Why aren’t medical students trained in ethics the same way law students are? Ethics is required in school and your knowledge of ethics is tested in a stand-alone bar examination before a lawyer can start practicing. Here’s a link to a BMJ article on it. With consent, medical students get to observe most surgical procedures, […]
Causerie Origin: French, 19th century An informal article or talk, typically on a literary subject. “Causerie” is based on the French expression “causer,” meaning to talk, which itself is based on the Latin “causārī,” meaning to debate or dispute.
Law students across the country used to watch video lectures on evidence by the famous Irving Younger (Harvard). I still remember his hearsay lessons – that made the impossible seem within grasp. The best of the Younger tapes was the series on cross-examination. For a kid who never wanted to be anything but a trial […]
I’m reading Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley. The book tells the story of Johnny Cash’s misunderstood politics of empathy. In today’s divisive politics, Republicans and Democrats both claim him as their own. Conservatives view him as a traditional patriot and Liberals view him as a champion of the downtrodden. But the author suggests the […]
Shortly after the storming of the Bastille, late in the evening of 4 August, after a very stormy session of the Assemblée constituante, feudalism was abolished. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) was proclaimed. One of my favorite posts here is one of my […]
From 1920 (pre-internet): The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little […]
For all judges, sovereign and subordinate, if they refuse to hear proof, refuse to do justice: for though the sentence be just, yet the Judges that condemn without hearing the proofs offered are unjust judges and their presumption is but prejudice…In like manner, in ordinary trials of right, twelve men of the common people are […]
If America’s founders hadn’t guaranteed the right to a jury trial in our Constitution, we might look like Canada (who inherited the same English common law and history). Early in the jury system, an accused was required to consent to be tried by a jury. However, the choice was illusory. Coercive methods were used including […]
I originally posted this on Feb. 18, 2018, titled “The Post Horn”. For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by US Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. […]
Friday morning, I was sitting in Pauley Pavilion at UCLA surrounded by thousands of parents for a graduation ceremony (the first of three that day). I’d forgotten how essential these rituals can be. The floor of the stadium was filled with students from the various schools and disciplines who – during their years in college […]
