Tag Archives: Law

News

Pregnant woman uses her shotgun to scare burglars out of her home

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From CBS News. (H/T Wes from Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

It’s the last thing two burglary suspects expected to hear when they broke into a Coon Rapids home. From within the house came the unmistakable sound of a pump shotgun. At the other end of that gun was a 22-year-old woman who is nine weeks pregnant.

The young woman asked not to be identified because the two suspects are still at large. However, she says when the men ignored her barking pit bull and black lab, and broke through a kitchen door, she had no other choice but to chamber a round into the 12-gauge shotgun.

There’s perhaps no other sound that commands as much respect and fear. The young woman at the business end of that gun was home alone and prepared to protect herself.

[…]With a single pump of her 12-gauge shotgun, the would-be burglars bolted out the door and through the backyard.

“Yes, a shotgun racking is something you don’t forget if you’ve ever heard one. So, it frightened these two suspects off right away, they took off running,” said Coon Rapids Police Captain John Hattstrom.

They ran across the backyard and into a nearby church parking lot where they were seen getting into a two-door, newer model automobile. But they didn’t escape without notice. The woman was able to get a long look at the two and provided police with a description.

The thing that liberals never understand about legally-owned firearms is that the people who own them are law-abiding people and they would prefer not to have to fire the weapon at all when they have to use the weapon to deter or halt a crime. This is known as peace through strength – the best way to stop an evil person from doing something evil is to raise the cost of doing evil. And weapons in the hands of law abiding people accomplishes that.

For those who would like to know what the Bible says about self-defense, check out this podcast featuring famous theologian Wayne Grudem.

The case for legal firearm ownership… in videos!

ABC News explains in this short 6-minute clip:

And here is a longer 44-minute show from Fox Business: (featuring a debate between economist John Lott and the Brady Campaign spokesman)

There are other debates in the show as well.

News

Leftist ABA rates record number of Obama judicial appointees “not qualified”

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From Judicial Watch.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s quest to transform federal courts by appointing unqualified leftist ideologues is worse than previously imagined, according to a mainstream newspaper that reports the notoriously liberal American Bar Association (ABA) has rejected a “significant number” of potential judicial nominees, most of them minorities and women.

This is hardly earth-shattering news considering Obama’s judicial appointments so far. However, the ABA rebuff sheds light into the magnitude of the president’s crusade to stockpile the federal court system, where judges get lifetime appointments, with like-minded activists. In fact, Obama has made it an official policy to “diversify” the federal bench when it comes to gender, race and even life experiences.

But the White House has agreed not to nominate any candidates deemed unqualified by the ABA, the 400,000-member trade association that provides law school accreditation. Though it claims to be an impartial group of lawyers, the ABA usually takes liberal positions on divisive issues and Democratic/liberal nominees are more likely to receive the group’s highest rating of “well qualified” compared to their Republican/conservative counterparts. This has been documented in various studies, including a recent one conducted by political science departments at three Georgia universities.

With this in mind, one can only imagine how deficient Obama’s rejected candidates really are. Their identities and negative ABA ratings have not been made public, but inside sources tell the paper that broke the story this week that nearly all of the prospects were women or members of a minority group. Nine are reportedly women—five white, two black and two Hispanic—and of the five men one his white, two are black and two are Hispanic.

The number of Obama hopefuls stamped “not qualified” already exceeds the total opposed by the ABA during the eight-year administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the story points out. That means Obama’s rejection rate is more than triple what it was under either of those previous administrations.

I don’t know for sure, but I expect that the nominees would be people like Obama’s friends: the racist Jeremiah Wright, domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn and Marxist Bertha Lewis.

I posted this to highlight another way that electing an unqualified leftist harms the country. It’s no wonder that companies are shipping jobs overseas – what company would want to run afoul of a judge whose only judicial qualification is being a member of politicized left-wing hate groups?

Commentary

Law schools are not preparing law students to practice law

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The New York Times explains why law school may not be worth the money.

Excerpt:

 The lesson today — the ins and outs of closing a deal — seems lifted from Corporate Lawyering 101.

“How do you get a merger done?” asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney.

There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month.

“What steps would you need to take to accomplish a merger?” Mr. Connolly prods.

After a pause, a participant gives it a shot: “You buy all the stock of one company. Is that what you need?”

“That’s a stock acquisition,” Mr. Connolly says. “The question is, when you close a merger, how does that deal get done?”

The answer — draft a certificate of merger and file it with the secretary of state — is part of a crash course in legal training. But the three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree.

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.

“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

[…]Consider, for instance, Contracts, a first-year staple. It is one of many that originated in the Langdell era and endures today. In it, students will typically encounter such classics as Hadley v. Baxendale, an 1854 dispute about financial damages caused by the late delivery of a crankshaft to a British miller.

Here is what students will rarely encounter in Contracts: actual contracts, the sort that lawyers need to draft and file. Likewise, Criminal Procedure class is normally filled with case studies about common law crimes — like murder and theft — but hardly mentions plea bargaining, even though a vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by that method.

[…]“We should be teaching what is really going on in the legal system,” says Edward L. Rubin, a professor and former dean at the Vanderbilt Law School, “not what was going on in the 1870s, when much of the legal curriculum was put in place.”

This is one of the reasons why I give the advice I do about studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Universities are politicized. They are run by people who want to push a secular leftist ideology. For such people, the more isolated you can be from feedback from the real world, the better. And that is why it is often (but not always) useless to study anything that isn’t STEM. If you’re going to the university at all, study STEM areas. That is, if your goal is to actually make money so you can support a family.

So you have two choices, in my view. Trade school/apprenticeship right out of high school. Or study STEM areas in university. That’s it.

A friend of mine who is a software engineer was thinking of doing an MBA a while back, and then decided on a Masters in securities and investing. I think that’s the right way to go. Stay as far away from anything that can be politicized as possible. Don’t give people who are embarked on perpetual adolescence any of your money (than they already get through taxpayer-funded research subsidies).