I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm. Founded in 1958, we have recovered over $2 billion for our clients through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, [...]
Miscellaneous Links, July 7, 2011
It's been impossible to avoid thinking about the Casey Anthony verdict, but I couldn't bring myself to write an obligatory blog post about it, not least because there are already hundreds of law blog posts out there saying roughly the same thing. So, instead, some interesting reading, only one of which is Casey Anthony-related: Jack Balkin on the constitutionality of the debt ceiling; Robert Ambrogi and Steve Matthews on optimizing law firm websites; Sasha Says on when rape victims lie; Stephen Hough on there being no such thing as a difficult piano piece; Jeralyn at TalkLeft on the beyond a ... Continue Reading
Sometimes You Should Lie About Yourself
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok was apparently born yesterday: When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.” So who said it? I was surprised. Yes, we’re all “surprised” Michelle Bachmann claims to read Ludwig von ... Continue Reading
Panda Blogging Is The New Legal Treatise
It’s no secret: legal marketing isn’t pretty. Even those of us personal injury lawyers who try to keep our marketing clean, like Eric Turkewitz, hate our marketing copy. There’s no easy way to mix tastefulness, modesty, search engine optimization, and client conversion into one document. Making matters worse, nobody would ever genuinely link to a sales page puffing up someone’s legal practice, so a lot of lawyers have resorted to shady search engine optimization tactics to game Google into ranking them first. Only 3% of legal work is influenced by legal directories? Maybe so, but those expensive directories will also ... Continue Reading
The Problems of Language
One of the great weaknesses of the civil litigation process is its near-total reliance on language. The vast majority of civil lawsuits are resolved, either by being dismissed or settled, before any party or witness testifies before a judge or jury, a process which is largely dependent upon written filings, transcripts of testimony given outside the presence of the judge or jury (that is, depositions), and, to a limited extent, oral arguments made the court hearings. As Dinosaur Comics lucidly explains: (Hat tip, Language Log.) Take a couple recent examples of the problems of language: One Professor’s Attempt to Explain ... Continue Reading
“The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living” From D-Day to the NFL to Autism Spectrum
Looking for something to read? J. D. Salinger’s Love and Squalor: For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski’s biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger’s wartime experience. Despite Salinger’s reticence, Slawenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger’s war. It’s hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th ... Continue Reading
Changing Minds In Moral and Scientific Revolutions (and Courtrooms)
There's never any shortage of material that should inspire a civil litigation blogger — Mastercard and Visa settled an antitrust complaint with the DOJ, Apple lost a patent infringement suit, Verizon refunded millions in fraudulent fees, a Delaware County jury awarded $5 million in a medical malpractice case — but sometimes the muse is absent. So let's talk about changing minds: Vast moral revolutions do take place once in a while, but it is hard to figure out exactly what sets them into motion or brings them to success. A high-minded prophet in some part of the world denounces an ... Continue Reading
“A Judge’s Guide to Neuroscience” — A Cautionary Tale
Modern society has two means by which it assesses truth or falsity: science and law. Just as Einstein recognized "there is no logical path to the [elemental laws of the universe]; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them," Holmes taught "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Scientists and lawyers have learned to value pragmatic experimentation over logical deduction; call it the victory of Aristotle over Plato. (Scientists and lawyers also share a love of semicolons.) But they don't always reach the same conclusions, particularly not on matters of the mind. ... Continue Reading
The Trial Lawyer’s Memory Theater
I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now. —Field Notes' slogan. Via Arts & Letters Daily, Nathan Schneider, senior editor of Killing the Buddha, has a post about the rise of reading via computers, Kindles and iPads, titled In Defense of The Memory Theater: The Greeks and then the Romans created imaginary edifices by which they could carry entire speeches, taxonomies, and epics in their heads. By the medieval period, this tradition was expressed in Dante’s circles of Hell and Aquinas’s placement of memory within the cardinal virtue of prudence—thereby elevating it ... Continue Reading
The Secret of Law Blogging: It’s A Pie-Eating Contest
Yesterday Adrian Dayton commented on the three most common reasons why people fail at blogging: In dozens of conversations with busy professional I hear time and time again similar excuses to the ones I made to my Father as a kid. “I’m too busy.” “I barely have time to respond to all my emails.” “I don’t want to commit to something I can’t stick with.” Most people who try to blog fail for three major reasons. 1. They aren’t sufficiently motivated to blog. 2. They aren’t organized enough to blog. 3. They don’t know what to say. I'm no fan ... Continue Reading
The Dunning-Kruger Effect And The Lawyer As Prognosticator
As part of a series on anosognosia (which was also one of the themes of Mike Rowe's TED Talk), the NYTimes' Opinionator has a new post on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, briefly stated as: Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999. Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When ... Continue Reading
