You might be critical of the Vampire Mom recently arrested in England for turning her son into a cripple and staging his pseudo-heroic survival for years, during which she collected much attention and many valuable prizes, while nearly destroying the kid physically and mentally. But wouldn't that be narrow-minded? If she had no other talents and found it tedious to go to work at her local pharmacy, she acted in an economically rational way. Di...

While I am writing, the question of same-sex marriage is still a heated debate in most parts of the US (currently eclipsed by healthcare, of course), and will probably remain as such for the next few years (hopefully, not more). The debate has always struck me as a curious test for the imagined integrity of the law: not simply the US Constitution, but the heternormative law as a system that is precisely codified as a difference from what it fa...

I just received from the university counsel, almost a year after the events, a copy of an anonymous denunciation of me sent to my dean by some cowardly scumbag writing on behalf of “Concerned Graduate Students” from the e-mail address “jazzsmith55@yahoo.com.” Alluding darkly to “what happened to one of our graduate student friends” (unnamed, of course), the letter informed the dean that “you should know that Professor Saussy sleeps with his s...

I was gratified, amused and surprised the other day when one of my relatives gave me a legal diary that had been in the possession of my great-grandfather, Frederick Tupper Saussy (1875-1956). I don't know who wrote it: the printed headings on each page give dates for 1881, which someone has corrected to 1888; ink and penmanship seem nineteenth-century (pencil and steel pen rather than fountain pen; fine spidery script). That would make it the...

I call a 24-hour moratorium, my fellow citizens, on lawyer jokes! Yesterday's All Things Considered included a story about the phalanx of legal minds that are lining up to work on behalf of the 270 prisoners of Guantanamo, those unwilling guests of the Dank Dungeons of Democracy (TM), most of whom have been waiting for years to obtain counsel and learn the charges against them. Guilty or innocent, and no matter the gravity of the charge, these...

I never thought papyrology was a great career path, but it looks as if that skill set is in demand! The former state security of the former East Germany left behind, in attempting to cover its tracks, thousands of bags of hand-ripped and shredded documents. And people want to see what’s there. They have an idea, of course, of what they’ll find in the reconstituted documents: The pages amounted to a minute-by-minute account of Poppe's life, se...

On February 12th, Al Gore spoke at the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. According to an AP wire report, he said the U.S. had committed “terrible abuses” against Arab immigrants after September 11th. Conservative bloggers were quick to comment.

On vacation with my family last summer, I found myself being exposed to dangerous levels of CNN. I wound up watching several hours of their ongoing coverage of the second Michael Jackson trial, which as far as I could tell consisted of a steady shot of the outside of a small courthouse and a lurid hag in the studio screaming, He’s guilty! This was my first encounter with Nancy Grace.