Can a rule be a rule if you can’t understand what it means? American law says that it can’t. If a law is written in a way that an “ordinary person exercising ordinary common sense” cannot sufficiently understand and comply with it, that law is “void for vagueness,” says the law.
Obviously, though, this […]
I discovered the other day, while in my daily business of tracking down the wild and radical of lawyering in North America, that Jimmy Carter once unapologetically excoriated the legal profession for being full of itself. He did this in a speech to the Los Angeles County Bar Association. At its 100th anniversary celebration. […]
The first thing I did in 2007 was file into the United States Capitol’s rotunda to say farewell to Gerald Ford, the only president ever to have lain in state while I was on the East Coast. The entire experience lasted only about an hour. The line was short and was hardly a […]
As I was finishing law school, the dean was in the process of implementing a mandatory pro bono program. Under this program, law students are required to give forty hours of service to an approved legal organization or law firm engaged in some kind of public interest or pro bono publico legal work. […]
Before I end my time with Marc Galanter’s Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture by returning it to the University of Alberta’s Weir Law Library, I want to excerpt a little piece of it for awareness’s sake. Galanter, at least as far as I’m aware, is most well known for his 1974 […]
Early, early this Hockey Day morning I left Canada’s northernmost major city for its easternmost one. In fact, here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I’m in both the easternmost city and the oldest European settlement (1540s?) in all of North America. This is also, according to official sources, the foggiest, snowiest, wettest, windiest, freezing-rainiest, […]
This blog is fighting a spell of mission drift. I anticipated this in post #1 and, what’s worse, readership has been declining since the drifting began (around Christmastime). So, with this post I will put myself to work on getting back to basics: public legal education.
What took me to Canada was a curiosity: […]
Here’s a happy compromise—now I’ll use these “asides” to get out the extraneous tidbits.
When Ed Stelmach became the premier of Alberta a month ago, he opened his swearing-in ceremony to the public. An unusual thing, said CBC Edmonton, and considered by some Canadians to be a little troubling. When Butch Otter became the governor of Idaho on New Year’s Day, he held his swearing-in ceremony in […]
I am in YYT, where incoming flights to St. John’s can’t land and outgoing flights (including my own) are cancelled. Winds in the area are incredible. Indeed, they are gales.
And that’s why what I did this morning is no doubt the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But I will […]