My thinking about Miranda has made me curious whether the warnings would work better if they were flipped around. Normally, they have always been read in this order:

You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
You have the right to speak to […]

Are the famous Miranda warnings (”You have the right to remain silent,” and so on) the only constitutionally mandated public legal education? The U.S. Supreme Court said in 1966 that the police have to read these warnings to you if they take you into custody, else the police risk that any evidence they get […]

I’m known to lament that there’s not enough grassroots community legal education going on in the U.S. And I mean both in quantity and in character. The “quantity” complaint is a standard one: even though there are many, many groups providing public legal education to youth and adults in America, there are just […]

“Civil procedure” is what lawyers and judges call the elaborate game of suing somebody. The process would be familiar to anybody who’s been through a 70-minute call with the phone company to dispute some outrageous charge on their bill. Except it is longer by many orders of magnitude, so complicated that the U.S. […]

At the end of a recent entry here, I asked whether the legal system isn’t perhaps just “a small circle of people on the playground making up new rules for the basketball game going on nearby, then waiting with grins for someone to do something wrong without even knowing it.” Well, no, it’s not. […]

Recently on CBC Radio’s “Sunday Edition,” I heard this excerpt from an interview with Wendell Berry, the farmer-intellectual from Kentucky:
You know that everybody subscribed, finally, to what I call the industrial economic program, which said that it was better to buy things than it was to produce things, essentially. That’s the doctrine. You […]

Ignorantia juris non excusat, or “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” is according to one waggish law professor “almost the only knowledge of law possessed by many people.” This doctrine, which helps the justice system avoid having to make the preposterous presumption that everyone knows the law, is more than a little misleading. […]

All things went as planned, and I spent this past week in Boise, Idaho, getting inducted into what the Supreme Court of the United States has called “a broad monopoly . . . to do things other citizens may not lawfully do.” That is, I received a license to practice law in the state […]

Unless I get killed, do something very stupid, or miss my flight to Boise, I will soon join the world’s most consistently detested profession. All that’s between me and a license to practice law is my swearing that, among a few other things, I “will never reject, for any consideration personal to myself, the cause […]

Yesterday I switched on—for the first time—the TV that’s in the furnished Edmonton apartment I somehow managed to get, and I saw a guy in a robe and a wing collar with tabs standing at a podium and talking about a statute. In a few moments there was a cut to a another […]