I’ve posted about government public legal education (PLE) programs (”govPLE,” which can be too cautious, to the point of being unhelpful). And I’ve written, indirectly, about bar PLE when I posted about pro bono (although there’s more to say on “barPLE,” and I’ll get to that in the coming weeks). For now, though, here’s […]

The overall quality of congresspeople’s and congressional committees’ websites is “disappointing” according to a new report from the Congressional Management Foundation. Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s website got a “Silver Mouse Award,” though. Still, for keeping track of the federal legislative branch I didn’t think anything could beat GovTrack—and then yesterday brought OpenCongress, and the […]

S. 1172 showed up in the Idaho Senate today. It is the second attempt to make English Idaho’s official language (S. 1469 in 2002, which died in committee, was the first). This year’s version, co-sponsored by 18 Republican members of Idaho’s 105-member legislature, would require all government meetings and transactions to be solely in […]

Via this blog over here, pointing to this one over here, both pointing to this thread in the Texas District and County Attorneys Association’s online forums, we learn that prosecutors are now getting written agreements to the destruction of DNA evidence as part of plea bargains. As Wretched of the Earth puts it, “Want […]

The authors of a twenty-year-old international review of public legal education that I was rereading today suggest that there are three possible “systems” of public legal education:

An “operational” system, where law is written in technical language but instruments of law like contracts and court forms must be written in plain and communicative ways.
A “two-tier” system, […]

Somehow this (strangely written) press release, about the “record numbers” of “self-represented” litigants in U.S. courts, got lost in my backlog. These statistics are not really news, but we ought to note that the release comes from a debt-counseling/”educational” firm called “Credit Card Rest in Peace.” Is it disturbing that the nonlawyer private […]

Today the hyper-enriching Peter Levine writes about “fit” between class and the labor market, noting how it’s not just that wealthy people have more money, but that the way they raise their kids makes those kids better candidates for white collar jobs. This phenomenon is likely most pronounced in the legal profession. If, […]

The Legal Services Corporation (the federally-funded U.S. entity that supports many of America’s legal aid organizations) will be getting a $22 million funding increase in 2007. Last Thursday, H.J. Res. 20 became law, upping the appropriation for LSC from $326.5 million to $348,578,000. This is LSC’s first increase in four years. All […]

Now, at the end of an odyssey, is Toronto, Canada’s biggest city. It is this huge nation’s economic and perhaps cultural capital. Culturally, though, I’m amazed at how American it feels. No other major city in this country (and I’ve now been to nearly all of them) has felt so familiar to […]

Community legal education doesn’t really show in the agenda for this year’s Rebellious Lawyering conference, either (although it has in the past). But, a panel on anarchist lawyering makes up for that, for me—especially a panel made up entirely of Katya Komisaruk.