I hardly ever pick up a newspaper, and when I do, I usually spend my time looking at the office supply circulars, but today I read an article. Midway through the article I found this gem:
It was such a chuckle-headed move that no one was sure whether the prosecutors had forgotten teh jduge's ruling or were trying to sneak the testimony through a back door.1
The article discusses the recent Roger Clemens mistrial, a result of the prosecution doing pretty much exactly what the judge told them not to do. Obviously the case is bigger than the quote, but I really like the term "chuckle-head" and was excited to see it used in the NYT. If you want to read more about the case, read the article, and read this post.
This post will soon be buried in updates with the cases I've been meaning to post, so, if you don't want to read a post on books, office supplies, and other nonsense, you can stop here. It won't hurt my feeling.
Between now and the last time I wrote about what I'm reading, I picked up more books. They are:
- The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)
- Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (3rd Edition)
- Logic for Lawyers : A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking
- Winning on Appeal: Better Briefs & Oral Argument
- New York civil appellate practice (West's New York practice series)(I got this new for 16 bucks or so)
- Federal Civil Judicial Procedure and Rules, 2011 ed.
That's it for the law books.
I also bought and read the new Erik Larson book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, and like his other books, it did not dissapoint. I know I give horrible book reviews, but they aren't really book review–more like, hey, this is what I'm reading. Before that, I read Extreme Fear, by Jeff Wise. Lately I've been keeping a list–in one of my many notebookls–of the books I want to read. It's a short list, but I think it is a good one:
- The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
- The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown and Hampton Sides
- The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
- My Friend the Mercenary by James Brabazon
- Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes
- SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper by Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin
- Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell
- Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
- The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
- Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
And in the office supply department, I picked up a few Whitelines notebooks. I used to be all about the Rhodia, but now I'm torn.
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1. July 17, 2011. NYT, Sunday Review, "Why are prosecutors striking out," Maureen Dowd. I might fix the cite later.
bruteforcelawyer.com 