Back from the West Coast

It was a fun week in San Francisco (I can't believe I missed the Father Cutié drama)...

I see the blog was in good hands while I was away. Rick was great and we hope to have him back on a regular basis.

Just a couple of quick hits before we get going for the week:

-- The Liberty City 6 jury (the latest version of it) will continue deliberating this week. That case is truly jinxed... (In his post on last week's LC6 happenings, Rick missed Mike Tein -- who, of course, is the most quotable lawyer in the District -- from the Blum article: "What a shameful waste of our taxes at the worst possible time. Just think what $10 million could have done for our schoolchildren in Liberty City.")

-- The District now has a Wiki page. It's interesting to look at the historical makeup of the Court. (Some trivia pointed out on the page: "This federal district has the dubious distinction of having had more judges removed through impeachment than any other district, with a total of two, one-third of all federal district judges so removed.")

-- Justice O'Connor had this to say about judicial elections: "They're awful. I hate them." More here.

-- Rick posted on the FIU faculty vote for Dean, and FIU law professor Howard Wasserman has a lot to say about the vote and the coverage here. Howard criticizes the open proceedings and compares it to watching sausages being made. Gotta disagree with Howard here -- we wanna know how sausages are made. Open proceedings are a good thing. Better to have the press in there and reporting (even if the coverage in this case wasn't complete) than the alternative of having the doors closed.

-- Rumpole demonstrates why the Ben Kuehne case needs to be dismissed.