Advice on Appeals from Howard Eisenberg

Just like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, there’s nothing like having fourteen people over to Thanksgiving dinner to concentrate the mind.  In my case, it’s also the galvanizing principle to buckle down and clean house.

This year, the task was truly daunting — the family room had become nearly impassible, swamped by pile after pile of paper and other detritus related to serial family emergencies and funerals of the past few years.  And let’s face it, if the laws of physics dictate a that an object in motion tends to remain in motion, the rules of law and gravity at my house dictate that clutter tends to remain in place, and magnetically attracts more of the same.  Exponentially.

Still, the pool table and foosball tables weren’t going to excavate themselves for company, and so I parked the puppy in “doggie day-care” and rolled up my sleeves.  

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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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Cleaning Up the ACCA Mess

David Holman has a helpful new article exploring the mess that has become the Armed Career Criminal Act jurisprudence in the wake of Begay v. United States. (I’ve blogged about this unfolding jurisprudence several times, e.g., here and here.)  The ACCA, of course, imposes a fifteen-year mandatory minimum for felons in possession of a firearm who have three or more prior convictions for a “violent felony” or a serious drug offense. It is the definition of “violent felony” that has occasioned so much litigation and so many unsatisfying judicial decisions over the past couple of years.  I’m glad to see David’s article because I think legal scholars have not been paying nearly enough attention to recent developments in this important area of federal criminal law.

I think David is correct to trace the jurisprudential difficulties to the tension between two lines of Supreme Court decisions.  

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