, every single day.

 Posted by mythago at 9:51 am

Death by bureaucracy

 6 Responses »
Feb 042007
 

Teresa Nielsen-Hayden has a most excellent proposal for bringing God back into the schools, after following the usual protocols….

 Posted by mythago at 9:01 pm

Court of Cthulhu

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Feb 042007
 

Kevin Thompson hosts the Illuminati edition of this week’s Blawg Review.

 Posted by mythago at 9:00 pm

…but some evidence is more admissible than others

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Jan 272007
 

I’ve had some very trying days in Law & Motion, but nothing as breathtakingly WTF?! as Celia Ambriz. Among the many forehead-slapping errors committed, the trial court had agreed with respondent that certain depositions were inadmissible–even though the respondent used the very same depositions as exhibits to its motion for summary judgment.

I also couldn’t help but think that after everything that’s happened to her, Ms. Ambriz must be one heck of a woman to maintain any faith at all in the legal system.

 Posted by mythago at 10:12 pm

Bill of Rights: Doubleplusungood

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Jan 242007
 

In case there was anyone left who clung to the idea that the Bush administration does not see itself as a monarchy, Attorney General Gonzales was happy to clear that up for you:

Gonzales acknowledged that the Constitution declares “habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless … in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” But he insisted that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

Continue reading »

 Posted by mythago at 12:39 pm

“Activist” courts – criminal divison, part 2

 6 Responses »
Jan 202007
 

Message to drug dealers: if you’re going to trade drugs for sex, pick a single woman.

There’s been tut-tutting around the blogosphere about the ‘crazy’ decision, but the bottom line is that the Michigan court is correct: under Michigan law, adulterous sex is one of most serious sexual offenses, because in Michigan, adultery is still on the books as a felony.

Continue reading »

 Posted by mythago at 10:16 pm

“Activist” courts – criminal division

 10 Responses »
Jan 202007
 

Via Pandagon, the story of Julie Amero, who was obviously railroaded for the crime of failing to erase porn spam pop-ups that mysteriously appeared on a school computer while she was a substitute teacher.

Right? Well, it’s hard to tell from the Pandagon or Alternet articles, which are less about what actually happened and more about righteous indignation that somebody would be convicted of showing porn to 12-year-olds; they’ve already seen porn anyway. And she wasn’t allowed to prove that somebody else surfed onto porn sites. Besides, the school should have stopped it with filters, and somehow, this is patriarchal oppression or something.

My lawyer sense started tingling when I noticed that Amanda had skipped over one very interesting fact: Amero’s lawyer failed to notify the prosecution of the “she was helpless before infectious malware” defense in a timely manner, and so her expert was barred from offering any testimony along those lines. Hm.

As far as her helpless reaction to the porn? Amaro turned one kid’s face away, but they could see the screen from their seats. The police testified that the graphic sites had been accessed during the time Amero was in the class, not before. It apparently didn’t occur to her to, oh, turn off the monitor, turn the screen, or unplug the computer. Or to call the principal’s or custodian’s office for help.

On the “forty years in prison”, this seems to be drawn from Amero’s conviction on four separate counts of a crime that calls for up to ten years in prison. To get forty years, she would have to be given the maximum penalty for each and have the time served consecutively, rather than concurrently. Norm Pattis would know Connecticut criminal law better than I, but I’m not seeing that Amero is likely to be given the harshest possible sentence without some kind of aggravating factors, such as a criminal history, which she doesn’t have.

Is it possible Amero was railroaded by paranoid prudes? As lawyers say, anything’s possible. But the facts that have been floating around so far don’t suggest that we should be checking the Connecticut court for railroad tracks just yet.

 Posted by mythago at 6:11 pm

Do not meddle in the affairs of law firms

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Jan 182007
 

Charles “Cully” Stimson, a Pentagon official, is a former prosecutor and defense lawyer, and therefore should know better. Nevertheless, last week he decided to shoot his mouth off about some large, prestigious law firms who do pro bono work for, if you can believe it, people who can’t afford lawyers–specifically, Guantanamo detainees. Such law firms, Stimson said, ought to be boycotted by their Fortune 500 clients and, even worse, probably rely on Sinister Funding Sources. Stimson also appears to have “>fed this story to that bastions of paleoconservativism, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (One would call them ‘knuckledraggers’ except that they probably hire servants to drag their knuckles for them.)

I doubt Stimson thought much other than this would get him a double play with the conservatives: bash (other) lawyers and Gitmo-huggers! Unfortunately, he forgot that the law firms he was bashing were, well, law firms. Big, respectable law firms that represent big, Fortune 500 companies and have big, monied connections to the business world and to the Republican party.

The apology was humorous: Stimson said he never meant to bash these law firms, although that’s exactly what he did, and that his statements do not reflect his “core beliefs”. Which is either a flat-out lie, or an admission that he didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth and it was all fabricated for personal gain.

When even the White House tells you to leave the lawyers alone, you know you’re the last rat on a sinking ship.

Update: FindLaw Writ commentary by Vikram Amar.

 Posted by mythago at 9:53 pm
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