Trial Advocacy at Temple & Pretrial Fact Investigation

What do think of Prof. Herb Kolsby's course (see below) on "speechmaking" by trial lawyers?

1719 N. Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122 215-204-1857 law@temple.edu

TRIAL ADVOCACY

Temple Law’s New Certificate in Trial Advocacy and Litigation. Herb Kolsby on Persuasive Speechmaking for Adversaries.

Certificate in Trial Advocacy and Litigation Temple Law proudly announces the launch of our new Certificate in Trial Advocacy and Litigation. Grounded in Temple’s ongoing commitment to legal education that bridges theory and practice, the Certificate in Trial Advocacy and Litigation offers a developmental and experiential curriculum, instruction from faculty and advocates who have proven themselves in the field, and live client clinical experiences. Participate in Temple’s award-winning full-year Integrated Trial Advocacy Program Take a minimum of 4 electives from a robust list of advocacy courses Join licensed attorneys in our path-breaking LL.M. program for instruction in Litigation Strategy and Courtroom Performance Serve as trial lawyers in one of 16 litigation clinical placements Learn about cutting edge issues from leading litigators in our Distinguished Advocates’ Lecture Series Gain insight into the courtroom process by serving as jurors, witnesses, and teaching assistants in mock trials and advanced trial advocacy courses Temple Law has long been a leader in training trial lawyers. Our graduates are courtroom ready and litigation savvy. With the addition of the Certificate in Trial Advocacy and Litigation, Temple Law School formally recognizes this accomplishment. Herb Kolsby on Speechmaking Lawyers do two things in courtrooms: They ask questions and make speeches. Only at Temple Law can students take a class dedicated exclusively to one of these acts – speechmaking – taught by one of the best speech makers at the bar. In Speechmaking, Herb Kolsby takes students through every stage of a trial, from voire dire to closing. Along the way, they learn that there are keys to persuasive speech; that lawyers need to become storytellers because juries decide based on the stories they hear; and that the visual, verbal, and vocal aspects of a speech must support the speaker’s goal in making it. Enrollment is capped at 12, therefore students are required to make a speech in every class and then receive direct feedback both during class and in a private session with Professor Kolsby. Students study the fundamentals of speechmaking by applying Kolsby’s model to formal speeches like eulogies before turning to the range of adversarial speeches, from motions and objections to argument, opening, and closing. By the end of the semester, students understand how to persuade their listeners – every time they rise to speak. Professor Emeritus Herb Kolsby ’51 is the former and founding director of Temple Law’s LL.M. in Trial Advocacy program. He is currently of counsel to Kolsby Gordon in Philadelphia and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

I like the idea for the course by Kolsby. But I confess I would like to see more emphasis  on pretrial preparation in the form of informal fact investigation and formal discovery. (To judge by the blurb below, this part of trial lawyering is missing from Kolsby's course.) Trial advocacy without meticulous pretrial preparation is lifeless, it is doomed to fail. But I am probably being unfair: There are other courses in Temple's program in advocacy and some of them probably deal in detail with pretrial fact investigation (which is my favorite shtick, see http://tillers.net/fi-course/fi-home.html).

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FBI’s DNA database upgrade plans come under fire

Paul Rincon FBI’s DNA database upgrade plans come under fire BBC News (Oct. 16, 2011):

A major upgrade of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) DNA database system has come under fire from members of the forensic science community. The Codis system is used to generate the genetic profiles stored in the US national DNA database. The FBI wants to expand the number of genetic markers used by Codis to classify individual DNA profiles. But a former science chief at the bureau says the plan is not being driven by scientists' needs. Dr Bruce Budowle, along with colleagues Arthur Eisenberg and Jianye Ge, outlined the objections at the Promega 22nd International Symposium on Human Identification (ISHI) in Maryland, US. Another scientist told BBC News the changes were vitally important because they would set down how DNA profiles were recorded in the United States for perhaps "the next 20 years".

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Controversy about Law School Data about Students' Employment Prospects Goes (More) National

Mark Hansen, Senators Seek Decade of Detailed Law School Placement, Bar Passage and Student Debt Data ABA Journal (online) (Oct. 14, 2011):

Two U.S. senators have asked federal educational officials to turn over detailed information about law school enrollment, tuition, finances, job placement, bar passage and student debt rates over the past 10 years. In a statement Friday, the two—Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)—said they were acting in response to "serious concerns" that have been raised lately about the accuracy and transparency of information law schools are providing prospective students.

 


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The Brain: Stupid or Smart -- or Something Else?

Some people believe that ordinary people are pretty stupid on the whole and prone to fall into all sorts of cognitive, visual, aural, tactile, etc., illusions & delusions. Camp 1. Some people believe the human brain is a remarkably sophisticated mechanism. Camp 2. Some people are agnostic on the issue of human stupidity v. human intelligence, and some people are indifferent to the issue. Camp 3.

I generally belong to Camp 2 -- while believing (as every sensible person should) that people should use whatever tools are available to augment their extant intelligence and capacities (so that they can build trains, planes, computers, etc., and do calculus, play chess, etc.). See, e.g., "Trial by Mathematics - Reconsidered," http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1798906

Even the NYTimes is beginning to creep (ever so slightly) into this debate. See Christoper Chabris, "Is the Brain Good at What It Does?" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/is-the-brain-good-at-what-it-does.html?pagewanted=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

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Simplicity (it is said) Is Not Always Better Than Complexity

"The dissent, ... (opinion of SCALIA, J.), criticizes the complexity of our approach, but we, at least, are unwilling to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity. Simpler is not always better...." Michigan v. Bryant, 131 S.Ct. 1143, 1162 (2011) (Sotomayor, J., for the Court).

Of course, Scalia's real point was that the majoity's approach in Bryant is unnecessarily complex -- and disordered. But never mind about that: Justice Sotomayor succeeded in making her point in a catchy way.

The issue in Bryant was whether certain pretrial statements were "testimonial" or "non-testimonial" under the Court's current theory of the reach of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right of confrontation in criminal cases. See Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004).

The truly troubling thing about the complex methodology in Bryant is its incoherence: The multiplicity of factors considered by Sotomayor (for the Court) serves as camouflage for the failure of the Court to give any grounds for the factors that Sotomayor and the Court chose to consider. (But this is a pickle that Scalia's opinion in Crawford created: In Crawford Scalia went to great lengths to try to make the reach of the Confrontation Clause independent of its purposes. Scalia effectively thinks that judges who confont confrontation problems should reason that the only purpose of confrontation is confrontation. However, even though some starting premises have to be granted or assumed, Scalia's preference for circular reasoning in this context is not viable: The purposes attributed to or discerned in Constitutional guarantees such as the Right of Confrontation will creep into  judicial discourse willy-nilly More about this point later, dear Reader.)

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QJustice 2012

The planning for the conference QJustice 12, May 22-24, 2012, Lisbon, Portugal, is proceeding apace.

The three general conference topics are:

Module 1: Inference and causality; 
Module 2: Consequentialism; 
Module 3: Distributive justice.

Organizers & program committee members include

Rainhard Z. Bengez, TU Munich, Germany
Lothar Philipps, LMU – Munich University, Germany
Maria Fernanda Palma, FDUL – IDPCC, Portugal
Augusto Silva Dias, FDUL – IDPCC, Portugal
Paulo de Sousa Mendes, FDUL – IDPCC, Portugal
David Duarte, FDUL – Institute of Juridical and Political Sciences (ICJP), Portugal
Rui Soares Pereira, FDUL – IDPCC, Portugal
José de Sousa e Brito, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
José Manuel Aroso Linhares, University of Coimbra Law Faculty, Portugal
Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Law Department, Florence, Italy
Feliciana Tafuri, LMU -- Munich, Germany
 Peter Tillers, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, USA
Joseph Gastwirth, George Washington University, USA
Scott Brewer, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, USA
Vern Walker, Hofstra University, USA

Institutional sponsors include:

Carl von Linde Academy, Technical University of Munich
Institute of Penal Law & Criminal Sciences, University of Lisbon Law Faculty
Portuguese Association for Law Theory, Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Lisbon
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York

Panelists include ... many interesting & important people (stay tuned for details).

Conference papers will be published, some of them in a special issue of Law, Probability and Risk, http://lpr.oxfordjournals.org/

QJustice 12 is part of a series of conferences organized by Rainhard Bengez, under the umbrella of the network "Quantitative Justice and Fairness." See http://www.quantius.org/ The general mission of this network is to address "the use, the limits and mediation aspects of formal/quantitive methods in connection with any of the the following topics:

* Ethics, moral theories and theories of human rights (e.g., assessment as of harms & benefits to other persons; quantitative models of justice and fairness)
* Legal theory (balancing rights and duties; formal and quantitative models of legal argumentation/justification)
* Law (quantification and the application of the law, e.g., compensation for economic harm, for pain & suffering; criminal punishment and deterrence)
* Analytical philosophy (ontology and metaphysics of quantification)
* Science, technology and legal responsibilities (neurosciences and the measurement of mind, assessing environmental and human impacts of dangerous technologies, responsibilities of scientists)
* Mathematics & Computer science (mathematical and computational approaches to model justice and fairness, e.g., game theory, geometry, fractals, etc)
* Evidence (mathematical & statistical analysis of factual inferences in trials; burdens of persuasion and proof)
* Economics (economic and decision-theoretic models of justice and fairness)
* Medicine & Health care (e.g., measuring the quality of medical care; allocating medical resources, etc)
* Theology (views in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc., of quantitative aspects of justice and fairness )
* STS - Science and Technology Studies (e.g. breaking down the black boxes of social behavior and social actions)
* Public Understanding of Complex Decisions and Mediation (e.g. how can a better understanding of our underlying quantitative measures and concepts be helpful in cross-cultural discussions, politics, etc. )

Quantitative Justice and Fairness | ::proportionality//humanity//reasoning//technology::

www.quantius.org

Fuller and Hart Want to Know: What Is a "Sidewalk"?

H.L.A. Hart and Lon Fuller famously discussed whether roller skating in a park amounts to operating a motor vehicle in a park. Cf.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Riding While Under the Influence: Is a Horse a Vehicle?

and

Monday, April 04, 2011

The Hart-Fuller Debate Resurrected: What Is a Vehicle in a Park?

In September 2011 the Is-roller-skating-in-the-park-driving-a-motor-vehicle-in-the-park? hypo took on yet another guise. Marc Weber pointed out a case he was involved in: People v Pena (Joshua) 2011 NY Slip Op 21340 (Sept. 28, 2011). There defendant "was charged with riding a bicycle on a sidewalk in violation of section 19-176(b) of the Administrative Code of the City of New York, upon allegations that he rode the bicycle "on a pedestrian pathway inside the entrance of a [specified] subway station." The prosecutor argued that "'sidewalk' ... encompass[es] all manner of 'pedestrian conduits,' even those 'set back from the street.'" The court rejected this argument:

[W]e agree with defendant that the underlying information was facially insufficient since it failed to set forth, prima facie, defendant's commission of the charged offense. Even if established as true, allegations that defendant was observed riding a bicycle inside a subway station entrance would not make out a legally sufficient case that defendant violated Administrative Code § 19-176(b), an essential element of which is proof that the bicycle riding take place on a "sidewalk," a term narrowly defined in the ordinance as "that portion of the street ... between the curb lines or the lateral lines of a roadway and the adjacent property lines, intended for the use of pedestrians." We decline to adopt the People's broad reading of the term "sidewalk" as encompassing all manner of "pedestrian conduits," even those "set back from the street." Had the City Council intended to extend the definitional reach of the term "sidewalk" in [*2]such an expansive fashion, it would have been a simple matter to include appropriate language to that effect, as it did elsewhere in the Administrative Code (see Code § 7-201[c][1][b] [The Pothole Law], defining a sidewalk to include "a boardwalk, underpass, pedestrian walk or path, step and stairway"]).

This bicycle rider knows that the issue was never in doubt. Nothing in New York City constitutes a "sidewalk" for purposes of bicycle riding in New York City (if, that is, the rider proceeds slowly and cautiously and does not swear at pedestrians who obstruct his [her] path).
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A Useful Perspective on Life from the Late Steve Jobs

Although I was not one of those people who wanted to deify Steve Jobs, he did make a perceptive comment a few years ago:

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.

Yukari Kane & Geoffrey Fowler, Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011 Wall Street Journal (Onloine) (Oct. 6, 2011).
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Criminal Educational Choice; Energy Production in the United States

The following matter is not precisely on topic -- but it is interesting:

Micheal Flaherty The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School Wall Street Journal Onlline (Oct. 1, 2011):

In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year. An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.

The following item is even more off-topic (the topic of evidence and inference) but it is also very interesting:

Stephen Moore How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia Wall Street Journal Online (October 1, 2011):

When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada.

I fancy myself an old-fashioned liberal: I think economic welfare (both of the nation and the individual) is very important. Energy costs are therefore important in my mind.
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Oscar Handlin, Dead; "Anyone Can Be President"

I got thrown out of my high school "Problems of Democracy" class for challenging the teacher when he said that anyone could become President. (I guffawed at the statement.)

Oscar Handlin, the eminent scholar of immigration to the United States, died recently. In the late 1970s he gave a talk to some group at Harvard Law School -- the Law & Humanities Fellows, I believe -- and he said that in America anyone could become President of the United States. I challenged that statement.

I admit it: I was a snotty kid.

But I wasn't wrong to challenge the statements of these two very different eminences was I? (It must be said, however: Oscar Handlin -- unlike my P.O.D. teacher -- was a genuinely warm and courteous person.)

It should be noted that in the U.S.S.R., as it was then, which I despised, anyone could become General Secretary of the Communist Party. It was theoretically possible for that to happen, was it not?

N.B. Henry Kissinger would have faced some special difficulties had he campaigned to be POTUS yes?  I was born in Riga, Latvia, of parents who were not U.S.citizens. So my campaign for the Presidency foundered early, at birth actually.

P.S. My erstwhile high school P.O.D. teacher peddled moral rearmament He did that in the classroom, in a public high school. The days, they were a different then, at least in Columbus, Ohio.

Big Brother by GPS?

I missed this article when it came out: Martha Neil, Secret GPS Tracking of Suspects, Without Warrants, OK’d By Courts ABAJournal (online) (August 13, 2008):

In what one critic describes as a signpost of our "always-on, surveillance society," police departments increasingly have been secretly using GPS, without seeking search warrants, to track the movements of uncharged suspects.

The satellite technology can be highly effective for this purpose: Although authorities are reluctant to discuss their investigative techniques, GPS has apparently resulted, for example, in the arrest of a convicted rapist in Virginia after a series of attacks on women in Fairfax County and Alexandria, the Washington Post reported. "After his arrest on Feb. 6, the string of assaults suddenly stopped." None involved a rape, notes an NBC article. 

A Fairfax police detective had placed the device on the suspect's van, in a few seconds, while it was parked on the public street, the newspaper writes. It apparently helped them catch the suspect Feb. 6 as he was allegedly dragging a woman into a wooded area in Falls Church. He was not charged in any of the prior attacks.





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Juristerei (Legal Rigamarole)

In Goethe's Faust Dr. Faust speaks the following lines when he first appears:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum-
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
...
Bilde mir nicht ein, was Rechts zu wissen,
Bilde mir nicht ein, ich könnte was lehren,
Die Menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren.

A crude prose translation perhaps best conveys Faust's mood and sentiments:

Oh, I've thoroughly and passionately studied
Philosophy, law, and medicine
And also, I'm sorry to say, even theology.

Now here I am, poor fool.
And I'm just as smart as I was before.
I'm called "master" and -- would you believe it -- even "doctor."
For ten years I've led my students around by their noses, up and down, this way and that.
And in the end I see that it is impossible to know anything.
...
I don't fool myself that I know what's right.
I don't fool myself that I could teach anything that would improve or reform mankind.

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So the fellow turns to magic. Hmmm...

Confronting a Forgetful Witness

In  United States v. Owens, 448 U.S. 554 (1988), the United States Supreme Court appeared to hold that the mere presence of a prosecution witness in a criminal trial satisfies accused's Sixth Amendment right to confront that witness -- even if the witness has or feigns no memory of a hearsay statement that the prosecution offers against accused. However, as Colin Miller noted in a blog today, the Supreme Court of Mississippi recently held that this reading of Owens is incorrect and that the mere presence of the witness whose pretrial hearsay statement is used against accused does not satisfy the Sixth Amendment Confrontation Right. Goforth v. State, 2011 WL 4089967 (Miss. 2011). The Mississippi Supreme Court acknowledged that its reading of Owens is a minority view.

Will the prosecution seek review in the United States Supreme Court? If so, will the U.S. Supreme Court grant review? If so, will the U.S. Supreme Court slap down the Mississippi Supreme Court or will it say that its holding in Owens was a mistake -- or will it say, unconvincingly, that Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), impliedly overruled or "undermined" Owens?

• If the Court wishes to take this third tack, it faces the task of explaining why its "plain language" cum history approach in Crawford should not extend to the question of whether a witness can be said to "testify" against a criminal defendant merely by taking the witness stand. (But, having the last word, the Court does not always feel obliged to explain itself. The Court sometimes finds it is more convenient  simply to ignore the plain language and meaning of a prior decision.)

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A Petition for More Transparency about Employment Prospects of Law School Graduates

See this post.
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Charges and Evidence of Lax Screening Practices at Logan Airport on 9/11

Ever since hearing (long ago) that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers had been asked to go through a weapon-detecting device at Boston's Logan Airport a second time after the initial pass-through had triggered an alarm, I had wondered about the claim that the 9/11 hijackings were unforeseeable and unpreventable. I had once lived in the Boston area and on 9/11/2001 (i) I recalled Logan Airport's reputation as a "patronage dump" for superannuated Massachusetts politicians, and (ii) I recalled earlier newspaper reports that some months or a year before 9/11 there had been government tests of the screening process at Logan and that these tests had revealed serious deficiencies in those procedures. Now -- with a trial impending -- we may finally learn more about the screening process at Logan and whether some part of it -- the part run by United Airlines -- was badly run. The lawyer in me, however, cannot resist also asking whether United Airline's prior screening practices at Logan will be admissible at trial.

The upcoming trial in (I gather) the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York concerns the death of "Mark Bavis, a 31-year-old passenger on Flight 175, in the only remaining wrongful-death lawsuit out of nearly 100 filed after the attacks." Benjamin Wesier, Court Filing Details Shortcomings of Airport Screeners on 9/11 NYTimes (September 16, 2011). The NYTimes claims that "documents" filed in this civil action show that "[t]he five terrorists who boarded United Airlines Flight 175 in Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, passed through a security checkpoint that was staffed by some screeners who could not speak or understand English, did not know who Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda were, and, in one case, could not identify what Mace was...." Id.

The following passage in the newspaper article is the one that piqued the lawyer's side of this blogger's curiosity:

The Bavis lawyers, in their filing, contended that United had “a long history of failing to substantially comply with the federal aviation security regulations.” They cited a former United security executive retained as an expert by the plaintiffs, who contended that the airline had failed to heed warnings in the years before Sept. 11 about the need for greater staffing and training.

Will evidence of United's prior screening practices be admissible at trial? Or does such evidence fail to pass muster under Federal Rule of Evidence 406, the federal habit and routine practices rule?

The passage quoted above suggests that counsel for plaintiff plan to try to take advantage of one standard avenue for the admissibility of prior conduct that falls short of being a "habit" or a routine business practice: the other conduct is offered to show notice. This avenue is open in cases in which the law applicable to the case allows notice or foreseeability to be an issue at trial.

A more esoteric argument for admissibility would be that before the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence and Rule 406, federal law  did not bar admission of evidence of non-routine or non-habitual other conduct of "unnatural" persons such as corporations and that, hence, on the question of the admissibility of United's pre-9/11 screening practices and failures, it is quite immaterial whether those failures were or were not "routine." Cf. 1A Wigmore on Evidence Section 98.1 (P. Tillers rev. 1983) (focusing on question of whether evidence of an organization's practices, routine or not, amounts to evidence of "character," which under some circumstances is barred by the "character evidence rule").

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Another Reminder of the Porousness of the Prohibition against Character Evidence

In this prosecution for a variety of crimes, including securities fraud and obstruction of justice, United States v. Polusen, Nos. 08-4218; 09-3658, 2011 U.S. App. Lexis 17715; 2011 Fed App. 0235P (6th Cir. August 25, 2011), the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a character rule challenge to the trial court's admission of defendant's acts amounting to spoliation on the ground that the spoliation evidence, the Court of Appeals held, was admissible to show "consciousness of guilt," which, the Court of Appeals held, is not the same as the sort of "character" barred  by Federal Rule of Evidence 404:

In March 2008, Poulsen was convicted in the Obstruction Case of conspiracy, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice. Prior to his sentencing in that case, Poulsen filed a motion in limine in his Securities Case to exclude certain types of evidence, including his conviction in and the facts underlying the Obstruction Case. The district court denied this motion, holding that the "obstruction conviction and its underlying facts are admissible under Rule 404(b)."

...

Other bad acts are probative and admissible if relevant to prove "motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident." Id. (citing Fed. R. Evid. 404(b)). This list is "neither exhaustive nor conclusive." United States v. Mendez-Ortiz, 810 F.2d 76, 79 (6th Cir. 1986). Our courts admit "spoliation evidence, including evidence that a defendant attempted to bribe . . . a witness," because such spoliation evidence shows "consciousness of guilt." Id.; see also United States v. Anderson, 333 F. App'x 17, 24 (6th Cir. 2009). Poulsen's conviction in the Obstruction Case was supported by evidence of his attempts to pay Sherry Gibson to give favorable testimony. This evidence was not offered to prove Poulsen's character in conformity with this prior bad act but rather was offered as evidence of his consciousness of guilt. The district court was aware of this distinction and clearly stated how Poulsen's "prior acts" were admissible under Rule 404(b): "Evidence of witness tampering was admissible as an 'other purpose' under Rule 404(b) because it 'tends to establish consciousness of guilt without any inference as to the character of the spoliator.'" Because, as the district court recognized, evidence of Poulsen's "attempts to bribe Gibson to testify favorably at his fraud trial is probative of his consciousness of guilt," the evidence was admissible. We take no issue with this finding, and move on to the question of whether the district court abused its discretion in determining that the evidence was not impermissibly prejudicial.

Note that although defendant attempted to raise an entrapment defense, the Court of Appeals did not rely on Federal Rule of Evidence 405(b), which allows the admission of character evidence when character is an element of a claim, charge, or defense. Earlier in its opinion the Court of Appeals  had held that the trial court had properly rejected a request for an entrapment jury instruction because defendant had not presented sufficient evidence at the trial to make his claim of entrapment a triable issue.

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Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Run MarshalPlan 5.0 with Firefox 3.x

Use Firefox 3.x and run MarshalPlan 5.0 in your web browser:http://tillers.net/MarshalPlan.5.0/Web/MarshalPlan.html

This will NOT work with Chrome. And it may or may not work with Internet Explorer.

The browser version of MarshalPlan 5.0 produces spoken versions of some of my explanatory notes.

• The second card in my new order of proof stack does not wish to appear in my Firefox 3.x browser. If this happens to you as well, just click the arrow on this card to go to the next card. I will try to remedy the problem of the missing image on the second card in this stack sometime soon.

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MarshalPlan 5.0

Go to this folder and download and run, from the sub-folders you see there, the version of MarshalPlan that works with your computer's operating system (Windows, MacOSX [Apple], or Linux).



MarshalPlan 5.0 has the beginnings of a stack (file) that you can use to plan the order of proof at a trial or evidentiary hearing, the order of submission of evidence at a trial or hearing.
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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

MarshalPlan Stack to Plan Order of Proof at Trial

I am developing a new MarshalPlan stack.

This new stack is meant to ease the job of figuring out the order in which witnesses will or should testify and the order of the questioning of each witness. This my initial draft of the heart of such a stack:

The following diagram illustrates schematically how planning for the order of proof at trial might work out in a particular case:

Student Misery at Harvard Law School -- Now in the Past?

"For most of the past fifty years, attending Harvard Law School was a miserable experience for the majority of its students." Kevin K. Washburn, "Elana Kagan and the Miracle at Harvard," 61 Journal of Legal Education 67, 67 (August, 2011).
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Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.