For the past 40 years, David Friedman has been thinking about what it might look like to have a society with private property but no legal system as we think of it today. We would, of course, need some way of protecting that private property, of settling disputes in the event of a robbery or a hit-and-run. But could we have the end product of a legal system — the enforcement of rights — without the law itself? (If you were unsettled by the prospect of law with fewer lawyers, this idea really pushes the envelope.) Friedman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, first broached this ... Read More
Law Without (As Many) Lawyers
August 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Why can’t lawyers be more like doctors? A form of that question — actually more like, ‘Why can’t the legal profession operate more like the medical profession?’ — is asked by law and economics professor Gillian K. Hadfield in this podcast. (Click below to listen or download.) [audio:http://www.psmag.com/wp-content/uploads/podcast/hadfield.mp3] The University of Southern California professor, whose Research Essay “Legal Services Wanted; Lawyers Need Not Apply” in the July-August edition of Miller-McCune magazine covered that question and others, argues that there’s a ... Read More
Eyewitness IDs Can Be Made Better
July 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A year ago April, Alan Northrop and Larry Davis walked out of a Clark County, Wash., courthouse on the north banks of the Columbia River, across from Portland, Ore. The two had just been cleared by DNA evidence after serving 17 years in prison for rape and burglary. The real perpetrators have not been found. In the year since their exonerations, Davis and Northrop have been virtually forgotten. They were convicted in 1993 based entirely on the eyewitness identification of the victim, who said she was blindfolded and never got a clear view of her attackers. Detectives eventually got ... Read More
Legal Services Wanted; Lawyers Need Not Apply
June 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
"Law is too important to be left to lawyers." Paraphrasing the famous adage about war and generals, Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems Inc., shared this observation with me in the spring of 2007. We were speaking over Cisco's stunning TelePresence video-conferencing system — he traveling on the East Coast, me on the West — while he grabbed a quick sandwich between meetings. Others had referred to Chandler as one of the most innovative senior lawyers in Silicon Valley, and I was picking his brain about the impact of law on innovation as part of the early phases of a research ... Read More
New Conditions of Probation
April 13, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
When she applied for the job of probation director in Travis County, Texas, Geraldine Nagy was ushered into a seat in the county courthouse law library with its expansive view of downtown Austin. She was surrounded at the table by six judges who would eventually become her superiors, and who began peppering her with questions. With each answer, Nagy proselytized about her ideas for a department that would rely extensively on research-based procedures that worked to reduce recidivism. "I specifically said my goal would be to implement evidence-based practices, and that I'd really look at ... Read More
Court Decision Could Lead FCC to Redefine Internet
April 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A federal appeals court in D.C. earlier this week threw up a roadblock to the Federal Communications Commission's plans for the future of the Internet in America. The details of the case were relatively straight-forward: Comcast was caught interfering with traffic by customers using the cumbersome file-sharing application BitTorrent, flouting a 2005 FCC Internet policy stating that Web users are entitled to access the content and applications of their choice. The FCC tried to sanction Comcast. Comcast sued. And on Tuesday — to the surprise of no one who has been following the case — the ... Read More
A Mind of Crime
February 23, 2010 • By • 8 Comments
Kent Kiehl, a prominent neuroscientist hired to study an admitted murderer named Brian Dugan, had already been under cross-examination in the hushed, wood-paneled suburban Chicago courtroom for more than an hour when a brain diagram, hatched with X's, was projected on a screen. The X's marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan's brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X's would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan's brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? ... Read More
The Exonerator
January 5, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
The photographic pose seems a cliché now, given the frequency with which it's been struck during the past 25 years: Jim McCloskey, a self-taught private investigator, stands next to a man or a woman just released from prison after serving time for a murder or a rape committed by somebody else. Sometimes a third person shows up in the photograph, quite likely a lawyer who helped McCloskey expose the incompetence or misconduct of police detectives, prosecutors, crime laboratory analysts, psychiatrists, defense attorneys, judges, jailhouse informants, well-intended witnesses and jurors. There ... Read More
Problem-Solving (and Award-Winning) Courts
October 30, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
"Problem-solving" courts — only a small percentage of the national total — have become increasingly effective due to their ability to rehabilitate low-level offenders (mostly drug offenders) while saving taxpayer money by eschewing traditional incarceration methods. The only problem, it seems, is that the public seems largely unaware of the success of these courts — although readers of Miller-McCune may remember Bernice Yeung's article in our August 2008 issue on the Center for Court Innovation. "You can continue to cycle these people and do nothing with them, or you can try to do ... Read More
A Most Uncivil Contempt
September 18, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
This past July, when a Philadelphia lawyer named H. Beatty Chadwick walked out of a Pennsylvania jail after serving 14 years for civil contempt — the longest such sentence in American legal history — the unique circumstances of his story initiated a brief flurry of articles in the national and local media. In 1995, Chadwick had been involved in a divorce proceeding during which he claimed he had lost a fortune of $2.5 million his soon-to-be ex-wife sought in a financial settlement. The court did not believe Chadwick, found him in contempt and ordered him jailed until he came up with the ... Read More
