A judge in Washington state has refused to grant a divorce to a pregnant woman. What's even more absurd about the judge's ruling is that she left her husband two years ago after he went to jail for beating her. The father of the child is her current boyfriend, who she wants to marry.

Shawnna Hughes' husband was convicted of abuse in 2002. She separated from him after the attack and filed for divorce last April. She later became pregnant by another man and is due in March.

Her husband, Carlos, never contested the divorce, and the court commissioner approved it in October. But the divorce papers failed to note that Hughes was pregnant, and when the judge found out, he rescinded the divorce.

"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitimized," Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine told The Spokesman-Review newspaper on Thursday.

Women are allowed to divorce even under Sharia law, which is the strictest law we can think of. What's wrong with this Judge?

Here's a profile of James Rogers, president of the union representing Legal Aid Society staff. He did a yeoman's job this year.

In negotiations concluded this month, Legal Aid reached a deal to stave off bankruptcy after financial mismanagement had brought it to the brink of collapse. The agency settled with creditors, negotiated budget cuts with employees and received an unusual $9 million donation from dozens of private law firms. It means the country's oldest and largest defense group for the indigent will stay in business.

Three highly decorated U.S. Forest Service workers have been sued by a San Diego businessman under the civil RICO Act (known as the Racketeering Act) for trying to block a luxury condo development and the Justice Department has left them to fend for themselves.

Okovita sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a statute originally passed in 1970 to strengthen the government's arsenal against mobsters and drug lords. As time has passed, the law has been used against a variety of individuals and groups. Legal experts, however, said they believed this was the first time the law had been targeted at Forest Service employees.

The three Forest Service employees and Steers said the charges against them are patently false. The government workers maintain that they were acting in their official capacity as Forest Service employees and have done nothing wrong. Steers said Okovita's suit was brought partly "to intimidate other activists from speaking out. That won't work," she said.

Nashville criminal defense attorney E.E. "Bo Edwards" passed away yesterday at age 61. Bo was the immediate past President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)and a very kind man. He will be missed.

Bo worked tirelessly for reform of our civil asset forfeiture laws. I had the privilege of working with him when I served as Secretary and Treasurer of NACDL.

He spent the last few years on dialysis, hoping for a kidney transplant. Yet he traveled to every NACDL board meeting and gave the organization every bit of his attention.

R.I.P. Bo, and know that there are thousands of defense lawyers thinking of you tonight.

Making the rounds at Craig's List:

Very Easy Job: Watch Me to Make Sure That I Study For Law School

Reply to: ****@nyu.edu
Date: 2004-11-04, 5:48PM EST

I'm a first year law student but I've been having terrible concentration problems. I need someone to sit with me while I study and make sure that I'm studying. Otherwise I'll waste hours surfing the internet or just thinking about random things. You can be reading the newspaper or doing your own work while you do this, you just need to be sitting at a starbucks table or other location with me. You DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT LAW SCHOOL to do this job.

I'll pay more for people that can tutor me in Civil Procedure, Contracts, or Torts.

[Link via PG at De Novo]

by TChris

Complaining that law schools rely on “extreme rationalism,” the dean of Liberty School of Law (part of Liberty University, where televangelist Jerry Falwell is chancellor) takes a less rational view of legal studies. So does civil procedure professor Jeffrey Tuomala, who criticizes the Supreme Court’s well-settled and uncontroversial holding in Erie v. Tompkins that federal courts have no business telling states what their substantive rules of common law ought to be.

In ruling that federal courts may not apply general principles in some cases but must follow state laws, he said, the Supreme Court denied the possibility of "a law that's fixed, that's uniform, that applies to everybody, everyplace, for all time."

So much for states’ rights. And Roger Bern, who teaches contracts, urges students to counsel their clients “not to walk away from oral contracts even where the law allows it.” Counseling clients to act in a way that is contrary to their desires and their best interests seems a bit unethical, but there may be no need to worry. Liberty hasn’t been accredited, and with such a radical view of the law, it probably won’t be. Unfortunate for the students who shell out $18,000 per year to attend (and who won’t be able to sit for a bar exam), but fortunate for those who might otherwise engage the services of lawyer who hasn’t been trained in rational thought.

These are reportedly from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, taken down and published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were actually taking place. If at least one doesn't make you laugh out loud, you are taking life way too seriously.

Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.
_______________________________
Q: What is your date of birth
A: July 15
Q: What year?
A: Every year.
_____________________________________
Q: How old is your son, the one living with you?
A: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
Q: How long has he lived with you?
A: Forty-five years
_____________________________________
Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that
morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.
______________________________________
Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he
doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
___________________________________
Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?
______________________________________
Q: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
A: Yes.
Q: And what were you doing at that time?

A website created to out Harvard Professors whose writings include words taken from the works of others is making waves. Today, esteemed Law Professor Laurence Tribe apologizes for his mistakes. Also caught in the cross-hairs: Charles Ogletree. Instapundit weighs in.

...identifying plagiarism requires more than just pointing out some parallel passages (see this post quoting Alexander Lindey on why that is) -- it also requires knowledge of context, an analysis of the work as a whole...

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article today on the fading number of jury trials. So many trials are settled these days, trial lawyering is becoming a lost art.

Fewer than 2 percent of all cases in federal courts are heard by juries, and available statistics suggest that fewer than 1 percent of cases in state courts are resolved by jury trial....Federal court statistics show that only 1.7 percent of all civil and criminal cases in U.S. District courts were tried before juries in 2002, compared with 6.6 percent in 1962. The volume of cases increased four-fold, but the number of jury trials was nearly the same in 2002 as 40 years earlier.

The reasons differ for civil and criminal trials. As to criminal trials:

On the criminal side, lawyers say jury trials are diminishing largely because sentencing guidelines in federal and state courts tacitly discourage trials. The guidelines can penalize a defendant who invokes his right to trial and is found guilty. Prosecutors can seek a tougher sentence arguing that the defendant - by denying guilt and asking for a trial in the first place - failed to take responsibility for his misdeeds. Most defendants don't take that chance. They cut a deal and plead guilty.

Money is also a factor, particularly for the middle-class defendant. The poor get appointed counsel, which (theoretically) includes costs of things such as scientific testing and expert witness fees. The defendant who makes too money to qualify for appointed counsel, usually has to foot the bill alone....without adequate funds, or not wanting to expend funds needed elsewhere in their lives, particularly in providing for their families, they feel pressured to take a deal.

For the rich, like Kobe and the Enron defendants, it's no sweat. Look at OJ though, while he won the criminal case,it wiped him out financially--before the civil judgment even hit the deck.

If you are a criminal defense lawyer or defense investigator don't miss this seminar in Atlanta, October 14 - 17 on eyewitness evidence and police and prosecutorial misconduct offered by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL.)

This innovative CLE seminar is a double-barreled attack on police and prosecutorial misconduct — from suggestive eyewitness procedures to racial profiling — featuring an all-star lineup of litigators and experts. This historic conference will dramatically change the way you litigate eyewitness cases — from strategies designed to overrule Manson v. Braithwaite regarding the admissibility of eyewitness evidence, to creative new state-of-the-art methods to litigate eyewitness identification cases before juries. Join NACDL in the forefront of transforming and developing successful winning criminal litigation strategies for the 21st Century. This is a critical seminar for every criminal litigator.

Something's rotten in the State of Massachussetts. Accused felons are getting out of jail because the state won't pay lawyers to represent them.

With hourly pay rates for representing indigent alleged criminals the lowest in the country, Massachusetts has been flirting with an indigent-defense disaster for some time. But with lawyers in several counties refusing to take on additional criminal cases, the state's assigned-counsel system is officially in crisis. And although underfunding is always an issue in indigent-defense systems, it is rarely the only problem. The real issue is the kind of indigent-defense system Massachusetts is buying—not how much they pay for it. The focus on pay rates is an unfortunate side effect of leaving the defense of the poor to languish as a low priority. The way the Massachusetts crisis came about, and the narrow terms of the current debate, should be a cautionary tale for policy-makers across the country—many of whom will soon be confronting similar questions.

For indigent criminal defendants, low-paying assigned-counsel systems like that in Massachusetts offer the worst of all possible worlds. They virtually guarantee sub-par representation, since low assigned-counsel rates almost always imply huge caseloads—a nightmare for poor defendants desperately in need of legal attention.

Read more about the crisis here and here. The court-appointed attorneys latest press release is here. The Bristol, Mass. Bar Advocates website is here.

by TChris

In 1965, unable to handle military service any longer, Charles Jenkins crossed the border into North Korea, leaving his life behind. He eventually married Hitomi Soga, one of a dozen Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped and used to train North Korean spies in the Japanese language and culture. Only five of the kidnapped Japanese are still alive. North Korea admitted their existence in 2002 and agreed to let them return to Japan.

But Jenkins, now 64, stayed behind, fearing that Japan would be forced to turn him over to the United States to face charges of desertion. His daughters (ages 18 and 20) stayed with him. The family would like to be reunited in Japan, and Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, wants to make that happen. When he raised the issue with President Bush, however, he got a predictable response: the former Sergeant must be dealt with according to military rules. If he goes to Japan to be with his wife, the U.S. wants him back.

Bush has contended with his own "deserter" label because of his ambiguous National Guard service, and he isn't likely to give Jenkins a break during an election year, particularly when his opponent is a war hero. As long as the President is unwilling to forgive and forget an event that occurred four decades ago, Jenkins' only hope of sharing the rest of his life with his wife and daughters may depend upon finding a country that doesn't have a treaty requiring extradition of miltary offenders and that will agree to host his family.