The Big Picture and the Closeup

From 2004 to 2019, my column ran almost monthly in the Maryland Daily Record.  The above phrase, from my very first column, can be taken as my motto.  I aimed to speak some unexpected and perhaps unconventional truths. With the exception of my War Powers, War Lies, Broken Laws, and Bad Judg(e)ment columns, which have their own pages, and a couple of others that have been moved to my Closeup page, you can find all my columns here.  The pieces have been arranged with the most recent first.  Note that the columns as they appear here may differ slightly from the way they were published.  But I have changed nothing essential.  Enjoy!

• When you stop thinking like a lawyer, as retirement has caused me to start doing, it’s time to move on from writing about law and policy. The Moving Finger Writes — And Moves On (September 20, 2019).
• When President Trump said the country where the Congresswomen came from was corrupt and dysfunctional, he wasn’t wrong. He was talking about the USA. Mogadishu Is Here (week of July 21, 2019).
• The way a road follows a railroad track, you’d think it couldn’t be coincidence. It isn’t. Steel Wheels and Tires in the North Country (July 11, 2019).
• Visiting Mt. Rushmore prompts thoughts of the flaws all heroes have, and how that diminishes neither the heroism nor the flaws. Rushmore and the Imperfections of Heroism (May 30, 2019).
• Wikileaks has slid a lot in my estimation, but we still need leakers, and the effort to extradite founder Julian Assange is as malodorous as many of the things Assange is accused of. No Heroes, Just Circumstances in Wikileaks Struggles (April 19, 2019).
• Republicans tried to discredit Michael Cohen’s House Oversight Committee testimony by pointing out various ethical lapses by Cohen; the only problem: they may not have been lapses. “I Think Every Other Lawyer In Here Knows,” (March 27, 2019).
• Virginia’s Governor Northam’s yearbook page suggests he was both Running with the Hare and Hunting with the Hounds on racial matters, but most of us have been guilty of taking both sides of an issue from time to time. The question is how hurtful his actions were. (February 22, 2019).
• It’s well worthwhile to contribute to curbside sign-holders and squeegee men, and poses no great safety hazards. Shedding the Bubble (December 18, 2018).
• Bessie Margolin’s story as retold by Marlene Trestman is a tale of a lawyer’s life well-lived in support of governmental initiatives (TVA, Fair Labor Standards Act, Nuremberg Trials, Equal Pay Act) that helped people. The Exemplary Ms. Margolin (November 13, 2018).
• Sometimes what’s missing is telling: Here it is nonwhite faces in a nostalgia-infused holiday village. Our fantasies of an all-white world are pervasive and dangerous. Every One of Them White (week of October 28, 2018).
• The Education Department is about to propose new regulations governing how colleges and universities handle sexual harassment and assault claims. It looks as if this will be an improvement. The New Campus Sexual Harassment Regulations: A First Look (September 21, 2018).
• What would it look like for sexual harassers and/or their enablers to receive second chances in their careers after they have fallen from grace? Sharing some thoughts… Harassers as Comeback Kids? (August 27, 2018).
• The assurance we should each have by now that we are not going to convert each other over Trump’s movement should also be key to our coexistence. If only because of our shared past, I do not want to lose our connection to each other, and I sense that you do not want to lose it either, no matter how angry we make each other. Living With What Lies Between Us (August 2, 2018).
• For his seriously inadequate sentence of the Stanford rapist, Judge Aaron Persky was Recalled for the Right Reasons (July 5, 2018).
• A prosecutor’s attack on the character of the men and women of the Catonsville Nine is wrong and still dangerous. The Catonsville Nine: Deserved Honor (May 11, 2018).
• The exemplary life of Gilbert Roe, Progressive Republican Manhattan lawyer who defended some of the biggest radicals of the early 20th Century because he understood the First Amendment in a way the courts did not yet do. A Different Sort of Heroics (April 12, 2018).
• How white privilege in one family (mine) depended on timing. There Are Tides (March 12, 2018).
• How white privilege affected one family: mine. When The Other Folk Give Up Theirs (January 19, 2018).
• It may seem hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year, with such an onslaught of bad news. But an old Christmas song with an interesting history may buck us up. Not Joyful, Not Triumphant, But Determined (December 14, 2017).
• Reviving the Draft, as New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman suggests, would be unnecessary, violate our deepest national values, not achieve the ends it was designed to, and would not honor those who served, including those who served under compulsion. Revive the Draft? Bite Your Tongue! (November 10, 2017).
• Climate change is to our world as the White Walkers are to Westeros. Summer Is Coming (September 14/15, 2017).
• As an Ann Arbor boy who graduated from high school the summer of the Detroit uprising, I finally come to terms with it. Relearning Detroit (August 8, 2017).
• Even his biggest fans would probably agree that Donald Trump is the most incivil president in our history. We may find in future that trash talking at the White House is like negative campaigning, impossible to abstain from once the other guy has made it possible. The Offensive Offensive (July 13, 2017).
• The Trump administration has given rise to so many issues at one time that a columnist can be overwhelmed. Just look at Russia-gate as an example! Interesting Times (June 16 2017).
• Surely United Airlines is run by Benthamite philosophers who only seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and shame on anyone who speaks slightingly of them dragging that doctor off their plane! Utilitarianism Invades the Window Seat (April 14, 2017).
• Trump’s war on “the administrative state” will prove tough to wage; the complex of programs defended by laws, regulations, and prosecutorial discretion isn’t set up to lose. “The Administrative State”: Nothing Less Than Our Civilization (week of March 19, 2017).
• At this writing, we don’t know whether the proposed consent decree between the City of Baltimore and the U.S. Department of Justice will ever be approved and go into force. But its 215 pages are worth a read. Sometimes it’s not so much what a document says as what it presupposes that is most telling. A Most Telling Decree (January 26, 2017).
• A visit to a former steel town yields observations and thoughts about the enduring value of towns abandoned in America’s deindustrialization, of their families and their main streets and churches, and their proud heritages, often marked forever by the departed factories — and about the political and policy implications of those towns. Beyond Big Steel: A Search for Purpose (January 5, 2017).  
• The tales Hillary Clinton could never tell straight reminded me of the ones certain clients could never get right on the witness stand. A Litigator Ponders the Election (week of November 20, 2016).
• Travels down the Mississippi drive home the way that levees, ordained by Congress to keep us from drowning, sometimes do the opposite. Lessons of the Levees (week of October 23, 2016).
• Do white actors have a right to be considered equally with performers of color in casting roles of color? Is Unconventional Obligatory? Freedom of Expression vs. Equal Protection Before the Footlights (week of September 11, 2016).
• When you hear claims the presidential primary process has been “rigged,” the influence of party insiders that the complainers bemoan may be a feature rather than a bug. Here’s to Party Elites (August 17, 2016).
• When Sleepy John Estes sang a testimonial to the attorney who’d gotten him out of trouble, he sketched for us the story of a live well lived. Lawyer Clark Blues (July 15, 2016).
• “Non-equity partner” and “underperformance” and “counseling”: the kinds of euphemisms by which Big Law tries to soften its Hobbesian realities. “Partner” and Other Big Firm Euphemisms (June 23, 2016).
• When we help out “Special Immigrant Juvenile” kids, we are merely doing a pitiful little bit to help them reassemble lives our own proxies disrupted. We are helping to re-situate our victims far away from the societies they should be growing up in, but they can’t because our activities wrecked those societies. SIJ Mentality: We Broke It, We Bought It (Week of May 22, 2016).
• The Justice Department’s effort to force Apple to break its own encryption of iPhones runs afoul of what the right against self-incrimination is coming to mean, and of the constitutional ban on involuntary servitude. Constitutional Rights Under Assault in Apple Encryption Case (March 29, 2016).
• Personal drone aircraft are going to change our privacy expectations. Take cover! Deluded If You Think You’re Secluded: Welcome to the Drone Age (Week of February 14, 2016).
• It hard to see how Donald Trump’s plan to close our borders to all Muslims would be unconstitutional or illegal. Abhorrent, Not Unconstitutional: Trump’s Would-Be Muslim Ban (Week of January 8, 2016).
• When we heard about the secret memos justifying the Osama bin Laden assassination raid, it produced a familiar, wearying, sense of deja va. We lawyers have to stop drafting these attacks on the rule of law. Losing the Rule of Law, Memorandum by Memorandum (December 3, 2015).
• When it comes to the Volkwagen emissions mess, don’t blame one form of externality (air pollution) on efforts to avoid another (unemployment). Diesels, Directors and Dogma (week of October 18, 2015).
• The House Always Wins – And Often Excludes explores the power of casinos to exclude potential customers for any reason or no reason, without accountability. The history of that power is unsavory, and we can’t know the strength of the reasons asserted for it. (Week of September 14, 2014.)
• Texas Senator Ted Cruz is a man of strong views about the Supreme Court. Ted Cruz’s strong views are truly wacky balderdash.  The Weird Jurisprudence and Constitutionalism of Senator Cruz (August 18, 2015).
• If same-sex marriage is so new, and the Constitution is so old, how does the former derive from the latter? The dissenters in the Obergefell case don’t think it does. I disagree with their conclusions, but agree with much of their thinking. The Obergefell Dissents: All Due Respect (July 10, 2015).
• So much about Magna Carta was an accident, from the name to its survival (after it was invalidated by papal bull). Its framers could not have anticipated either the contours or the importance of what survived eight centuries of erosion of the document and change in the world. In what was transitory and in what was unexpectedly long-term (rule of law, due process, separation of powers), Magna Carta cautions us lawyers against assuming either the permanency or the meaning of what we do. Magna Carta: Accidental and Cautionary (June 22, 2015).
• What to Say After Freddie Gray (June 1, 2015), explores the confusing welter of issues raised by Baltimore’s own eruption of that chronic problem of our society, the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of the police — and resulting riots.
• In Admirable Disloyalty (April 14, 2015), I ask when loyalties to paramount causes, such as American Communists held in the 1940s and 1950s, may legitimately trump loyalties to country.
• Even With Campus Rape Charges, We Still Need A Due Process Culture (April 1, 2015): apologists for campus disciplinary procedures that tilt in favor of rape accusers and against respondents claim that anyone opposed must be in favor of a “rape culture.” Not so; in campus disciplinary procedures we already have a due process nightmare that the Department of Education’s aggressive stance against rape respondents is only going to make worse.
• This Is (Not) Going to Go on Your Permanent Record (February 23, 2015) ruminates on the new European Union privacy law that allows EU citizens to demand that U.S. search engine providers take down links to them. Is this a frontal assault on the First Amendment, or just a deeply misguided attempt to do something useful?
• Disrespect: Real and Unreal (January 29, 2015) explores the law enforcement realities and the real motives of the police upset at New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio for his “disrespect” for them.
• Secession’s Dueling Rules: Self-Determination vs. Uti Possidetis (December 10, 2014), looks at the legal quandaries that come from recognizing the right of peoples to self-determination but giving a largely contradictory set of rules for when territories may sunder.
• Lots of countries are threatened with secession, national divorce. I reflect on the U.S.’s two experiences with secession, and what it may teach about the legitimacy of secessions elsewhere. Secession: The Right That Can Be Wrong (October 23, 2014).
• As the parties concerned with preserving or overturning state laws denying recognition to same-sex marriages prepare the stage for the inevitable Supreme Court case, there are numerous opportunities for good and bad jurisdiction. I consider an example of each in Same-Sex Marriage: The Fight to Shape “the Next Shoe” (September 15, 2014).
• Why are we accrediting colleges and universities that require their scientists to swear to the inerrancy of Scripture? Peter Conn says we shouldn’t. But maybe the Free Exercise Clause says we must. Full Faith and Accreditation (August 18, 2014).
• U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone strike, did not receive his due process rights — or at least, if he did, it wasn’t explained in the released portions of the Office of Legal Counsel memo that greenlighted the drone. Missing from the Awlaki memo: Almost everything that really matters (July 17, 2014).
• We lawyers pledge to keep our clients’ confidences forever: a promise we shouldn’t and, as it happens, can’t always keep. History has its demands too. Vital and Inevitable: The Decay of Client Confidentiality (June 30, 2014).
• The “good character” requirement you must meet to be licensed for all professions and many occupations is vague, unworkable, and heartless. The Bad Character of “Good Character” (June 9, 2014).
• What with the CIA trying to bully Congress and keep the public from being told the truth about the CIA’s conduct of the torture-and-rendition campaign, it is important for the Senate to be mindful of its constitutional oversight role. We Need Congress To Be The Boss (May 6, 2014).
• Same-sex marriage and public acceptance of legal equality for LGBT folk has broken out of the beachhead phase; defenders of inequality have turned to erecting enclaves for discrimination like the failed “religious freedom” law in Arizona. Marijuana legalization is still in the beachhead phase. Beachheads and Enclaves (March 18, 2014).
• Jersey City has a killer view of the Freedom Tower, and an even sharper view of the multiethnic America immigration foes fear. Once you take in the view from Jersey City, you won’t worry about those newcomers. Two Things About Jersey City (February 20, 2014).
• Whatever crimes Edward Snowden may have committed, none of them is treason, and it would be both unconstitutional and dangerous to convict him for that. Not Treason (January 2014).
• An article in the Wall Street Journal opined that we are an exceptional country because of our adherence to law. I explain my disagreement with this point of view in Not So Law-Abiding, Not So Exceptional (December 15, 2013).
• The Doug Gansler Photo and Teen Drinking: Unresolvable Questions (November 13, 2013) points out that while minimum driving age laws do save lives on the highway, their legitimacy is questionable, their route to bringing about that effect is necessarily indirect and attenuated, and the policy questions they raise cannot be fully answered.
• The wisdom of decriminalizing drugs is really beyond rational debate at this point. Prohibiting Prohibition: It’s High Time (October 23, 2013).
• Maybe Edward Snowden really is a hero; in any case the aggressive searches of our metadata that he exposed threaten to make the Fourth Amendment a dead letter. Our Metadata, Ourselves (September 15, 2013).
• The GIs who invaded Normandy and later in the campaign were charged with and often hanged for raping Frenchwomen turned out to be overwhelmingly black, though the invasion force was 90% white. Professor Mary Louise Roberts’ investigation of the reasons suggests rape may sometimes be too opportune, and at other times too inconvenient to the mission to leave the making of decisions about military rape charges to the commanders. Command Influence at the End of a Rope (August 21, 2013).
• In the 1930s, without Brown v. Board of Education or a public understanding of legal ethics, real-life lawyer Thurgood Marshall and fictional lawyer Perry Mason came from a very different world. Thurgood, Perry, and the Long-Ago Thirties (July 22, 2013).
•  In a barbaric legal culture, even conscientious lawyers are likely to find themselves acting a lot like barbarians, as the histories of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More show. Two Lawyers Named Thomas (June 14, 2013).
• The Torture Report: We Need Names and Consequences (May 8, 2013). The title says it all.
• The debate about same-sex marriage is really over, revealing only one side as reasonable. The Court could do some necessary fence-mending by recognizing a fundamental right. On Same-Sex Marriage, Reasonable Minds May No Longer Differ (April 8, 2013).
• Now that we know a little about the justification for the drone killings, it’s hard to agree, but at least we can start talking meaningfully about improving the situation. Drones: An Informed Debate Begins (March 11, 2013).
• The Freedom of Information Act does not overcome Administration secrecy, but the leakocracy begins to tell us exactly why the drone killings. The Secret Warriors’ Secret Law Unveiled (Kind Of) (February 11, 2013).
• When there’s a presidential inauguration and a new Congress, it’s time for Spring Cleaning in our codebooks! Time to drag the following out to the curb to be hauled off: the Second Amendment, the filibuster, and marijuana prohibition. (January 14, 2013).
• A genealogical reality test for the proposition that amnesty for illegal immigrants would be offensive to those who entered the county legally. A Slap in the Face? Really?  (December 3, 2012).
• As you drive old Route 66, you’ll see, often in the same glance three layers of government programs: the Santa Fe tracks, Route 66 and its replacement, I-40. They tell a tale of how government programs can give, and they can take away. Lessons from the Mother Road About Government (November 5, 2012).
• There is a degree of incomprehension on both sides when it comes to the struggle over The Innocence of Muslims video, but basically everyone understands that freedom of Internet speech is all or nothing. We must stand up for all. In the Free Speech Tug of War, the Internet Is the Rope (October 1, 2012).
• Employment at will has become such an ingrained norm we don’t remember what came before, which unions partly exist to restore. Arguably, in light of the history, we need a more pro-union norm again. Working Up Some Indignation on Labor Day (September 4, 2012).
• When the New York Times publishes leaked stories about our drone killings and the Stuxnet virus, we shouldn’t be carrying on witch hunts to locate the leakers (who are no great secret anyway). The Drones and the Virus: Time to Talk, Not Prosecute  (July 1, 2012).
• For the unlucky law school graduate facing debt and severely limited job prospects, this from the Voice of Experience: when you finally do get to practice, you’ll still have to live up to The Spiritual Standard: My Law School Commencement Address (If Only I’d Been Asked to Give One) (June 4, 2012).
• For the Supreme Court to overturn ObamaCare might be a catastrophe, but it wouldn’t violate any norms, judicial or political — because there are none.  POTUS v. SCOTUS: There Are No Rules (May 7, 2012).
• The Hunger Games is not merely a cultural phenomenon; it also embodies political narratives of both the left and the right. Hunger Games: The Politics Is Ever Balanced (April 2, 2012).
• In the fight over contraception, the bishops are acting as if they owned the hospitals and universities, not like the trustees they should be, responsible to the entire body of the faithful.  But the courts won’t stop the usurpation.  And so the American Catholic Church may die.  Contraception, an Unrepresentative Church, and Unresponsive Courts (March 5, 2012).
• Our unwillingness to intervene in near-slavery conditions in Chinese factories that make our electronics or to pass laws restricting foreign websites pirating U.S. movies and music explains why extraterritoriality of our laws stops where it does.  Where and Why Extraterritoriality Stops (February 5, 2012).
• When a judge won’t let an agency take yes for an answer because there aren’t any mea culpas attached, he only thinks he’s serving the public interest.  Unnecessary Roughness (December 5, 2011).
• Tired of seeing all the local banks bought up and the local bankers fired or demoted so that the faraway CEO can enjoy stupendous riches — all in the name of “rationalization”?  Time to Rationalize Back? (November 7, 2011).
• We never talk to each other anymore … even while we’re posturing at each other on Facebook.  Nonversations (October 3, 2011)
• .…Or The Kid Dies: The NCAA’s Little First Amendment Problem (August 1, 2011): Can the NCAA occasion threats by state schools that if their fans talk to high school prospects, the prospects may be barred from attending? Can state schools issue such threats? Don’t fans have constitutional rights of free speech and association?
• “Hostilities” (July 5, 2011): Obama is evading the War Powers Resolution through a phony statutory interpretation; so much for taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.
• Candidate Jack versus the Doubting Thomases (June 6, 2011): To  the alert conspiracy theorist, public records are all frauds, and the one thing we can be sure of is that everything we know is wrong. This is willed lack of judgment, and an insult to archivists, whose work is a patrimony we should cherish.
• Comparisons are odious: especially when they equate Obama’s few measured and appropriate bill signing statements to the confusing, vague and far-too-numerous signing statements issued by George W. Bush.  Signing Statements Done Wrong, and Done Right (May 2, 2011).
• The Obama Administration has failed to articulate any explanation for why it thinks its commitment of U.S. forces to the Libyan conflict complies with either the Constitution or the War Powers Resolution.  Could it be that Obama really thinks a Security Council Resolution is an adequate substitute?  Speak Inaudibly, and Carry a Stick of Indeterminate Size: Finessing Legality in Libya (April 4, 2011).
• The Wisconsin demonstrators are quoting and adapting the Middle East demonstrators’ tactics to make a related point: the government has rendered itself illegitimate — in this instance  with the attempted obliteration of public employee unions.  Tiananmen to Tahrir to … Capitol Square? (March 14, 2011).
• What the Tea Party really wants is a more perfect disunion, so its members can be free not to look out for the poor, the infrastructure, the environment, the elites — and are free to make up their own weather reports.  (Saving) Money Is No Object: Tea Party Budget Thinking (February 7, 2011).
• The separation of the races: not voluntary even when it’s chosen.  But we may not always be condemned to it.  Because They Had No Choice (January 3, 2011).
• Advanced Imaging scans and touching our junk: There should have been regs, and the public consultation that goes with them.  Time to Talk, Mr. Pistole (December 6, 2010).
• There is a clash between the empathic world view, the conscience, that informs our laws, grounded in a respect for others, and the psychopath’s.  So who is right?  The Psychopath’s Challenge (November 1, 2010).
• Political Correctness is an antibody that attaches itself to your diseased discourse and protects the American immune system.  Wash Your Mouth Out!  Bite Your Tongue! (October 4, 2010).
• The role of the leakers and the press and bloggers who disseminate what the leakers share is not institutionalized, and there is little or no quality control.  But as a result of their actions, things that need to be made public, like torture and illegal wiretaps, often are publicized.  The Messy But Necessary Leakocracy (September 7, 2010)  serves as a valuable if not vital safety valve in our society.
• We should attend to what other countries do and think – just as they should be looking at us.  Nobody’s too dumb to teach or too smart to learn, whatever Justices Thomas and Scalia may say.  As antidotes to “exceptionalism,” consider the burqa — and consider Roman Polanski.  In Praise of Foreign Moods (August 2, 2010).
• Cruising US-1 through the South (aka the Jefferson Davis Highway in places), way too much Confederate commemoration, way too fuzzy on actual history, and virtually no offsetting commemoration of slavery and its aftermath.  The Case of the Missing Monuments, Or None Dare Call It Treason (July 6, 2010).
• The State Department gives the Pope immunity from a civil suit in U.S. courts, relying partly on a case about a steamship in World War II.  The Good Ship Jurisdiction: Sunk to a Foggy Bottom (May 3, 2010).
• Government employees who make policy are expected to know this going in, whether it’s written down or not.  They are accountable for their views, and the currency in which they render account may well be their careers.  Nothing Personal: The Parable of the Advocate and the Advisor (April 5, 2010).
• It looks as if “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may finally be on its way out.  If it seems hard to understand now, it is worth contemplating the Congressional testimony and debate that preceded it.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: What They Were Thinking (February 22, 2010).
• The Obama administration is very close to admitting it is imprisoning people for their beliefs and allegiances.  They call them “Combatants”: Detained But Not Tried (February 1, 2010).
• It is far from clear that, even if the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by uniformed military, these would have been war crimes.  It is, however, beyond doubt a violation of U.S. and New York State criminal law for civilians to attack skyscrapers with airplanes.  Those New York Trials: Par for the Terrorist Course (November 30, 2009).
• As the shrinking newspapers and wire services try to cover the big stories – and the small ones – they look increasingly like hockey players covering a net a mile wide.  Meanwhile, the new journalists are kept on retainer (and a short leash) by publications you can’t afford to read.  Slipping Through the Cracks (October 26, 2009).
• Maybe the mainstream media would not be failing from a business perspective were they not failing from a news-reporting perspective as well.  Maybe the blogs would not be succeeding, were they not beginning to seize the standard of bona fide reporting falling from the grasp of the mainstream media as they tumble lifeless upon the field of economic battle.  Picking Up the Flag (September 28, 2009).
• Not only should we be prosecuting the lawyers who wrote the torture memos, but we have a viable legal theory on which to proceed.  What the Client Wanted to Hear (August 31, 2009).
• Thanks to John McCain’s amendment, we don’t know whether acting On Advice of Counsel will protect the people who ordered or perpetrated the torture.  (July 25, 2009).
• Since the Nuremberg Trials, we haven’t accepted that Just Following Orders would be a good enough defense to excuse war crimes.  We shouldn’t start now.  (June 28, 2009).
• The Pentagon used “cutouts,” winks, and nods to cover up the trail, but the Pentagon itself directed the MPs at Abu Ghraib.  When we punished them and called them “A Few Bad Apples,” (May 23, 2009), didn’t that suggest how we should deal with contaminated barrels with names like Donald Rumsfeld? Just asking…
• It was a good thing to publish the CIA “Torture Memos.”  Various Circles of Hell (April 27, 2009).
• Each contradictory policy approach is absolutely correct, as is each other approach.  Courting a headache while experiencing AIG Bonus Baby Befuddlement (March 30, 2009).
• Something’s gained, maybe, but something’s surely lost, as we prepare to exit the newspaper era.  Laudator Temporis Acti (February 23, 2009).
• Decommissioning Guantanamo, releasing or trying its inmates: Not so complicated as it may appear. Guantanamo Made Simple (January 26, 2009).
• Detroit had a lifetime to get this right: Snapshots of the rise and fall of the automobile industry and its home turf. Rusted Out: Some Personal Glimpses of the Tragedy of Detroit (December 22, 2008).
• We really do need two parties. So how do the Republicans provide a choice, not an echo, while returning to the mainstream of our politics? It’s a No-Brainer (November 24, 2008).
• Will our next President reverse the dangerous overextension of executive power? Michael Traynor’s talk at the American Law Institute conjures up memories of ancient Rome. Caesar in the Wings? (October 27, 2008).
• If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Kissinger said, and in a National Enquirer world we always learn about the sex lives of the powerful, we have to get smarter about how we react to what we always find out. Too Much Information (September 29, 2008).
• All over the political spectrum, people are slow to comprehend, quick to take offense at the Barry Blitt New Yorker cover of the fist-bumping Obamas. Can’t Take A Joke? Apparently not. (July 28, 2008).
• The Boumediene case was another “win” for the Guantanamo detainees. But with nobody leaving Guantanamo without permission on Bush and Cheney’s watch, the Administration is the real winner. Running Out the Clock (June 30, 2008).
• Few of us lawyers will get to pursue a career as rewarding as Charles Halpern’s, but there’s something to be said for muddling along in an imperfect world. Speaking for the Muddlers (May 27, 2008).
• A lawyer so brilliant but so feckless he could not recognize when his own advice was bad: for his client, the President — and for the country. John Yoo’s Disbarable Incompetence (April 26, 2008).
• The tale of Client 9 and “Kristen” raises yet again the question whether or not to legalize prostitution, and no one, neither the legalizers nor the prohibitionists, is reliable on the subject (March 31, 2008).
• Campaign talk attacking taxes is irresponsible. Anti-Tax Rhetoric: Another greenhouse gas (February 25, 2008).
• On the fourth anniversary of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” the rotten social and political dynamics behind the FCC’s attempt to punish CBS. T&A TV and its Figleaves (January 28, 2008).
• Those “illegals” are our brothers and sisters, and we’re in no moral position to try to exclude them. First Principles on Immigration (December 31, 2007).
• Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and the Bush Administration’s new Attorney General Michael Mukasey are alike in their threat to checks and balances.  Musharraf, Mukasey and Checks and Balances (November 26, 2007).
• On reconsideration in the light of the Kitzmiller case, Intelligent Design stands revealed as Bad Science.  But Bad Science is still not the same thing as no Science at all.  Intelligent Design Reconsidered (October 29, 2007).
• The fact that so few people laughed at Imus shows that we have moved on in the long march away from slavery.  Unfunny Imus (April 27, 2007).
• Information is not forever unless we’re careful and lucky in how we handle it.  Some thoughts about this illustrated by the duopoly of Westlaw and LEXIS, which guards the texts of my profession.  Foreboding in the Law Library of Achilles (December 29, 2005).
• Screwups every way you look: Some Lessons of Katrina So Far (September 30, 2005).
• Persistent vegetative states compel us to recognize not only each individual’s worth but also the importance of society’s countervailing needs.  Trying to Think Humanely About Terri Schiavo — And the Rest of Us (April 1, 2005).
• A visit to the 60th anniversary of D-Day celebrations leads to this conclusion: If we have good and honest leaders, we won’t need a Draft.  Normandy, Four Kinds of Soldiers, and the Draft: Some Thoughts (June 28, 2004).
• My first crack at talking about the Intelligent Design debate.  The Intelligent Design Debate: Dogmatists Keep Out (May 28, 2004).
• Telling the Truth About Telling the Truth (January 30, 2004) explores the constraints on truthtelling by lawyers.