By way of TalkLeft comes word of this startling government report that federal and state prisons house one of every 138 U.S. residents. The report estimates that 12.6 percent of all black males in their late 20s are in prisons or jails, compared to 3.6 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of…

Deval Patrick, former general counsel to The Coca-Cola Company from 2001 to 2004 and to Texaco from 1999 to 2001 and former assistant AG for civil rights under President Clinton, has launched a Web site in support of his campaign to be the Democratic candidate for Massachusetts governor. No doubt Patrick can afford a…

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the Legal Affairs survey of the top 20 legal thinkers in America is its between-the-lines commentary on the power of blogging. Little surprise that Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and circuit judges Alex Kozinski and Richard Posner…

At ABA TECHSHOW 2005, Jim Calloway, Jeff Flax and I presented our annual wrap-up of practical and not-so-practical Web sites for legal professionals. In case you missed it, the complete list is now available: 60 Sites in 60 Mintues. The list as posted actually includes more sites than we had time…

Steve Terrell, an Indianapolis lawyer who traces his Indiana routes nearly back to its statehood, has launched a blog on law and the practice of law in the Hoosier state, cleverly titled Hoosier Lawyer. I’ve come to know Steve through listservs and conferences and had the honor to be invited by him to speak…

In a posting two weeks ago, I noted the planned launch of Podscope, the first full-text search engine for podcasts. It is now up and running in a beta version.…

I wrote in February about the free public-records search engine Pretrieve. Today, in a development of significance to the legal profession, Pretrieve announced that it has integrated searching of nationwide court records. It covers all state and local courts in the United States that offer Internet searches of case records. When court records…

Back from a week traveling the incredibly beautiful state of Arizona, from Phoenix to Sedona to the Grand Canyon. With a fried modem and only intermittent high-speed access, I learned I can survive a week offline — and better yet, enjoy it. Fortunately, the Grand Canyon is yet to offer WiFi.…

I am traveling much of this week and have made two discoveries. One, high-speed Internet access isn’t always easy to find. Two, it seems my modem is fried. Thus, I am not likely to post for several days.…

A recent study by the Knight Foundation found that high school students know little about the First Amendment — 49 percent say newspapers should not be able to publish stories without government approval, 75 percent think flag burning is illegal, and nearly 50 percent believe the government can censor the Internet. In response, the…

When I was a much-younger lawyer, I had the good fortune to have my own practice in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The federal court there is a court of original jurisdiction, and in the mid-1980s, it was straining under a backlog of cases. I remember learning that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had…

Good news: The ABA Section of Litigation offers a free , weekly e-mail newsletter with litigation tips from James McElhaney, author of a number of books on litigation and case management.

More good news: The section’s Trial Practice Committee has posted to the Web its library of trial practice articles.

Now…