Seventh Circuit Week in Review: Cloak and Dagger

The Seventh Circuit had only one new opinion in a criminal case last week: United States v. Latchin (Nos. 07-4009 & 08-1085).  Latchin emigrated from Iraq to the United States in the early 1990’s and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1998.  However, documents seized by American forces in Baghdad in 2003 revealed that Latchin was in the employ of the Iraqi government.  The documents indicated that Latchin had been sent to the U.S. as a sleeper agent for the Saddam Hussein regime.  It is not clear whether he ever conducted any covert actitivities once inside the U.S., but, somewhat chillingly, he did manage to obtain a job at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.  In any event, once his connections to Saddam were exposed, Latchin was prosecuted for procuring citizenship illegally by making false statements on his naturalization application in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1425(a).  He was convicted and then appealed.

The legal issues on appeal were not nearly so colorful as the underlying facts.  Most significantly, the court had to determine what it means to “procure” citizenship through a false statement. 

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Show and Tell

 

I have a confession to make:  I am something of a PowerPoint addict.  I have a second confession to make:  I am aware that not all of my PowerPoint presentations are as effective as I would like them to be.  Having been in the audience during many PowerPoint presentations, I know that slides with too much text are ineffective, and I also know that nothing is more boring than listening to someone read from his or her slides.  Thus, over the past few years, I have tried to make my slides more audience-friendly by reducing the amount of text that I display and increasing the number of visuals.  

I made those changes after doing some reading about learning styles and how the brain processes information.  Though this is a huge oversimplification, I learned that the brain processes verbal and visual information through separate channels, so if we present students with both kinds of information, we can help them improve comprehension.   Other than in Property and Estates and Trusts, when I remember my professors diagramming future interests on the chalkboard, I don’t remember having visuals in my law school classes.  (The fact that I remember those diagrams almost 15 years after my law school graduation probably says something about why I now use visuals in my classes.)

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Episcopal Modesty or Overreaching? Or Both?

Since an article from Foxnews.com has been up on the law school website, my inner self defensiveness prompts me to point out again that I did not say that “Catholic politicians have been excommunicated in recent years for not supporting positions consistent with the church’s teachings.” I actually referred to three segregationist politicians in New Orleans in 1962, but did note that many bishops have become more aggressive in saying that pro-choice politicians should not take communion. (Me misquoted by Fox seems to prove, again, that God has a sense of humor.)

But, as important as that may be to me, the larger issue is more interesting. The National Catholic Reporter has put up a story on comments by Catholic University historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler who criticizes the recent emphasis of many Catholic bishops on abortion and contrasts it with earlier treatment of social welfare policies and artificial contraception. Dr. Tentler argues that bishops in the first half of the twentieth century “didn’t push a single-issue approach to politics” and “spoke a pragmatic rather than a religious or doctrinal language” that “consistently framed the debate in terms of values that nearly all Americans shared.”

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