Judicial Branch Archives

The Fifth Amendment - Why you don't talk to the police without an attorney

In a brilliant pair of videos, Prof. James Duane of the Regent University School of Law and Officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department present a forceful case for never, ever, ever speaking to the police without your lawyer present. Ever. Never, never, never.

"Law prof and cop agree: never ever ever ever ever ever ever talk to the cops about a crime, even if you're innocent," by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, July 28, 2008

Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution - from Wikipedia

Prof. James Duane, Regent University School of Law

Officer George Bruch, Virginia Beach Police Department

. . . . . . . . .

July 29, 2008 09:27 PM Link Comments (0)

Should Federal Judges be paid the same as Members of Congress

For the past 20 years, members of Congress have linked their salaries to those of federal judges as a strategy to avoid the wrath of voters who think lawmakers are overpaid and do not deserve an annual raise.
. . .
Questions about the pay practice have been repeatedly raised in recent years, including by the National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The commission found that the buying power of judges has fallen behind inflation and that many law school deans, for example, earn more than federal judges.

"Judges, Congress and the Salary Link," by Stephen Barr, The Washington Post, April 25, 2007

A group of former U.S. Senators and Representatives is preparing to call for Congress to end the practice of linking the salaries of federal judges and those of members of Congress, if Congress is hesitant to raise its own salaries. To assist in this effort, Brookings scholars and their colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research produced this paper to describe the history of interbranch salary linkage and to analyze it as policy. (The group includes former Senators Howard Baker, John Danforth, and Sam Nunn, and former Representatives Richard Gephardt, Henry Hyde, Susan Molinari, Leon Panetta and Louis Stokes.)

"How to Pay the Piper: It's Time to Call Different Tunes for Congressional and Judicial Salaries," by Russell R. Wheeler and Michael S. Greve, Issues in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, April 2007

Pay and Perquisites of Members of Congress - from TheCapitol.Net
Chief Justice's Year-End Reports on the Federal Judiciary
"Salaries of Federal Officials: A Fact Sheet," by Sharon Gressle, CRS Report 98-53, June 25, 2004 (2-page pdf )
"Judicial Salary-Setting Policy," by Sharon Gressle, CRS Report RS20278, March 25, 2003 (6-page pdf )
"The Unpersuasive Chief: Are judges undercompensated? Maybe, but Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t make the case," by Matthew J. Franck, January 2, 2007
"Underpaid And Overworked: The National Disgrace of Undercompensating Federal Judges, While Allowing Their Workload to Balloon," by John W. Dean, FindLaw, November 3, 2006
"Insecure About their Future: Why Some Judges Leave the Bench," The Third Branch, February, 2002

May 8, 2007 10:07 AM Link Comments (0)

Covering the Supreme Court

6. Scalia is just as funny as you've heard. (See this letter to the editor of the Boston Herald after a reporter misinterpreted his Sicilian chin-scratching in Mass as an obscene gesture.) But Chief Justice Roberts is staging a coup to replace him as the justice who gets the most laughs. Scalia wins this round for quantity, but a Roberts' quip gets the hardest laughs, at the expense of one of the arguing lawyers. I don't know if it's considered a compliment or a good sign to one side if they provide fodder that gets a humorous diss from a justice.

"Supreme amusement," by Greg Piper, The Smoking Room, March 31, 2006

March 31, 2006 06:27 AM Link Comments (0)

"The Sweet Science," by Jacob Stein

Just what legal reasoning is defies a clear, unambiguous definition.
As I write I have before me my collection of books dealing with the subject. You will understand from the titles why the judge would have paused: The Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin N. Cardozo (1921); The Folklore of Capitalism by Thurmond Arnold (1937); Law and Other Things by Lord Macmillan (1939); The Mysterious Science of the Law by Daniel J. Boorstin (1941); Think Clearly by Moxley and Fife (1941); An Introduction to Legal Reasoning by Edward H. Levi (1948); The Nature of Legal Argument by O. C. Jensen (1957); Law as Large as Life: A Natural Law for Today and the Supreme Court as Its Prophet by Charles P. Curtis (1959); The Rules of Chaos by Stephen Vizinczey (1969); Law and Morality by Louis Blom-Cooper (1976); Tactics of Legal Reasoning by Pierre Schlag and David Skover (1986); Logic for Lawyers: A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking by Ruggero J. Aldisert (1989); The Problems of Jurisprudence by Richard A. Posner (1990); Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality by A. C. Graham (1992); An Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning by Steven J. Burton (1995); Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System by Norman F. Cantor (1997); and A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind by Steven L. Winter (2001).

"The Sweet Science," by Jacob Stein, Washington Lawyer, March, 2006 (Jacob Stein is the author of "Legal Spectator & More")