Cecil Taylor left his body on April 5, 2018, at the age of eighty-nine. While I only infrequently mention the passing of people on this blog, lest it become an obituary blog rather than law blog, Cecil merits this pause to deeply thank and bow...
Fairfax criminal lawyer is back to blogging Blogging returns to this website after my family had a great visit to New Mexico. Fairfax criminal lawyer on tribal courts. The first picture here is the Ohkay Owingeh Judicial Complex/ courthouse at a pueblo only a few miles...
The power of thanks/gratitude, giving/serving and compassion can never be underestimated. They are key ingredients to succeeding as a lawyer, in any other line of work, and in life. They remove us from being self centered and draw us to bring out our greatness....
On October 29, 2017, American Indian Movement co-founding leader Dennis Banks went to the spirit world, as his family recounts, after heart bypass surgery....
Our Virginia criminal lawyer website is upgraded and faster. Thanks deeply to our webmater/graphic designer Rosalina Hansen not only for seamlessly moving our thousands of static and blogpages, and emailing system, to our new sitehost InMotion Hosting but also for...
Donald Trump as president is a sad reality. He was never fit to sit in the White House. He made his money despite his perpetual thin-skinned, undiplomatic name-calling immaturity. Many talented non-Trump-admirers have joined Trump's administration, which might counterbalance Trump's excesses. Thank goodness someone at as high a...
The September 11, 2001, murders, happened sixteen years ago. Terrorists win of terror is allowed to erode civil liberties. Sadly, that erosion continues....
The world is never in shortage of ways and places to help others in dire straits, to save the planet from bellicose and environmental destruction, to improve human rights, and the list goes on. Rarely does it do any good to shine the spotlight on...
John Coltrane (above playing "Alabama", after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing) has inspired me for years to pursue beyond the seeming limits of possibility. I have searched him out through his music, at the house where he lived in Philadelphia, through his longtime pianist McCoy...
The Chinese government's June 3-4, 1989 massacre of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators at Beijing's Tiananmen Square left an indelible mark on me. Yet, as time marches on, I myself lost track of the anniversary of this Chinese government bloodbath. So I observe that anniversary today. ...
Happy Father's Day to all fathers, and to my father, my grandfathers, and the rest of my lineage to cavepeople, apes, and before that. LAW "Ocean City [Maryland] acts to keep women from going topless at beach" - The Washington Post "You have to break the horse to...
Memorial Day -- a day of remembering those American military members who died in war -- is filled with parades, weekends away, pool openings, cookouts, and retail sales. I have experienced my share of military pomp and circumstance, including marching while playing my trumpet in...
One 2014 day when I entered a nearby courthouse, a sheriff's deputy lamented the backlash of public opinion against police after police shot dead Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The unjustified police killings continued, including Eric Garner's death on Staten Island following a police chokehold,...
Richard "Racehorse" Haynes -- nicknamed for his athletic skills and dubbed "Race" for short -- was at the Trial Lawyers College for a day or two during the first week of the program. What immediately struck me about Race was that this trial lawyer who...
Some books stand very much apart from the rest. Three such books that have particularly influenced me are Jack Kerouc's On the Road; which reminds me that adventure and intrigue exist everywhere -- starting within ourselves (which is a fitting lesson from a writer so...
Bill O'Reilly is gone from Fox, likely with a golden parachute. The sexual harassment complaints and settlements rolled in, regardless of how true those accusations were or not. He would cut off the microphones of numerous guests with whom he vehemently disagreed. He blasted Sami...
Any president would have felt in a bind after the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria on its own civilians -- apparently at Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's own order -- between seeming indecisive at not launching a quick and decisive military response, and having that...
A refrain by many people is that it is important to support the office of the presidency and our nationhood by getting behind every new United States president as s/he begins the heavy lifting of the job. That idea, though, is countered by the fact...
Today's Women's March on Washington was a peaceful, positive and uplifting experience. What a counterpoint to yesterday's many Trump opponents who sadly went beyond merely peaceful demonstrating. With hundreds of thousands of people positively mobilized today in the nation's capital and throughout the United States...
I write about the inauguration because I am saddened that this is the first inauguration in my three decades in the capital area when I have heard about violent protest, including rock/brick throwing at police (and here a bottle after the police used mace), vandalism...
