The Eyes Have It

During my freshman year at Boston University, I was engaged to a girl from just outside of Houston. It didn’t work out in the end, but it was a good relationship, and so I’ve tended to refrain from joining in on the jokes people like to make about Texans, particularly as pertains to their creative (i.e., absent) approach toward the rights of criminal defendants. But even I can’t resist taking some jabs at the Texas Supreme Court for this decision.

To summarize: Andre Thomas killed his wife, 4-year old son, and 13-month-old niece. He then (and I honestly can’t phrase this better than the article did)

walked into the Sherman Police Department and told a dispatcher he had murdered the three, then told officers he put his victims’ hearts in his pocket, left their apartment, took them home, put the organs in a plastic bag and threw them in the trash. He said G-d had told him to commit the killings.

This would probably be enough to give anyone pause, but it gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it).

Continue ReadingThe Eyes Have It

Rant on the Economy

The collapse of the economy is the result of many different causes. There is plenty of blame to go around. For all too long, the government, under the spell of the mantra that “the government is the problem, the free market is the solution,” let much of the financial industry escape any real regulation by morphing into new forms of business that did not fall within the conventional regulatory schemes. As the Madoff and Stanford scandals show, the regulators gradually deregulated, through lack of vigorous enforcement, even in areas that are within their authority to regulate. As Judge Posner admitted recently, in that environment of rampant non-regulation, the Wall Street “Masters of the Universe” acted as he would expect, as “rational profit maximizers”: Unrestrained short term greed simply drove all good sense out of the market.

For example, most of the “credit default swaps,” and it appears much of the world of “derivatives,” is in fact gambling. Neither party to the swap has any connection to any actual economic activity. They are simply betting on the outcome of the actual economic activity undertaken by others.  In a world of rational regulation, no honest business would propose such a scheme because regulators would be expected to swoop in and determine these swaps to be what they are — unenforceable gambling contracts. Where was the accountability for those in the financial industry, the regulators and those in charge of the regulators who all acted so irresponsibly? A new structure of regulation and new regulators need to be put in place so that those with basic good sense have the reinforcement of prudent regulation.

Some of the blame seems wrongheaded.

Continue ReadingRant on the Economy

Let the (Oral) Argument Begin

Kudos (on getting this far) and best wishes (as we move forward) to the sixteen upper-level students who are competing this week in the quarterfinals of the Jenkins Moot Court Competition. The students earned this right based on their top performance in last fall’s Appellate Writing and Advocacy course, which is a prerequisite or gateway to both the intramural Jenkins Competition and all extramural or interscholastic moot-court competitions. The students are paired into eight teams of two for purposes of the Jenkins Competition:

  • Lindsay Caldwell & Lindsey Johnson
  • Alyssa Dowse & Tim Sheehey
  • Jessica Farley & Brent Simerson
  • Sandy Giernoth & Megann Senfleben
  • Tim Hassel & Joe Brydges
  • Rachel Helmers & Nick Harken
  • Amber Peterson & Allison Ziegler
  • Nicole Standback & Bridget Mueller

Each team writes a brief in the first half of the spring semester and has a chance to argue twice in a round of quarterfinals. Thereupon, based on a weighted scoring of the brief and the oral arguments, four teams advance to the semifinals. The briefs having been “filed” several weeks ago, the oral arguments begin this week, and culminate in the Jenkins Finals at the United States Courthouse at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 2.

More information on the reasons the Law School structures its moot-court competition this way can be found in this article from the Marquette Lawyer or at the moot-court webpage (and a student’s perspective can be found in a very fine post by a guest blogger last month, Jessica Franklin). I hope that all will join me in congratulating and wishing well to this year’s Jenkins competitors.

Continue ReadingLet the (Oral) Argument Begin