I am Tom Freeland, a lawyer in Oxford, Mississippi. The picture in the header is my law office. I'm on Twitter as NMissC
I started (co)blogging as NMC in early 2008 on the Folo blog, (with coblogger Lotus); that blog went on hiatus in March, 2009. In 2005, I covered Fifth Circuit cases for the (now defunct) Appellate Law and Practice blog.

Blogroll

Print This Post

The House passed the forensic pathology bill, plus another strange development

Radley Balko has a post with the news about the bill plus a bizarre development, from his Reason blog
First, the good news. The Mississippi House of Representatives has passed the bill requiring anyone doing autopsies in the state to be board certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology. The bill now [...]

Print This Post

RIP Bill Champion, Ole Miss property professor

In my first semester of law school (in 1978), for property, I had Bill Champion for Property (Guff Abbott taught my section Property II).  In that class and upper level classes what he wanted to sound was themes from trusts and the like, and there was a way each class was the particularly subject through [...]

Print This Post

Amy Bishop had bombs in her basement?

Amy Bishop was, of course, the professor at UA Huntsville who shot colleagues at a faculty meeting and, as it turns out, had earlier shot her brother and been investigated when pipe bombs were mailed to a colleague where she was working in Massachusetts.
WAFF in Huntsville is reporting:
HUNTSVILLE, AL (WAFF) – Several [...]

Print This Post

Jim Hood comes out against having qualified forensic pathologists

There is a bill before the state legislature to close an unfortunate loophole and require that any forensic pathologist hired by multi-county districts must be board certified in forensic pathology.  It’s HB 1456.  It’s just short of passage– all that is left is for the House to concur in changes made in the Senate–is backed [...]

Print This Post

Amen (about the “shameful attacks” on lawyers who defended detainees)

I’m going to reproduce this in full, too.  Note some of the names– Ted Olson, Ken Starr.
The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy. As attorneys, former officials, and [...]

Print This Post

The Mississippi Supreme Court debates “We can’t fire him! He quit!” and decides it’s going to fire Bobby DeLaughter, regardless

Today, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that they were going to explicitly remove Judge DeLaughter, and refused to grant the Judicial Performance Commission’s motion to dismiss its proceeding against DeLaughter, a motion based on DeLaughter’s resignation from the bench at the time of his guilty plea.
The majority thinks that this particular case doesn’t just require [...]

Print This Post

SCOTUS blog legal history post about the Supreme Court and civil rights in the late 19thC

The SCOTUS blog is having some posts about the U.S. Supreme Court and race.  One is a nice discussion of two decisions from the 19th Century limiting the scope of the Reconstruction Amendments by Robert Cottrol, a professor of law and history at George Washington University.  It begins:
Chances are if you went to law school [...]

Print This Post

Motorhome Diaries Folks File Motion to Suppress, tort claim letter

The Motorhome Diaries folks have fired their next barrage against Jones County.  First, from an article in the Laurel, Mississippi Leader-Call that sums up the situation:
Pete Eyre, Adam Mueller and Jason Talley were traveling through Jones County on I-59 North on May 14 when they were stopped by Jones County deputies.
In Laurel Justice [...]

Print This Post

“Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee were not acting as fair-minded analysts of the law but as facilitators of a scheme to evade it.”

The editorial page of the New York Times has apparently been thinking through its reaction to the recent OPR opinions as deliberately as I have (note the quote in the title). The lede sentence is haunting to me as a lawyer:
Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers [...]

Print This Post

It all depends on who’s ox is gored: John Yoo and Youngstown

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) is the leading case on presidential power in wartime, and specifically on the president’s authority with regard to congressional power when the nation was at war.  Justice Black’s opinion frames the issue in those terms:
We are asked to decide whether the President was acting [...]