Author Archive | Paul Cassell

Here’s standup comic Demetri Martin on his two years at NYU Law School and the “Word of the Day” game.  Good stuff. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvG8FLNPVFE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] Hat tip to TaxProfBlog.

On Wednesday, President Obama nominated University of Utah law professor Scott Matheson for the Tenth Circuit.  This is the kind of kind consensus nominee for a judgeship that deserves wide support.   Matheson (a colleague of mine at the law school school) has a resume that makes him a extremely well qualified for the federal bench.  […]

  I have previously argued that the trial judge presiding over the murder trial of Scott Roeder for killing abortion doctor George Tiller should not give the jury a manslaughter instruction.  Yesterday the trial judge reached the same conclusion, declining to give such an instruction.  The judge’s ruling will force the jury to essentially choose between the […]

Over at Crime and Consequences, former federal prosecutor Bill Otis has this insightful analysis about the interrogation of the Christmas day bomber, who reportedly was given Miranda warnings and then stopped providing useful information shortly thereafter.  Otis quotes the Washington Post’s editorial on the subject, which attacks the administration as follows:   UMAR FAROUK Abdulmutallab was […]

  The ABA Journal has this short article on the rising number of federal judicial clerkship applications.  It contains the interesting factoid that there was a 66% increase in the number of on-line applications for federal clerkships last hiring season.   Apparently the number of applications was so great that some judges simply stopped reading them.

There has been lots of media attention to the Kansas abortion case, in which defendant Scott Roeder plans to tell a jury that his slaying of Wichita doctor George Tiller was voluntary manslaughter.  Typical is this New York Times article.  The defendant plans to argue that what would otherwise seem to be cold-blooded, first degree murder was in […]

This flow chart will help you determine the answer.  Thanks to Tom Smith over at The Right Coast for the pointer to Instapundit.

So argues this op-ed piece in the L.A. Times.  Here’s a snippet of the argument: Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being “a good start”? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly […]

The American Law Institute has decided to pull its model death penalty statute, as recounted in this New York Times article.  As Kent Scheidegger points out in this detailed post, the action was not  intended to be a statement by the ALI that the death penalty should be abolished.  Nonetheless, that appears to be the spin […]