The law treats some acts as grave enough that it won't give them legal effect unless a person with knowledge of the facts attests to them. The oath of a witness tends to give the act heft. It suggests you can trust what the witness says.
But what happens when the witness botches the oath?
Blawgletter didn't follow the Trayvon Martin case — State of Florida v. George Zimmerman — but when we heard about the verdict Saturday night we had one big question.
What did the jury charge say about reasonable doubt and self-defense?
Now we know, thanks to The Law of Self Defense blog, which posted the Zimmerman
If you watch a lot of daytime TV, you may have seen lots of ads by for-profit schools. The pitches promise you an awesome job, a lot of pay, more sex-appeal, and even, in some cases, super-human powers.
But did you ever think about the people whose job it is to get you to pony
From Intruder in the Dust, by William Faulkner, as a first-ever visit to Gettysburg begins:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail
An opening statement in a recent trial started with this:
In 1975, when I was 16 years old, a friend who I played football with at Nacogdoches High School and I spent the summer hauling hay. We would drive out every day looking for farmers who were baling their hay and sometimes when they were cutting hay,
A 5-4 Supreme Court today ruled that the Constitution forbids the federal government from refusing to recognize same-sex marriages. United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307 (U.S. June 26, 2013).
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor joined him.
Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas dissented.
Blawgletter watched the oral arguments last year in Fisher v. Univ. of Texas, No. 111-345 (U.S. June 24, 2013). We came away thinking that UT's program for giving boosts to well-off minority applicants would crash and burn. Today it crashed. The burning will await its return to New Orleans, where the Fifth Circuit must
Under Title VII, an employer’s liability for [racial] harassment [at work] may depend on the status of the harasser. If the harassing employee is the victim’s co-worker, the employer is liable only if it was negligent in controlling working conditions. In cases in which the harasser is a "supervisor," however, different rules apply. If the
Public unions claimed that the Governor of Connecticut ran roughshod over their members' first amendment right to . . . join a union. They alleged that the Constitution State's chief executive used budget cuts and state-wide layoffs in 2003 as cover for firing 2,800 workers solely because they belonged to unions that refused to accept
About 76 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt hatched a plan for bending to his will a recalcitrant and obstructive (by his lights) U.S. Supreme Court. The Court at the time consisted of seven Republican appointees and two Democratic ones.
As the Senate Committee on the Judiciary explains what happened:
To counter the impact of the Court's decisions