Legal Writing
The Association of Alternative News website features an interview with my friend, Boston civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate about his work as a columnist. Harvey is the co-founder, with Alan Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on whose board I serve. Here's the beginning of the interview:
A lot of professionals are frustrated in their jobs because of what they see as corruption or incompetence in their field. Do you use your column to vent your frustration with your own field of work, the criminal-justice system?
Absolutely, and I'd say that's the main thing that I do with my column. What I find particularly galling is the extent to which reporters are taken in by prosecutors, to which they're taken in by courts. A court writes an extremely dishonest opinion where it mischaracterizes the facts of what happened, and the reporters never go to the record. They simply take the appeals court's word for it or the prosecutor's word for it, and I find that to be extremely aggravating.
When the Supreme Court came down with its Guantanamo "enemy combatant" opinions, in all the newspapers, I didn't read any reports that dissented from the judgment that the Supreme Court had struck down the Bush administration and rebuked it by insisting that it had to hold hearings for these "enemy combatants"; that they couldn't just snatch them off the street and put them away forever without any kind of hearing, trial, charges, nothing. If you read the controlling opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor closely, you saw that the nature of the hearing was a complete illusion and that under the rules that the Supreme Court set for what these hearings were supposed to be, no defendant could ever possibly win, ever.
Harvey's publications archive is on his website here.