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One day I was speaking with a taijiquan teacher about yelling people. He replied: “Why try to figure them out? It is just wind.” That advice is great for staying powerfully calm and unrattled in the face of someone exploding in an unjustified tirade. However,...

Law school is not for everyone. I found law school in large part to be a necessary, time-consuming and money-consuming pain in the ass — and sometimes worse — for finding a way to use the law to help make the world a better place....

Depending on the judge I get for my case, my response runs from hoping I have misread the judicial assignment, to figuring the judge is better than some and worse than others, to raising my hands in joy to the sky. When one of the first...

A colleague who has known many local judges since childhood and through the old boy/girl network recently told me that half the judges he knows in a particular county do the work out of a sense of public service, with numerous of the remainder dreading...

Recently — I think in one of Ram Dass’s two recent books — I was re-reminded how important it is not to take others’ seeming trespasses personally. For instance, if person A is yelling at person B, that may be more of a manifestation of...

Judy Clarke stands behind the late Bob Rose (who is wearing an eyepatch), and two people to the left of my trial law hero Steve Rench. The rest of the photo is here. (1995, Thunderhead Ranch, Dubois, Wyoming); I am pictured around four people to...

Do jurors — and judges when sitting as factfinders — want to be talked at monotonously like all the adults in Peanuts? Do they want to be whined to like George Zimmerman’s prosecutor did in closing argument? Or, do jurors and judges as factfinders want...

My close friend and teacher Trudy Morse — a great grandmother who learned many key life lessons before I ever was born — once wrote in thanks to those who supported her along the path of life. Local taijiquan teacher David Walls Kaufman, who very generously...

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”- Ben Franklin. Prosecutors’ offices likely share with each other on email listservs and at conferences to help make each other better prosecutors. Plenty of criminal defense lawyers do the same, and...

Good lawyer training sessions teach lawyers to persuade jurors by being in the roll of the thirteenth juror — figuratively in the jury box with the jurors, being an “us” rather than an other with the jury. This path is a two-way street, starting with...