Associate's Mind

  I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. [...]

  When I was an uchi-deshi, there were special classes reserved for senior students called kenshu (“sword sharpening”). During these classes, I would sit in seiza (“proper sitting”) for 30 minutes or so, listening to the instructor lecture on a multitude of topics. History, art, subtle points of techniques, themes, etc. If you haven’t come [...]

“If a generation is going to arrive in the jury box that is totally unused to sitting and listening but is using technology to gain the information it needs to form a judgment, that changes the whole orality tradition with which we are familiar.” November 2008, Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain, Sir Igor Judge. So begins [...]

  A couple weeks ago, the Alabama Supreme Court adopted changes to the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Rules of Professional Conduct permitting “limited scope representation” (LSR) or “unbundled” legal services. There have also been a number of modifications to the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure new rules, but I wanted to break out [...]

  I recently got around to reading a whopper of an old law review article that I had been wanting to read for awhile entitled, “Inside the Judicial Mind.” From the introduction: …we conducted an empirical study to determine whether five common cognitive illusions would influence decision making of a sample of 167 federal magistrate [...]

  As bandwidth has increased, so has internet users consumption of video. So over the past month, I’ve been cranking out videos about legal issues as a bit of an experiment. It took awhile for me to work it out and they’re still a bit rough – but they are steadily getting better (I hope). The big problem was [...]

Show Notes: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace The US Government’s plans for your anonymity and identity online. I’ll leave you with this video presentation of the NSTIC (which oddly feels as though it was prepared by Aperture Laboratories):  

Only boring people get bored.

Show Notes: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/scotusjones.pdf – US v. Jones Holding Tom Goldstein, Reactions to Jones v. United States: The government fared much better than everyone realizes, SCOTUSblog (Jan. 23, 2012, 4:07 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/01/reactions-to-jones-v-united-states-the-government-fared-much-better-than-everyone-realizes/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States – No right to privacy in public http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley – no right to to privacy from police observation from public airspace http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/ -Relaxing drone [...]

  Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, famed British Prime Minister during World War II, was not only a noted statesman, but also a gifted student of oration and history. Churchill wrote numerous pieces on history, the English language, and how to develop the skills necessary to develop a mastery of rhetoric. So gifted was Churchill that he [...]