Unspun™

As any of you who have been here before probably can see, Unspun™ is undergoing a transformation. I’m changing from MovableType™ to WordPress™.

Until then, of course, the usual beautiful images, links, etc., aren’t here. It may take weeks, since my law practice sometimes interferes with my ability to spend time on the blogging stuff, but I’ll get everything ported over sooner or later. The articles themselves should still be here (although no longer with the links that were known to Google. Alas, I’ll have to live with that. My readership dropped so much after what A-plus.net did to me a couple years ago anyway that it probably doesn’t matter.

Time to rebuild.

Stay tuned.

According to a recent statement reported by the Washington Post, Curt Furbrain — I’m sorry, I think that might actually be Furberg — is advocating for warning labels on ADHD drugs, stating, “I am sure there are patients who need these drugs, but it is not 10 percent of all 10-year-old boys.”

Either the Washington Post is leaving out significant chunks of its stories, or there is no basis for making this comment. Imagine someone saying, “I’m sure there are patients who need diabetes medication, but it is not 10 percent of all 65-and-older adults.” (Hint: It’s actually 22 percent.)

The claim is that ADHD drugs can cause heart attacks. If true, maybe we do need some kind of warning on ADHD drugs. I don’t know. But what I do know is that 1) there is no basis for the statement Furbrain made and 2) given the choice of suffering from ADHD all your life, or possibly having a heart attack if you are treated with medications, a large number of people I know with ADHD would probably risk the heart attack. I know I would.

Even more interesting, though, is that the Washington Post article says nothing — yep, that’s right, nothing — about either the percentage, or the actual number, of people who will have heart attacks because of drugs like Ritalin. In fact, there’s no indication whatsoever in this article that anyone, particularly not any 10-year-old boys, has suffered a heart attack after taking ADHD drugs.

And while I don’t necessarily think pharmaceutical companies are bastions of honesty and openness, the makers of Ritalin are quoted in the article as stating that they “saw no more evidence of a higher rate of heart problems in people taking its drug.” Almost nine million prescriptions for another ADHD drug, Adderalll, were written last year; yet, again, there is no mention of the number of heart attacks, if any.

Instead, the article merely notes that the number of prescriptions for adults is on the rise.

Sometime after the mid-1930s, the number of people taking Prontosil — essentially the first “sulfa drug” to combat bacterial infections — began to rise dramatically. (I won’t say “number of prescriptions for adults began to rise,” because my recollection is that Prontosil didn’t require a prescription when it first came out, but I could be wrong.) Nevertheless, the number of people who survived bacterials infections after the invention of Prontosil was rather dramatic. Although there were possibly people who died from allergic reactions to the drug, or other side effects, the number of people who survived wound infections (or just armpit boils) was astronomical after the discovery of antibacterial drugs. (Okay, the armpit boil is cheating, because that was 1871, and a carbolic substance, rather than sulfa, was used. — it was still antibacterial and a new discovery which resulted in less people dying from “simple” things like armpit boils.)

Like I said, it may very well be that there is some scientific basis for requiring warning labels on ADHD drugs. My complaint here isn’t about that question per se.

What I’m complaining about is the state of reasoning today. Why in the world do we accept statements like “the number of prescriptions for X is on the rise” as proof that warning labels should be required for X?

The real problem is this: The number of government agencies recommending more control over the lives and choices of citizens is on the rise — I think we all political appointees should come with a warning: “May be hazardous to the exercise of rational thought.”

Or something.

I really don’t know how many times I’m going to beat my head against a wall before I just give up and realize that the United States Constitution is dead. And that no one cares.

These days, anything the police wish to do is not only justified, but considered a-ok, no problemo, what-the-hell-are-you-complaining-for?-we’re-just-trying-to-keep-everyone-safe. Anderson Cooper goes so far as to complain about stupid people (kids, in this case) who “waste time” by protesting the abuse of their civil rights.

In my job as a defense attorney, I’m having to file motions to obtain the most basic of my clients’ rights. People who have been arrested, apparently, no longer have them. Just because they were arrested. Forget preliminary examinations; forget trials; forget due process of law. Our nation no longer follows the rule of law. Instead, we have the rule of law enforcement. And anything goes.

Sheriff wants to put intercom systems into all interview rooms where attorneys meet with clients, so they can listen in at the flip of a switch? So what. It’s for “safety” purposes. Police want to invade parties because they see kids drinking from red cups? So what. “Safety” is the issue. Our President wants to invade countries that have not attacked the United States? So? Again, it’s safety.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if safety actually mattered. But it doesn’t. “Safety” is the pretense that allows the State to do whatever it wants. The State may violate any law — it matters not that the laws may have been enacted hundreds of years ago to constrain the State.

No one, no law, no Constitution must stand in the way of “safety.”

Yes, it’s true. Although he didn’t use that exact phrase. Instead, when a reporter mentioned to Cheney that two-thirds of Americans though the war in Iraq was not worth it, he responded, “So?”

Hey, he and his minions got their war and, with it, millions of dollars for themselves and their cronies. Who gives a damn what the American people think?

I really thought abut titling this post, “Why America Is In Decline” and then talking about our abysmal lack of ability to do simple things like count. Or perhaps we could talk about how the news media fails to report the news in a way that makes sense — and we forget to call them on it.

Or it could just be one more stupid cop.

“There was somewhere between six (million) and 16 million of them running around out there,” Officer Steve Merchant of the California Highway Patrol told CNN. — CNN.com, ” Now, that stings! Escapee bees swarm a.m. commute” (last visited March 17, 2008).

Anyone who reads the story will soon realize that either the cop is wrong, or there were more bees present on Highway 99 near Sacramento than exist in the entire United States.

In the United States, the honeybee, the world’s premier pollinator, experienced a dramatic 40 percent decline, from nearly six million to less than two and a half million, in the last two decades. — CNN.com, ” Now, that stings! Escapee bees swarm a.m. commute” (last visited March 17, 2008).

The story, however, reported the cop’s statement as if it were true, without pointing out this discrepancy.

(more…)

Wow. This is truly amazing.

Last year, I got on a health kick. I stopped drinking carbonated beverages.

I never knew I had this much power, though!

Interesting article from the ABA Journal on how judges — like many other intelligent people — rely upon intuition to get things wrong.

The article focuses on trial judges, as opposed to the norm of studying appellate judges. That makes it interesting to many of us in and of itself. The most interesting part of the article focuses upon three questions — and how the judges in different areas of the country answered it.

The questions are posed in such a way that an “intuitively right” answer leaps to mind almost immediately. When judges got it wrong (which was scarily often), they usually did so because they relied upon their intuition. In answering the first question, which is deceptively quite easy to answer, more than 88% of those judges who got it wrong came up with the “intuitively correct” answer. The second question seems harder, which subconsciously clues the reader that intuition might not be a good way to go. In that case, more than 57% of the judges who got it wrong gave the “intuitively right” answer. And, on the last question — and this really scared me because the correct answer virtually screamed itself out to me — 85 out of 125 judges who got it wrong (68%) did so because they jumped to what the article said was the “intuitively right” answer. (As I indicated, another answer, which was the correct one, seemed “intuitively right” to me. So that any judge got it wrong worries me.)

Most interesting of all is that the judges who got things wrong by going with the intuitive answer were more likely to say that the question was easy. I guess one lesson to take away from this is that if a judge thinks the answer is “easy” and disagrees with you, you’re going to really have to work to explain why his intuitive response is wrong.
Another point of note: gender, age and political affiliation had nothing to do with whether the judges got it right or wrong on this. The mistakes were across the board.

The article explored the ways in which the seductiveness of the “intuitively right” answer shows up in court. More complicated problems, like intricate, rule-bound Fourth Amendment search and seizure analyses, tend to produce less of a tendency to rely upon an intuitive answer for many (*sigh* not all) judges. I would suspect this also means that careful exposition which closely and methodically draws the link between the facts and the law in suppression motions would be more likely to obtain a positive result than those which are conclusory in nature. On the other hand, “vivid fact patterns” (the phrase is from the article), upon which prosecutor’s not infrequently rely in criminal cases, have a tendency to provoke an “intuitive” response.

Finally — because if I keep going with this summary, you might as well read the article yourself (not that you shouldn’t; it’s just that you don’t need to do so, in effect, twice!) — the article looks at how we might overcome the tendency to intuition. Minimizing “spur of the moment” decisions, not surprisingly, is first on the list for how to overcome this tendency. Evidentiary issues tend to provoke the intuitive response and are often decided in the heat of trial; pre-trial motions on anticipated evidentiary issues can help. I’m not sure how we’d get trial judges to do this, but WRITTEN opinions provoke a more deliberative response. Asking for reasons can help.

As the article itself states in closing, “[C]ogent legal judgments call for deliberation. Justice depends on it.”

A posting on SOLOSEZ, one of the few listservs I have time to read these days after following some of the tips in “50 Ways to Market Your Practice,” informs me that Above the Law thought that compilation was pretty pathetic because it didn’t list blogging as one of the 50 ways. I noticed that Home Office Lawyer jumped on the bandwagon as well.

Maybe it’s me who’s missing something, but I didn’t notice that the list was called “The ONLY 50 Ways to Market Your Practice.”

Several attorneys I know maintain blogs. They don’t mention their blogs every time they give someone advice on marketing.

At one time, I was a quite avid blogger. These days, though, by using some of the tips listed on the “50 Ways to Market Your Practice”, I’ve found myself too busy to blog much. In fact, it’s a struggle to find time to read a few good blogs, since so many of them can take two-to-three paragraphs to say things like, “You should blog” — and many of those blogs don’t add much more useful information to my day than that. (This comment is not meant to disparage Home Office Lawyer, which has had some interesting posts on the iPhone, using blogs productively (including discussions of ghostwriting), fixed fee issues and so on; I was just using this one post as an example.)

My wife is already complaining about being a “law widow.” I can’t imagine what would happen if I added time for blogging to the mix!

Besides, not all attorneys are good writers. (A great deal of my current practice is writing for other attorneys who either don’t like writing, or rightly consider that their skills lie elsewhere.) I don’t see anything wrong with giving those attorneys tips they can use, instead of having every list out there tell them they have to write a blog.

On top of that, a good argument could be made that blogging — or “blawging,” as the effete seem to prefer — is far from the best use of one’s marketing dollars and time. Most blogs don’t have much of a readership. My own blog, before Aplus screwed things up for me, had 250 readers per day. That was after three years of writing. Sure, my name often appeared at the top of the list when people searched for information on topics written about in my blog. But 250 readers per day, if your goal is getting the best bang for your buck advertising-wise, isn’t much, especially when you consider that not all those readers will be living close enough to you to want to retain your services. And most “blawgs” won’t have that level of readership.

(On the other hand, pay Lawyers.com or Findlaw.com a little chunk of change and you’ve got your Internet presence and potential clients in your area will find you when they’re looking.)

Seen in that light, the tips on “50 Ways to Market Your Practice” make a lot more sense. They’re “local” suggestions:

• Join your local Chamber of Commerce…
• …write an article for your local paper…
• …get a local reporter to use you as a legal expert.
• …and so on.

In addition, numerous other tips on the list have “local” impact in that they’re targeted at doing things involving people you’ve actually physically contacted, such as when the list suggests “Get a unique business card and hand it out freely” or “Send holiday cards to everyone you meet and keep the list growing.”

Blogging can be fun. It can be a wonderful outlet, too, for those who love to write. And it can be useful as a piece of your marketing plan.

But criticizing the ABA list — compiled from suggestions of successful solo practitioners — because it didn’t include blogging or “blawgs” is like criticizing someone because they didn’t mention that one way to get from Cleveland to California is by car. Sure, that works. But airplanes are oh-so-much-more efficient.

Erwin Chemerinsky is one of the most renowned of constitutional scholars; he’s been rightly called a “demi-god.”

U.C. Irvine is apparently trying to get a new law school off the ground. I say “apparently,” because they’re sure going about it in a funny way. They may have shot themselves in the foot before they started: last week, one week after hiring him to be the new Dean of the proposed law school, they fired him because of pressure from Orange County conservatives. Apparently, they suddenly realized Chemerinsky was “a liberal.” And god knows we can’t have them running our law schools!

Rumor has it they may lose their ABA accreditation before they even get it.

But they’re working on fixing things. Like so many other recent stupid political moves, they’re trying to convince Chemerinsky that they’ve changed their minds again and want to re-hire him.
Where did the fiction that the neo-cons were smart ever get any traction?

I’m not sure this post is appropriately titled, particularly since at least part of the inspiration for it is an armless woman, Venus de Milo. More accurately, the re-evaluation of the time period in which she was created is the inspiration for this post.

(more…)