The "Fighting Fifth," as I call it (it helps to have a "team name", and a mascot would be nice too!), is the federal appeals court that covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. That court has become increasingly conservative in the past few years, and I know that the Dem's are not eager to let the pendulum keep swinging in that direction. But, Judge Owen is obviously smart and has a strong legal background, so, putting politics aside, I don't see why she shouldn't be confirmed.
11:36:03 PM
Volokh Does the Math on Free Speech Cases in the US Supreme Court
Eugene Volokh writes "HOW THE JUSTICES VOTED IN FREE SPEECH CASES, 1994-2002: Which Justice has the broadest view of free speech, and which has the narrowest? The answer, it turns out, is Reagan appointee Justice Kennedy (broadest) and Clinton appointee Justice Breyer (narrowest). Here are my results:
Toward a Theory of Justice (with apologies to John Rawls)
Dean Peters emailed me asking if there was a law that prohibited something that was clearly wrong (the subject matter that we were talking about isn't important). My general philosophy is that there are too many laws, and more laws aren't going to help us curtail wrongdoing. (wish I had a link to George Carlin's bit about reducing the Ten Commandments to two, which boil down to something like "respect people, and be honest"). Anyway, I responded to Dean with the following E-mail, which he thought was blogworthy:
" The hard part is not finding laws to use against bad guys, but trudging trough the totally non-streamlined litigation process to bring them to justice. Which reminds me of something: In law school they make you take courses to understand the underpinnings and wider ramifications of the law. At least at my school they did. One of the courses I took got into the social theory of law, which basically says "we need laws in society so that people have an outlet to give vent to their feelings of being wronged." In other words, the process of law (even though it is imperfect) makes people feel good. And this is good for society because it is more efficient and orderly for society to process wrongdoers in a legal system than it is to let lynch mobs ride around and hang people, or have people pacing off steps and engaging in pistol duels. Well, that was back in olden times. Now I often wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient to let the mobs ride and the duelers duel."
If you are interested in how too many laws are messing things up, I highly recommend you read the very short, insightful and down-to-earth account of our legal system by Philip Howard entitled The Death of Common Sense.
10:18:21 AM
Weblogs for lawyers?
Well, that's old news here in the blogosphere, but Rick just wrote about it in his regular column for the ABA Law Practice Management magazine. He has put it online, and of course that means that if you go read it you'll probably know what it says before 97% of the subscribers even receive their hard copy.
9:11:40 AM
Louisiana's Judicial Performance Report
The Supreme Court of Louisiana issued its 120 page report about the State of Judicial Performance for the year 2001. They mailed it to me, which was nice. I'm guessing they mailed it to all of the 20,000 lawyers in the state. They could have saved a few dollars and just told us it was available as a PDF online, but that's okay. Most lawyers would rather ignore the hard copy version, than the online version.
The format is that they list "obectives" and then the court reports on results. For example, they list objectives for the Supreme Court like 6.1, which is "to promote and maintain judicial independence." Let's skip over the response; it's not exciting. Okay, none of it is exciting, but some of it is interesting. Objective 3.2 for the courts of appeal seeks to have those courts "facilitate public access to their opinions." I would think the best way to do that would be to put them online, right? And a couple did, but here's what one court "reported" back:
"The Fourth Circuit reports that it employs a number of strategies to facilitate public access to its decisions." The Supreme Court Report then adds: "The Fourth Circuit did not provide any information as to how decisions are made available to the public."
