I was happy to be asked by Michael O’Hear to be the Alum Blogger for March. I hope to avoid “Beware the Ides of March,” but will be happy with “March Madness,” especially if Marquette does well in the Big East tournament and beyond.
I graduated from the Law School in 1967, a tumultuous time for our society that did not exempt the Law School. I had a chance to look back at that period when Gordon Hylton asked me to participate in the Centennial Celebration at the Law School last semester. That caused me to reflect some more on the role of Robert Boden as Dean of the Law School. On one hand, Bob Boden has come to be a generally revered figure by members of the Law School community — students, alumni, faculty and staff. On the other, I, and I think many of my classmates, have viewed him differently, quite negatively. Can these two views be squared?
Why the negativity? Boden came in as Dean and was part of what appeared to be a campaign to sweep clean the ... Read more..
Archive for February, 2009
Credit card companies have no doubt spent billions of dollars on advertising in order to get their credit card in a consumer’s wallet or purse. As a result, they have collected billions of dollars in payments from consumers on credit card balances and debt.
Surprisingly, one credit card company decided to return some of that money to its cardholders this week. Only this time, rather than cash back rebates, frequent flier miles, or a no interest balance transfer to increase their use of plastic, they did so to get them to stop reaching for their credit card of choice.
Select American Express credit card holders will receive $300 to pay off the remaining balance on their American Express card by April 30th and close their account. The offer for high risk borrowers required them to enroll by February 28th to be eligible for the money.
It’s the latest program from a credit card company to encourage debtors they deem a credit risk to pay down their debt. Citigroup at one point matched payments from select debtors to ... Read more..
West Palm Beach criminal lawyer William Moore has learned over the years that many of his clients, prior to their arrests, believed that traffic offenses are always just tickets – never a criminal matter. While most traffic issues are civil offenses, punished by fines and points on your driver’s license, there are also criminal traffic offenses. Civil traffic offenses are violations like minor speeding tickets. If you are convicted of a criminal traffic offense, it will appear on your criminal record and you could even face jail time. Palm Beach criminal defense attorney Moore represents all kinds of criminal traffic violation and can advise you regarding the particulars of your situation.
One lesser known criminal offense that relates to traffic is the motor vehicle noise law. In Florida, it is illegal to alter the exhaust pipe on your car to make it very loud. In fact, you are not allowed to alter it so that it is louder than it was when the vehicle was originally manufactured. Doing so is a crime punishable by ... Read more..
On Tuesday, February 24, MLBPA Executive Director Donald Fehr was quoted in the New York Daily News and the Sports Business Daily as saying that “baseball’s steroid problem has been fixed.” I’m not sure how much credibility Mr. Fehr actually has on this issue, but we can at least hope that he is generally correct. The problem remains as to what to do about the corrupting effects of the use of performance enhancing drugs (”PEDs”) from the late 1980’s until the mid-2000’s.
I don’t believe that any serious observer is recommending that the presence of offending players be somehow expunged from the score sheets of games played in that era. This would be neither possible nor desirable. It is also completely without precedent. Although it has been frequently reported over the years that the midget Eddie Gaedel who played one game for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 was retroactively banned from baseball and his one at bat (a walk) stricken from the baseball records, apparently no such action was taken (although his contract was voided, and he was banned from playing ... Read more..
I’m just finishing two weeks of conferences with my students; we have been working through the drafts of their first trial briefs. One of the topics we have been talking about is how to effectively incorporate counter-analysis in a principal brief.
Before we broke for conferences, we talked about counter-analysis in class. I tried to impress upon students that they cannot be effective advocates simply by making their own affirmative arguments and ignoring their opponent’s likely arguments. Instead, they need to anticipate their opponent’s likely arguments and address those arguments as well. I get little to no push-back from the students on that point; they can see the benefit of trying to neutralize opposing arguments from the outset rather than allowing the opponent to control the arguments in the response brief.
Where students and I sometimes disagree, however, is about how best to approach counter-analysis.
We talk about assertive and defensive approaches, and we look at various examples of assertive and defensive analysis as a class. Defensive counter-analysis first sets out the opponent’s argument and then knocks it down. Playing defense might ... Read more..
