Hiatus

Sorry to The Legal Watchdog readers for my lack of posts.  And, due to new writing opportunities, I may be on an extended hiatus.  However, please stay tuned for posts regarding forthcoming books and articles.  In the meantime, Knightly will get some much needed rest.

Sniffing out police perjury

Police perjury in the Fourth Amendment context is widespread and well-documented.  (Read pages 547-48 of this article, and pages 472-73 of this article, for details.)  In a nutshell, if a cop tells a judge that he saw, heard, or smelled something that aroused his suspicion, judges will uphold any police search and look the other way on Fourth Amendment violations.  But not Judge Guolee of Milwaukee.  He’s not afraid to “call bullshit” when he sees (or smells) it.  In State v. Jackson, the defendant challenged a police search of his vehicle's trunk and the judge held a hearing.  At that hearing, the cop testified that he was legally justified in searching the trunk because he could smell the marijuana.  But instead of rubber-stamping the testimony and automatically finding that there was no Fourth Amendment violation, Judge Guolee had about enough.  Here’s what he said:

Judicial three-peat: Cimpl as pie

Judge Dennis Cimpl recently made The Dog’s list of repeat offenders for his gross misunderstanding of the law resulting in the reversal of two convictions. (See here and here for earlier posts.)  And now he’s become The Dog’s first three-peat offender.  In State v. Sarfraz, judge Cimpl prohibited the defendant from presenting his defense to the jury.  The reason?  In the judge’s mind, the defendant’s evidence was relevant but not as persuasive as he would have liked.  However, as the appellate court explained in ¶25 of the opinion, weighing the evidence is the role of the jury, not the government agent sitting on the bench.  This was such a serious and fundamental error that the defendant’s conviction was reversed, and a new trial was ordered. 

HIATUS

Knightly (pictured) will rest and gather his strength while I take some time off from The Legal Watchdog to write a short, invited essay for the Hofstra Law Review.  In it I intend to demonstrate (in Hitchens-esque style, I hope) how our constitutional rights ain’t what they used to be.  Stay tuned.    

Elite Eight and More Off-Court Madness

MU Elite Eight

Congrats to Marquette for a fine tournament run before getting stifled by the best zone defense in the country.  It's been a phenomenal 2012-13 season.  Marquette not only won the Big East regular season title (after being picked to finish seventh), but they also made it to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tourney—their deepest tournament run since D-Wade led them to the final four a decade ago.  Meanwhile, the off-court madness continues at UCLA.  I was glad to see the Bruins hired a new coach; that means they won’t be sniffing around Marquette to steal away Buzz Williams.  But I was surprised that, after firing their old coach who had been to the Final Four three times in the last ten years, and who had just won the Pac-12 regular season title, they hired Steve Alford out of New Mexico.  Alford led New Mexico only to three NCAA tourney births in the last six years, and never made it past the round of thirty-two.  Weirder still, Alford reportedly had just signed a ten-year contract extension with the Lobos mere days before jumping to UCLA!  If they didn't already know it, I guess New Mexico fans learned the hard way that contracts just don’t mean much in college basketball.

On-court sweetness and off-court madness

MU Sweet 16

Congrats to Marquette for storming the Sweet 16 for the third year in a row.  Thanks, Vander Blue, for this game winning shot to claim the Big East regular season title (which, in my opinion, was MU's biggest accomplishment since the Final 4), for this game winning shot against Davidson in the first round, and for this dominating 29-point performance against Butler to make the Sweet 16.  This Eagle is having the biggest impact of any player since D-Wade.  Meanwhile, I hope that some giant university doesn’t fire their current coach and lure Buzz Williams away after his incredible, recent success.  The big risk here is U. of Texas.  They have so much sick money down there that the law school dean literally paid himself a $500,000 bonus so that he wouldn’t quit his own job.  Hopefully this type of shameful, embarrassing excess isn’t Buzz’s style.  Besides, Marquette is already paying him a yearly salary that exceeds what I could spend in a lifetime, so he's not hurting for money.  And Buzz also knows that alumni and fans aren’t as kind at these big universities as they are at a small, Midwestern school like Marquette.  Consider, for example, the off-court madness at UCLA.  Their coach, Ben Howland, is rumored to be getting fired after ten years.  But why not?  He only made it to three Final 4s and this year he won the Pac-12 regular season title while going to the Pac-12 conference tournament finals, and then to the Big Dance.  Of course he should be fired.  Madness, indeed.

George Mason is this year’s George Mason

With the Big Dance fast approaching, everyone is asking, “Who will be this year’s George Mason?”  Well, I guess it won’t be George Mason, as they lost a heart-breaker in their conference tourney.  But they do have good taste in law review articles.  Stay tuned for my newest article, “An Alternative to the Wrong-Person Defense” which will appear in the George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal this fall.  In the meantime, check out the blog post on which the article was based, and check out GMU’s Civil Rights Law Blog, which is full of chocolatey cookie goodness for the libertarian-minded reader.  Oh, and enjoy March Madness.         

Seashells and Balloons

Marquette: Big East Champs

Congratulations to Marquette after winning a share of the Big East regular season title in dramatic fashion.  (Nice buzzer beater, Vander Blue.)  This is MU’s first conference title since the days of Dwyane Wade, et al., in Conference USA.  This year, though, was different.  With no NBA ballers on the roster, and much tougher competition in the Big East, Buzz Williams routinely went nine or ten deep to finish 14-4 in conference play.  Al McGuire would have loved it.  It’s all seashells and balloons, Al.

Paul Campos: “Damn it feels good to be a gansta”

Paul Campos is a law professor who started and, sadly, recently ended a blog titled “Inside the Law School Scam.”  The title of the blog speaks for itself, and there is little I can write about Campos that hasn’t already been written.  But a little is better than nothing, so here goes:

The next bubble is here

We all know about the housing bubble.  Lenders gave out money willy-nilly, people accepted it to buy homes, this increased demand and artificially drove up prices, and then the housing market crashed.  (I’m sure an economist would quibble with much of that phraseology, but you get the point.)  And while our economy is still feeling the effects, the next bubble is already here.  Unfortunately, it could easily have been prevented.  And although much of the damage is already done, it’s still possible to rein it in.  The new bubble, if you haven’t guessed, is educational debt. 

Lies, damned lies, and the statistics that expose them

I’m generally not a huge fan of empirical studies on the law.  (There are one or two exceptions, of course.)  But sometimes, the numbers have an uncanny way of exposing lies.  Consider this tale of two groups: police officers and law school bureaucrats.  With regard to the police, one famous study on police-officer behavior revealed that, before the Fourth Amendment was imposed on the states, the police would simply write in their reports what really happened: they stopped people on the street for no reason, searched them, found drugs, and arrested them.  In fact, the police admitted to this in 33 percent of their police reports.  Only in 14 percent of their reports did they write that the drugs magically fell out of the defendants’ pockets.

The wrong kind of theory

Legal education has come under a great deal of fire lately.  One criticism that has been around long before the recent legal education crisis, however, is that law schools teach only theory, and not practical skills.  The debate, in a nutshell, boils down to two competing camps.  The practicing-lawyer camp mocks theory, while praising the value of a practical education.  After all, we lawyers are licensed to practice law, and clients deserve some basic level of competence, even from new graduates.  The law-professor camp, on the other hand, elevates theory to heavenly heights, singing its praises along with the importance of teaching students “how to think like a lawyer”—whatever that phrase may mean.  Unfortunately, the two sides are only preaching to their respective choirs.  In fact, the debate never gets off the ground because the word theory means something different to each camp.

Law review publishing: In search of a useful ranking system

I’ve published ten articles in law reviews, with an eleventh on the way.  Basically, the system works like this: I write an article, submit it to 50–100 different law journals, and wait for offers of publication. Then, after a series of emails with the editors of some of the journals, I have to decide which offer I should accept.  (After that, the article goes through a lengthy, and sometimes painful, editing process before it’s eventually published.)  My initial decision on where to publish has typically been guided by the US News rankings of law schools, which, in legal publication circles, is used as a proxy for the quality of a law school’s journal.  For example, the UCLA Law Review is published by the UCLA School of Law, which US News says is the fifteenth best law school in the land.  This means that authors would love to publish in the UCLA Law Review and, as a result, that journal may receive 2,000 or more annual submissions for about 12-15 available publication slots.  As we slide down the US News rankings—say, to the bottom fifty-or-so of our nation’s 200-plus law schools—the journals may receive only a couple hundred submissions for their 12-15 publication slots.

Speaking Freely

I exercise my free speech rights nearly continually, and the government is my biggest target.  Fortunately for me, “criticism of the government and advocacy of unpopular ideas . . . are almost always permitted” under the First Amendment.  So whether it’s my books, articles, blogs, or podcasts, my keyboard is rarely at rest, and my big mouth is rarely shut.  (In fact, my contrarian jabbering as a child led my mother to accurately predict my careers as both lawyer and writer.)  But I sometimes forget how lucky I am – lucky not only compared to citizens of other countries who can be imprisoned or even killed for speaking out against their governments, but also compared to others here in the United States.

Sports and Courts: What Judges Can Learn from the NCAA

In the criminal justice system, our government agents—police, prosecutors, and judges—are supposed to follow certain rules when trying to convict us of crimes.  However, when they break those rules, there are usually no consequences for the rule-breakers.  The result, of course, is that there is little incentive for government agents to know and follow the rules that supposedly govern them.  And, as every five-year-old child in America knows, a rule without a consequence really isn’t a rule at all.  As some prosecutors mockingly say, “It’s more of a suggestion.”