Best of the Blogs: Grinch Edition

In honor of the holiday season, this week’s Best of the Blogs presents a special Grinch edition.  Click Here to watch the Grinch’s heart grow.

A group of law students at the Suffolk University Law School have put together a guide to suing Santa Clause. As a former litigator, I don’t know whether to be proud or to send them a lump of coal.  Check it out at the Above the Law Blog here.

I always dreaded holiday parties at my old law firm.  It seemed to me that these events presented a minefield of potential personal and professional disasters.  You can read about one law firm’s Christmas party hook up, and its legal consequences, at the FindLaw UK Blog here.

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Indigent Defense and the Private Bar Rate Debate

The Wisconsin State Public Defender (SPD) currently pays $40 per hour to private bar attorneys who represent indigent citizens accused of crimes.  This rate has been unchanged for decades, and lawyers are lobbying for an increase.  However, aside from horrible timing—this latest plea for more money coincides with Wisconsin’s $2.5 billion budget deficit—some of the arguments in support of the rate increase aren’t terribly persuasive, and should be abandoned.  But more significantly, the fact that lawyers have to make these arguments in the first place is merely a symptom of a larger problem: We live in a culture that misunderstands and undervalues our Constitutional rights.

But first, let’s review and grade a few of the more popular arguments:

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