Constitutional provisions come to us “on faded parchment,” and so it goes with the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination.  “No person shall be … compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”  Sounds easy…

It began in 1954, with Kingsley Amis publishing Lucky Jim.  Surely generations of student-turned-professors had already found academia absurd, but nobody had articulated it quite so well.  So, if you find yourself nearly fed up with pretention, manipulation, incompetence,…

If you give the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit thirty thousand words, you get a single per curiam sentence of ‘law’: “The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.”  That’s it.  Eight words out of some…

    On April 11, the U.S. Sentencing Commission adopted proposed amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The amendments will become effective November 1, 2025, unless Congress passes a statute changing them, which is highly unlikely.    The “Reader Friendly” version of the amendments is 682 pages.…

For years, I wrote a lot about the Fourth Amendment and new technologies (see summary in this note 6), so I was very pleased with the inflection point Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), and I…

Classes in Criminal Procedure: Investigation and Criminal Procedure: Adjudication are of course constitutional law… we just smartly don’t title them as such to keep our colleagues from wishing to teach them.  Thus, at some point in some discussion, a student…

In my textbook, I use the classic case of People v. Bisset, 92 N.E. 949 (Ill. 1910), in introducing common-law voluntary manslaughter.  It’s a colorful story of two plainclothes cops in a Chicago saloon that begins (oddly) friendly and…