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Happy 2010 to Prawfsblawg readers. Starting this week, I have a number of substantive posts planned. In my next post I will initiate a dispute with Paul Horwitz on the question of whether criminal torture prosecutions (such as John Durham's, if it comes to that) undermine or strengthen democracy. First, though, I feel I should offer a brief introduction, because I think I am not alone in wanting to know something about the person writing a blog post when I read it. Or if I'm wondering whether to read it. I am not an established academic presence, so I think I owe readers that courtesy. If you don't want to look at it, don't look at it. The future of our democracy can wait one more day. After all, it had to wait until January for me to defend it.

 I'm thirty-six. I'm a professor at Southwestern Law School in LA. I teach evidence and criminal procedure as my core courses. Next year I'm going to add a course on sentencing, and probably a seminar on drug policy. I was a federal prosecutor in San Diego for two years. I kicked ass...  Before that I clerked (Third Circuit) and then ran an immigration appellate clinic for a year while teaching at Cal Poly Pomona. I kicked ass there too. Cal Poly Pomona is part of the Cal State system. My appointment there was in the philosophy department. Before I went to law school I was a philosophy professor. My Ph.D. is from Columbia, and I spent a year in Texas (at Stephen F. Austin State) and year in Michigan (at Lake Superior State) teaching, before going to law school. I taught as much literature as philosophy, given the vicissitudes of general-education humanities curricula.

Dispositionally, I'm a fox not a hedgehog. My dissertation was about the relationship between 17th-century scientific and religious disputes. At Columbia I taught the "great books" Homer-to-Virginia Woolf classes for two years; at Lake State I taught a (fun) required "history of western culture" class. I went to Georgetown for law school because my wife was getting her Ph.D. there, and I came to SoCal (hence Cal Poly, San Diego, and now Southwestern) because she got a job at UC-Riverside. I like Southern California. I'm glad her job is here and not someplace where I wouldn't want to live or couldn't find a job.  At Georgetown I was the big boss of the law review. My subordinates are now all richer and more powerful than I am. I remain better looking.



As for what I plan to write about here, I'm a pretty straightforward criminal law/criminal procedure/evidence person. I will also have some comments about immigration law since I have also practiced in that area and know something about it, and since as things stand it's inextricably intertwined with criminal law.  I don't believe in bullshitting about subjects I haven't thought deeply about. I will not do that here.

I have a foul mouth. It was useful professionally. I keep it in check in my writing. I'm not a huge reader of blogs. The only ones I look at every day are Doug Berman's (Sentencing Law and Policy), Volokh (mostly for Orin Kerr, who also used to have a good solo blog) and Scotusblog. I also like Grits for Breakfast, though I look at it less frequently, likewise Ellen Podgor's White Collar blog. Of course one looks every so often at How Appealing, and I also like the Ninth Circuit blog run by Shaun Martin at USD. I have also started reading this blog.



I've published a few articles; they're listed on the Southwestern web site. I will not comment here on their brilliance and orginality. I have a few articles in the pipeline at the moment. I will blog about them here in hopes of incorporating colleagues' insights.

I'm a musician. Springsteen's (and Conan's) drummer Max Weinberg was about to go to law school when the E-Street Band became a full-time gig. It was an easy choice, he said: the world needs musicians more than lawyers. I'm with Max, but Bruce hasn't called.



Most of my free time is spent raising my kids. I assume this is true of many prawfs readers. Solidarity, brothers and sisters.



I think it's socially unhealthy to define ourselves by our careers; I have investigatory and aesthetic objections to the standard newspaper formula "...the deceased, a 35-year old bricklayer from Riverside..." When I die, I want to have created a work of art, not busted some perp or written some article.



I agonized a bit over leaving the best job in the practice of law. But it was the right choice. One of the big bosses in San Diego advised me to move to academia when the chance came because there's always another fucking case, as he put it, but teaching law is something every lawyer thinks about at some point in their career, wistfully, but will never get to do. And the door closes fast. Crime isn't going anywhere, anyway, and I'll do defense work, I'm sure, sooner or later. My door is open if Britney or Lindsay wakes up in a stupor next to a dead body and needs someone to clean up the mess.



That'll do.



Now here's my opening query, because I'm genuinely curious: who else is working on a detective novel? I am, and I aspire to writing for the movies or crime t.v. shows. Is this phenomenon universal among legal academics? Didn't we, after all, choose this path largely because we wanted to write? Doesn't the market for legal thrillers tempt us in the way that the thought of that million-to-one tort case with the sympathetic plaintiffs and the dirty, deep-pocketed defendant does? Stephen Carter isn't the only one, right?



In this vein, here's an observation I have often found myself making: in the criminal justice system, good guys and bad guys act out their parts in an often uncanny dialectic with their fictional counterparts. Have you ever noticed this? We play our roles, and we learn our roles, in large part, from popular culture. You get to your crime scene, and of course you're going to stride briskly through the cordon, declaiming in a loud voice, "Well, boys, whaddawe got?" You will. You know you will. I did it the very first time I went out on one of my searches, and it felt natural. Felt good. After all, that's what my character would say. Or you bring in a guy for a proffer who's looking at a man-min, and he chickens out, so you say: "I'm your last best hope, pal, and I'm going to give you one chance to talk. I'm going to put my watch on the table and when two minutes are up, I'm walking out of here, and the next time you'll see me will be in court when you're sentenced to five years." And you stare at each other for two minutes. I worked on my stare. It's pretty good. And two minutes elapse and you stand up and just when you put your hand on the doorknob-- this guy knows the script-- he says, "Wait! I'll talk." Of course he does. Because that's how it works. We know it and they know it. I have listened to jail tapes that were pure Tarantino dialogue. (Angry girlfriend: "Why'd you do it?" Defendant: "I did it for you, baby! For us! This was our shot, I had to take it! I couldn't stand working for the Man. I was gonna be the Man!").



(Less interesting is the constant analysis of whether a given agency was accurately/sympathetically portrayed in whatever movie depicted it. I did a couple environmental cases with the armed wing of the EPA (I think that line is hilarious, and I will keep using it), and learned that my agent had, in fact, seen the obscure 1997 Steven Seagal movie "Fire Down Below," in which he plays an agent of said armed wing. You bet she had, just like all my postal inspectors had seen "The Inspectors" with Louis Gossett, Jr. I will have no further comment in that regard, except to whine that they never show the U.S. Attorneys in movies with federal-agent heroes, when in real life they're there, in every single investigation, and just as photogenic as the agents.)



You'd be surprised at the number of federal agents who are working on scripts. How many more are out there? How many law professors? How many prosecutors/former prosecutors? And are we any good at this, necessarily? Are there networks of such people? Are you underground? Do you rely on pseudonyms?



I work on my detective novel intermittently. I give it another few years. My exemplars are Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy. I hope it's done before I'm nominated for the federal bench, so the senators can grill me about all the violence and profanity, and I can defend the noir detective novel as one of the definitive American art forms, up there with jazz. Then I'll smile winningly and say I'll just be an umpire.

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