DJ Sui G. Spins da Podcast

Now available for your weekend listening pleasure: The latest edition of Ambivalent Voices featuring a conversation with Sui Generis, a current 0L who is not yet sure if or where he's going to go to law school this fall. Sui G. and I talk about his current reign as Master of Patience as he waits to hear about acceptance to law school, leisure reading, being a DJ, and writing a novel in 15 days or less (which Sui G. did last November). Click below to listen (or right-click to download the mp3):

Thanks for the conversation Sui G! If you would like to be part of a future episode of Ambivalent Voices, please drop me a line. (Use the email link in the top right of this page.) It'll be fun; you can tell me about your summer with your uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines! Technotes: This podcast was recorded by phone via Slapcast.com. I added bumpers via Garageband and compressed the mp3 in iTunes. To subscribe to Ambivalent Voices in a podcast aggregator, add this link to your aggregator's subscription list. In addition to being able to access these recordings via the Ambivalent Voices Slapcast page, you can also find the local posts about each recording conveniently collected in the voices category here on ai.

Posted 09:25 AM | voices

Defender Dilemmas: LSIC Interview

Ok, so here's the situation: You're a public defender and Petey is your client. He's charged with beating up his girlfriend and he comes to you and he says, “Hey man, I did it. She had it coming, man. But this is a rearrest parole violation and if I get convicted of this I'm going down for a long time so you gotta get me off, man. Ok?” What do you do? It gets better. Petey quickly changes his story. “I didn't do it, man.” But you just said you did, Petey. “Well, um, she started it.” Really? “Yeah, and my cousin was there and he saw the whole thing. Ask him, he'll tell you—she started it, she hit me first.” So will your cousin testify to that? “Sure, but here's what you do. When you go talk to him, don't ask him what happened, just tell him what I said—that he saw the whole thing and she started it. He'll agree, because he was there.” What do you do? Or here's another good one: Your client (not Petey this time, let's call him Jake) comes to you on a misdemeanor and you ask him about his record and he says he's got a rap sheet a mile long and starts listing off offense after offense for which he's been convicted and done time in the relatively recent past. It sounds pretty bad. But then you get discovery from the prosecutor and Jake's rap sheet is blank—it shows none of what Jake mentioned. What do you do? I had an interview with DC Law Students In Court (LSIC) yesterday and these were the kinds of things we talked about for half an hour. It was awesome! I don't know if I had all the “right” answers (or if there are “right” answers to questions like these), but it was great talking to two attorneys who face choices like this all the time and have experience weighing the pros and cons, advising clients, cutting through the BS when necessary, interviewing possible witnesses, gathering other evidence, etc. It was like an adrenaline injection and a breath of fresh air. These guys didn't assume I was just biding my time until I could get a firm job or looking for a credential to get me ahead somewhere else—they didn't care about any of that. What they cared about is how I would handle hostile client situations, tricky fact patterns, and tough choices. It also made me more impatient than ever to get back to work at the PD's office this summer. I can't wait until May! Is this what I want to do? Um, yeah. LSIC will announce decisions about who made it into the clinic next Wednesday. You can bet I'll be waiting by the phone.... About LSIC, see also:

• GW's description of the clinic (scroll to the bottom).
• A recent WaPo story about a $2 million award the clinic received thanks to past litigation against Comcast, including more information about what the clinic is and what it does.
• The DC Bar's coverage of the same thing.

Posted 08:09 AM | Comments (14) | 2L

Marathon Man?

Today I signed up to participate in the National AIDS Marathon Training Program. This is not the last you will hear about this once real training starts at the end of April, but for now, I'm just saying, for the record. If I do not now complete the Marine Corps Marathon on October 30, 2005, you can laugh at my folly for ever dreaming I might. Does St. Patrick's Day make people do crazy things?

Posted 09:49 PM | Comments (3) | marathon

FYI: Equal Justice Works Summer Corps

If you're a law student working a public interest job this summer, you might want to apply for an Equal Justice Works Summer Corps grant, which provides $1000 for your education expenses. If you're interested, you should apply today because it's kind of a first-come, first-served thing, so long as your job qualifies. A qualifying job would be a civil rights job, legal aid or some other direct service to indigent clients on the civil side. Last year they gave grants to people working for public defenders, but they've changed the rules this year so those jobs no longer qualify.

Posted 07:03 AM | 2L advice

Oh, But Don't Forget Rasul

In my haste to commend Scalia for his dissent in Hamdi (yesterday), I nearly forgot his typically hyperbolic and melodramatic dissent in Rasul v. Bush, 124 S. Ct. 2686 (2004). There, the majority decided that the D.C. District Court had jurisdiction to hear habeas petitions from Guantanamo prisoners, and Scalia lamented that the Court had taken the “breathtaking” step of “extend[ing] the scope of the habeas statute to the four corners of the earth,” and added that this was “judicial adventurism of the worst sort.” Um, Nino? How can you square this melodrama with your dissent in Hamdi? If “[t]he very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive,” then what happens to that core of liberty when you make it depend on citizenship and geography? If the Executive can arbitrarily detain noncitizens abroad (and especially in territory over which the U.S. exercises almost complete control if not “ultimate sovereignty”) and deprive them of even basic due process, doesn't that make a mockery of the “liberty” we enjoy here in the U.S.? Sounds pretty hollow to me. Scalia's dissent in Hamdi makes a forceful case that “the Great Writ” ought not be simply a Constitutional right or an “Anglo-Saxon” right, but a human right, a basic core element of civilized society. And while it would probably be too much for the U.S. to try to force other countries to institute a common habeas regime, it's not too much to ask that the U.S. conduct itself in the world consistent with the idea that the very core of human liberty is freedom from indefinite and arbitrary imprisonment at the will of any U.S. authority, regardless of whether you're a U.S. citizen, an Iraqi belligerent, a suspected terrorist, or what have you. If we can arbitrarily imprison whomever we want, wherever we want, for as long as we want, w/out so much as giving them notice of why they're being imprisoned or allowing them to challenge their imprisonment, we become terrorists ourselves and everything else we do to secure “liberty” in the world will ring with the hollowness of hypocrisy. Yes, I understand that “war” creates special necessities and we should make allowances for the Executive to use its judgment there to some extent, but indefinite imprisonment with no process? No. Never justified. Never ever. Not by U.S. authority, not here on U.S. soil, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not on the moon. I also think Scalia willfully misunderstands 28 USC §2241(a) and §2242 in reading them to limit federal habeas jurisdiction to territory that falls within the geographical bounds of an existing federal district court. You can read §2242 that way, but doing so would make it inconsistent w/§2241(a), which Scalia just plain misinterprets as the basis for his Rasul ranting. And yeah, I know what a joke it is for me, a second year law student, to be scolding Scalia about his statutory interpretation, but hey, when the man is wrong, he's just wrong. ;-) On the subject of habeas, see also Three Generations where “holmes” notes that a Connecticut court actually granted a habeas petition recently.

Posted 07:30 AM | 2L

Fie on “War Powers” & Why Fed Courts, um, Sort of Rocks

Getting back in the groove of this law school thing after spring break, I just read the opinion in Padilla v. Hanft (PDF), the South Carolina District Court decision which came down about two weeks ago and held “that the Bush administration lacks statutory and constitutional authority to indefinitely imprison without criminal charges a U.S. citizen who was designated an 'enemy combatant.'” It's a great opinion because it's short, clear, well-organized, and it chooses positions on the law with which I can mostly agree.* In a great moment, it quotes this memorable bit from Ex parte Milligan, the case that held that where U.S. courts are open and their process unobstructed, a U.S. citizen cannot be tried by a military tribunal:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence.

Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall) 2, 120-21 (1866). I love that bit. Thank you Judge Henry F. Floyd, for striking a blow for sanity in a time of mostly madness. On this note, I must confess that, despite my consistent criticism of his writing and the position he takes, even I was moved to read Scalia's dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 124 S. Ct. 2633 (2004). There, Scalia also struck many blows for sanity in habeas jurisprudence, including the following statement of the significance of “the great writ”:

 The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive. . . . The gist of the Due Process Clause, as understood at the founding and since, was to force the Government to follow those common-law procedures traditionally deemed necessary before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. When a citizen was deprived of liberty because of alleged criminal conduct, those procedures typically required committal by a magistrate followed by indictment and trial. * * * To be sure, certain types of permissible noncriminal detention--that is, those not dependent upon the contention that the citizen had committed a criminal act--did not require the protections of criminal procedure. However, these fell into a limited number of well-recognized exceptions--civil commitment of the mentally ill, for example, and temporary detention in quarantine of the infectious. It is unthinkable that the Executive could render otherwise criminal grounds for detention noncriminal merely by disclaiming an intent to prosecute, or by asserting that it was incapacitating dangerous offenders rather than punishing wrongdoing.

Hamdi at 2661-62 (internal citations omitted). Developments in federal habeas law in the past decade (at least since the passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996) should be very very troubling to all Americans, and they might be if anyone knew about or understood them. Despite the vitriol I so enjoy heaping on Federal Courts, I also love that class for teaching me about this and making me read this stuff. Don't get me wrong; I still think the material of Fed Courts is immensely frustrating because, as I commented here, “it's the human condition bashing its head against illusory ideals of truth, justice, and the American way.” Yet, I do appreciate the value and necessity of that head-bashing, and it's reassuring and gratifying to see that, at least sometimes, the result is a decision like Padilla (this most recent decision, not the one by the SCOTUS last year which was maddening!) that really does make sense.** * It would be more confident for me to declare that Padilla is “right” on the law, but that seems foolhardy since the law here is so malleable and even contradictory at times. Law school and the exigencies of practice tend to encourage lawyers to use such language—“this is right, that is wrong”—because they want to sound certain about their arguments for the benefit of their clients. This, in turn, makes the law seem more concrete and clear than it ever actually is. It also, I'm afraid, also tends to encourage categorical statements of truth from lawyers, like those I bemoaned here about some advice from an attorney about law review. The desire for certainty, for absolutes in the law, is understandable, but its effects are sometimes pernicious. ** I reserve the right to withdraw any positive statements I've ever made about Fed Courts as soon as finals arrives. Judging by the panic and newfound dedication the class has inspired in the heart of Energy Spatula, it's only a matter of time before I, too, will be denouncing this class as the bane of my existence.

Posted 07:29 AM | Comments (1) | 2L

Baby Talk with Famous P.

In a break from the recent string of amusing interviews with fellow law students, the latest edition of Ambivalent Voices features a conversation with Famous P., an old friend from graduate school who became a new father just three months ago. Famous P. and I talk about how he got his nickname and what it's like to be a father for the very first time. Click below to listen, or right-click to download the mp3.

Famous P. and I always have a lot to talk about, so stay tuned for future episodes in which he may explain why the world misunderstood Hegel for the last 150 years, why graduate school in English is both a paradise on earth and a soul-sucking self-flagellation, and the art of pouring a truly wonderful Tucher Bräu. If you would like to be part of a future episode of Ambivalent Voices, please drop me a line. (Use the email link in the top right of this page.) It's lots of fun. I promise! Technotes: This podcast was recorded by phone via Slapcast.com. I added bumpers via Garageband and compressed the mp3 in iTunes. Baby sounds are courtesy of here and the Absolute Sound Effects Archive. To subscribe to Ambivalent Voices in a podcast aggregator, add this link to your aggregator's subscription list. In addition to being able to access these recordings via the Ambivalent Voices Slapcast page, you can also find the local posts about each recording conveniently collected in the voices category here on ai.

Posted 07:37 AM | Comments (2) | voices

Hitchhiker's Guide Best Bits

I read (reread, actually) only one measly little book while on break, but it was a good one: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Because this is such a widely-read book, I'll just comment on my favorite parts. First, it struck me on this reading that Adams' characterization of the role of the President of the Galaxy was eerily accurate:

The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely-judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. . . . Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded.

Does that sound anything like another President/Government you know? Is it possible we all watch the actions of our figurehead and elected officials intently as if they had some meaning, when really the true power in our society is at work elsewhere? NAFTA Chapter 11 comes immediately to mind, as well as the FTAA, both of which transfer authority over all sorts of government regulatory functions into the hands of multinational conglomerates. Perhaps the President's job is to make a lot of noise somewhere (like, oh, maybe, Iraq and neighboring countries), while the real power brokers slowly work their nefarious magic. Could it be? You think? Wars are generally extremely effective in drawing attention away from other things.... Another favorite idea is that the mice have been running the show all along. While humans have been thinking we were doing experiments on mice, the mice were actually doing experiments on us. The idea almost makes Hitchhiker's Guide a forerunner of “The Matrix” (the mice have you!), which is something I'd never considered before. Finally, the little bit with Majikthise and Vroomfondel at the end. These two representatives from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons are outraged that a computer might solve the greatest mysteries of the universe and leave them with nothing to do:

“You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we'll take care of the eternal verities, thank you ver much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Qeust for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thingkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we? I mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machien only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?” “That's right,” shouted Vroomfondel, “we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

Anyone familiar with the bureaucratic politics of Humanities departments in large American universities will have to chuckle at this. It can also be read as a fun jab at luddites and at the general revolt against “modernity” and the rise of science in the late 19th century, all of which continues to figure today in, for example, battles over whether to teach evolution in public schools. Bottom line: The Hitchhiker's Guide is a fun, fast, light read that remains entertaining, engaging, and highly relevant even 25 years after its initial publication. The movie should be fun, too. Over the next few weeks perhaps I'll take a quick bite at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. p.s.: If you're a Marvin the morose robot fan, check out his songs here.

Posted 12:16 PM | ai books