Land of living skies and utility box tributes to the father of medicare. Hail Saskatchewan!

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released a special report on Contacts between Police and the Public in 2005 [313 KB PDF]. Each year, about one in five people in America have an encounter with a police officer, mostly in traffic stops.
There’s lots of interesting information in the BJS’s series of “police […]

I’m off to spend May Week and Beltane in Saskatoon and Winnipeg, the socialist hearts of Canada’s Prairie Provinces. More from the road if I can.

It almost seems like spring is trying to come to Edmonton. It hasn’t snowed in over a week, and the temperature has creeped above freezing for long enough that I even opened my windows today. Still there’s something not quite right about it—I’ve been saying to myself, “why does this feel like fall?” […]

A number of courts around the US have begun offering RSS feeds of court opinions and news. So far, the Idaho courts have not (as far as I know). For my own benefit, I’ve used Feed43 to create feeds of the published opinions of the Idaho Supreme Court and Idaho Court of Appeals. […]

Junior Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (a Democrat) has introduced S. 1167 (”the Civil Legal Assistance Attorney Loan Repayment Act”) [GovTrack | OpenCongress | Thomas], which would create a $10 million loan repayment assistance program for legal aid attorneys. The bill text tracks the current prosecutor/public defender LRAP bills (S. 442 and H.R. 916) pretty […]

This week has been a complete Canadian freakout. Wednesday was the Arar, Canadian folk hero thing. Tuesday was the 25th anniversary of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of Canada’s constitution—a big… no, a huge deal. And then this coming Monday will be the 110th anniversary of the birth of […]

I’ve just returned from a lecture given by Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was tortured in Syria after being sent there by the United States. Although Arar’s case is not unique, what makes it special is that he could not be any less of a terrorist, by pretty much all accounts, including the official […]

Earlier this week, S. 442 (the “John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007″) [GovTrack | OpenCongress | Thomas] made it out of the Judiciary Committee and is bound for the Senate floor. This bill would fund a $25 million federal loan repayment assistance program (LRAP) for new lawyers working in prosecutors’ […]

This week, my governor (kind of) is on a trade mission to Cuba. Despite Cuba’s successes in literacy and healthcare, Governor Otter says that the country’s “three great failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that’s where we come in.”
While Idaho can sell its potatoes to our Martían friends (since 2000), as an American […]