Over the next several months, I am devoting Wednesdays on the blog to profiling some of my Yale Law classmates. Everyone knows about Brett Kavanaugh, but there are so many other people who are fascinating and accomplished! If you have read Bryan Stevenson's excellent book Just Mercy , you have already come across the remarkable work of Michael O'Connor. He appears in Chapter 7 of that book, when he comes on board to help Stevenson and Bernard Harcourt represent Walter McMillan , who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. Stevenson, O'Connor, and Harcourt pursued the case until McMillan was exonerated after six years on death row. O'Connor came into law school like a ball of fire. He got to college late, but then blazed through his undergrad studies at Penn State and graduated summa cum laude. At Yale Law, he was both brilliant and deeply principled, a moral figure who often (rightly) challenged the rest of us. He cared about working people, the poor, cri...
I'm not a huge golf fan. I think the use of land for golf courses in some places (ie, Los Angeles) is pretty ridiculous, and it drives me bananas to see it on TV, with the whispering announcers and tracking shots of a tiny white ball someplace against a herky-jerky sky. Still, I have to admit that it does have some fascinating personalities floating around. For the last three decades one of them has been John Daly, who was just approved to ride a cart for the PGA Championship, drawing a rebuke from Tiger Woods, who recalled that he walked the course (and won that tournament) on a broken leg. Daly has a variety of ailments that make walking difficult, and I don't begrudge him the cart (though, again, I don't know much about this sport and its traditions, so I probably should not have an opinion at all). Daly is a character: probably the only pro golfer to be arrested for public drunkenness in the parking lot of a Hooter's restaurant, he claims to have lost over $50,000,0...
Megan Willome wrote a nice little haiku about the Mueller report yesterday: Dear Mr. Mueller, You could've summarized the whole in a haiku. She's right, too. I've got some thoughts on the Mueller Report (in addition to what I have said here and here ): 1) Regarding a conspiracy with Russians to influence the election, it seems clear that Mueller found insufficient evidence to recommend charges or impeachment. That's not totally surprising. From what we already knew, it seems that events like the Trump Tower meeting the Russians approached people in the Trump organization, talked about some stuff, but the Trump people never agreed to participate in the activity in any active way-- and that agreement is the essence of conspiracy. Sure, it turns out that the Russians went and did stuff to help Trump on their own, but that does not make it a conspiracy. 2) On obstruction, there is the legitimate question of "obstructing what?" I may disagree with the Barr analy...
Comments
Post a Comment