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 […]

And to follow upon my plea for more “reality” in the legal profession, here’s a peek into the reality of the legal profession. Xoxohth, aka Autoadmit, is the online gathering place of at least some of America’s incubating lawyers. The foundational understandings there are that

prestigiousness (”prestige”) is next to Godliness;
the third tier (aka […]

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 […]

A benefit of being an Idaho lawyer is that it’s completely feasible, all by yourself, to read and digest every single new opinion issued by the state’s two appellate courts. During all of November, for instance, the Idaho Supreme Court and Court of Appeals issued a grand total of seventeen published opinions between the […]

The government itself is the biggest provider of public legal education, at least in modern first-world democracies. And when I tell people in the United States about my interest in PLE, they often think I’m talking about the drab brochures that various state and federal agencies produce. Things like these pamphlets on landlord […]

At the time, I was in transit between one snowed-under Canadian metropolis and another deep-frozen one, and so maybe that’s how I missed this. But at the end of November the Stanford Law School announced that it would not be one-upped by Harvard’s plans to dramatically reform the long-standing American law school curriculum. […]

It’s the run-up to Christmas (and Boxing Day!) and I’m also in the thick of a flurry of grant proposal deadlines, so the small core of regular readers I’ve earned might see a temporary decline in activity here. I won’t reduce the frequency or even the essential quality of my posts. Length and originality […]

A whole lot of jurisprudence in America (and Canada too, as far as I can tell) justifies itself by appealing to “reasonableness,” or something like it. And what’s “reasonable,” the law will tell you if you press it, has to do with what a sensible expectation for human behavior should be. However, when […]

I’m in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, on my way from central Alberta to central Virginia. I haven’t been south of the border in several months now, and I thought I’d pause to mention that the USA is still the USA. It is not Canada. For one thing, I’ve been in the States nearly […]