Still here, just busy. I’ve been having a little fun helping out at PD Stuff here and here, while also applying for jobs, searching for jobs, trying to network, oh, and don’t forget getting ready for company. And “testing” my new iPhone. Wow.

Oh, and trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be under construction in the next few weeks, not that it should matter to most readers (the two of you) — I will try not to break the RSS feed. The rough idea is to try to integrate the tumbroglio with the imbroglio, so that everything in my flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, and Google Reader shared items will all appear here seamlessly. No more “bits” in the right column, no more separate place for tweets, just a regular flow of whatever I’m posting wherever it may be. That’s the idea, anyway. Who knows if it’s possible, or rather, if I’m capable of making it so. We’ll see.

But first, it’s gluttony week! Perfect for a nation whose economy is in the toilet because of too much credit, too much borrowing, and basically overconsumption. But that’s a crap way to look at it. Forget I said that and if I don’t get back for a bit, Happy Turkey!

So says a hatchet job article in the Boston Herald. The comments do a pretty good job of pointing out how misleading and inaccurate the article is. It’s sad when something like this can be called “news.”

But and so, what the heck has happened to Public Defender Stuff? It’s been silent for a month and while that’s pretty normal on this here blog, it’s very not normal for PD Stuff. Gideon is still posting regularly on his main blog, which is good, but… I miss PD Stuff. Anyone know what’s going on?

Jason Kottke’s musing about timeline twins and the subsequent comments is some fun mind candy for a Sunday morning. As one of the comments says, “The fact that it’s been 32 years since I first heard The Ramones is mind-blowing to me.” It’s only been 22 years for me, but still. Wow.

Several comments (here and here) discuss whether “we” (meaning thirty- or forty-somethings and younger) have changed the way we relate to popular culture compared to our parents. “Imagine still listening to the music of your youth?” one writes. “These days we evolve and move on. And are in fact terrified of hanging on for too long to any one moment in history.”

That is both a fascinating and terrifying possibility. The first thought that springs to mind is that “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” I think it’s true that we have become much more of a transient culture than that of previous generations; we do live through the moment, then move on to the next w/little thought about what has come before. How else could we get into the current financial crisis other than by paying no attention to the long-term, to the lessons of the past, and living only in the now?

The thing is, I find myself looking back constantly. Sometimes the urge is stronger than at others, but I have two big boxes of cassettes — yeah, cassettes — that I keep because they have music I don’t have in any other format and which I don’t want to forget. I dream of digitizing all (or most) of these cassettes so that I can listen again whenever I want and with ease to the music of my youth. Does that make me a weirdo? Am I out of touch w/”my generation”? Hmph.

It’s all fun to think about, though. I love this one: “Mathew Broderick lip synching The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” (1964) in the parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) would be like someone lip synching Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” in a movie in 2008.”

Damn.

One of my favorite blawgs in the last year or two seems to have disappeared. Woman In Black was an experienced public defender in some western state who shared great insights about her practice, constitutional law, and also some details of her particular state’s law and practice. This all came with frequent and funny anecdotes about her personal life — children, dates, movies, etc. She had a great mix and I always enjoyed catching up on her posts.

So imagine my dismay when I visit today to find Blogger saying, “Sorry, the blog at womanwearingblack.blogspot.com has been removed.” What!? Google shows that her last post on Nov. 5 suggests that she has decided not to be a woman wearing black any longer:

One of the heaviest things, mentally and emotionally, about the job is that I am responsible for my clients in so many ways. Yeah, we all know we are supposed to “counsel” and “advise” and “assist” in decision-making, but that’s really bullshit when you are talking about our clients. How many times a week do you get asked, “What should I do?” or told “If that’s what you think, I’ll do it.” or even “Tell me what to do.” But then there is the segment of clients you simply can’t tell ANYTHING to, or at least they won’t hear what you are telling them. So, my poorly-drawn analogy is that America is like the public defender client base. And now Obama is responsible. So I wore black just about every day for the last eight years and now I don’t have to. It is oddly liberating.

That’s cool (and a good example of her styleâ��frank, smart, always w/an edge of humor), but this doesn’t mean she has to stop blogging! Please Woman In Black, come back!

Everybody in the public defender world is talking about the NYT article from last week about PD offices refusing cases because they don’t have enough resources to adequately handle all the clients being assigned to them. It’s sad, and something rather difficult to understand. What are we saying to these people? “I’m sorry, you do have rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution but we just can’t afford to honor those rights at the moment. Maybe if you find yourself penniless and accused of a crime in a few years things will be better.”

I’m sure Scoplaw might have much more to say about this if he weren’t in the middle of it. I can’t fault any of these offices around the country who are refusing cases for lack of resources, but what I don’t understand are judges who are ruling that this is ok. It’s not ok, not by any stretch of the imagination. I guess at the moment the judges, like the PD offices, have little choice. But where are the lawsuits from the ACLU or other groups against state and local governments for failing to meet their constitutional obligations? Times are tough, but this is one governmental function that can’t just be cut â�� especially when we’re not cutting the ranks of cops and prosecutors.

Meanwhile, public defenders in Minnesota are moonlighting to make ends meet. (Not that I’m in favor of paying PDs any less anywhere, but the salary mentioned for Ms. Sherman is more than I was making and her monthly loan payments are half of what I have, so what is she doing with her money?)

One thing is certain: Now is a very bad time to be looking for a job as a public defender.

This is news that never gets old: Obama won! Ok, so it’s not news. You know this. As usual, I’ve been scooped. Still, I can’t get over it. Amazing.

And yet… He’s not a magician. He’s not our saviour. And there’s only so much a president can do. Obama is planning to reverse a bunch of the Worst President Ever’s policies, but it’s not like he can wave a magic wand to make that happen.

I’m excited. I am. And very glad. But I’d rather keep expectations low and be pleasantly surprised than hear a chorus of denunciations against Obama six months or a year from now when his administration has failed to meet my unrealistically high hopes. It’s exciting and amazing enough that he won.

He won! Yeah!

The mind boggles at what is going to happen next Tuesday. Will we wake up next Wednesday to President Obama? The polls suggest “yes,” but what do polls mean in an age off electronic voting?

Yeah, I’m paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?

Honestly Obama’s 30 minutes of prime time tonight bothers me. What is he doing? Things appear to be going his way. Is now the time to do something so odd, ostentatious, and almost unprecedented? I’ve heard comparisons to Ross Perot; he apparently did something like this in 1992. Of course, Obama is in an entirely different position now than Perot was then, but I still just have this bad feeling that this tv spot is going to backfire, making Obama look cocky or giving him the opportunity to say/do something that is going to change the momentum. How could viewers not be disappointed? We’ve heard so much about this tv special there’s no way it could live up to expectations. So how can that sort of disappointment â�� “Oh, he was fine, but he didn’t really say anything that blew my doors off” â�� how can that be good for his campaign?

But I know nothing. Just thinking out loud.

On the up side, it’s fun to hear reporting and punditry about the in-fighting and recriminations beginning w/in the Republican party. NPR just featured a Republican complaining that the Republicans have become just like the Democrats in the past six years or so, there’s no difference between the parties, he’s disgusted w/the Republicans, they deserve to lose for abandoning their values, etc. It’s funny b/c that’s exactly the criticism Democrats and others further left were making back in 2000. Remember Nader’s tweedledee and tweedledum argument?

It’s sort of fascinating to look back at that whole argument now. I admit I bought it. Back in 2000 I was disgusted w/the Democratic party. I even (gasp!) voted for Nader. (But note: I lived in a state that went solidly for Gore; had I lived in a swing or Republican state, I might have voted differently.) I agreed with the argument that Democrats deserved to lose if they weren’t going to take strong stands on the issues that were really important to them. I believed, w/Nader, that a Democratic loss would teach us all a lesson and make the Democratic party stronger for the next elections.

It turned out I was wrong. It didn’t take long after Bush was installed as pResident for us to be reminded of the differences between him and what Gore likely would have done, and we all know what happened in 2004. Instead of Democrats learning their lessons and coming back strong in 2004, we got another four years of Worst President Evar.

Now we’re a week away from possibly changing things. Not that I’m counting chickens here, but I don’t know what I’ll do if McCain wins. What I do know is that if the shoes change feet, so to speak, and Republicans continue to be the ones dismayed and despairing about their party and the future b/c their party just lost the election, well, I won’t be losing any sleep over that. What goes around, kiddies…

Sadly, it looks like I won’t be able to get into the big election night rally downtown. Tickets are already gone.

One of the “benefits” of being a member of the ABA (I’m pretty sure my membership has expired, but whatever) is their weekly email of legal news headlines. Today’s email brought great news about the legal job market. For example, Jenner & Block asked 10 partners to leave, a PR firm is advising law firms on how to write layoff memos, another firm is rumored to have laid off 80 associates in the last nine months, some talking head says the legal economy is going to be twice as bad as the most extreme predictions, and law students are being advised to have backup plans (and backup backup plans) b/c they are heading into “a grim hiring market.”

Yeah.

So this is the context in which I just quit my job and am now looking for a law job in a state where I do not yet have a license to practice. If you always suspected I was utterly brilliant, wonder no more! I am obviously a genius!

The good news is that I’ve never found that the “news” or advice from the ABA has been very relevant to me as law student or lawyer. Like the law school I attended, the ABA is focused largely on BigLaw, and BigLaw is not where I have any interest in being. I’m going to be fine.

Oops! Gotta run! I’m late for my shift at Starbucks!

Golden Gate University Law School Professor Peter Keane is featured on today’s edition of This I Believe on NPR. The good professor was the chief assistant public defender in San Francisco for 20 years and he believes that “everyone, no matter what they have done, deserves to have one person on their side.”

Me, too, Professor Keane, me too.

It’s a great essay. I highly recommend it. Professor Keane makes a good case for the layman who asks of public defenders: “How can you defend those people?” It reminds me of one of the best answers I’ve ever heard to that question, which comes from Blonde Justice, with some further interesting discussion of the question itself. Also highly recommended.

Perhaps these discussions resonate with me at the moment because, well, right now, I don’t defend those people. Currently I am unemployed. For personal reasons I have moved to Chicago and am now searching for a job. I would like nothing more than to continue to be a public defender, so if any reader out there has any connections, however tenuous, with anyone in the Chicago criminal defense community, please let me know!

Earlier this week Justice Roberts took pains to call attention to the fact that he wants to reduce the level of evidence and suspicion necessary for cops to stop a suspected drug buyer. The SCOTUS denied certiorari in Pennsylvania v. Dunlap (see the last paragraph of that article), in which the Commonwealth of PA appealed its high court’s decision that cops did not have probable cause to stop a dude after observing him make a quick, hand-to-hand exchange of something small for something else small. The cops argued it was a cash for drugs exchange and Roberts emphatically agreed that the cops had plenty of reason to stop the guy and investigate after seeing this transaction from a distance. In fact, Roberts wants so badly for the world to know he thinks cops should be able to act on hunches that he wrote an attention-grabbing collection of sentence fragments to say so. Awesome.

Last night in the presidential debate John McCain kept repeating: Elections have consequences. Roberts’ dissent in this case shows once again how true that is.

More here and here from Orin Kerr and his readers.