Thanks for reading this. I really want these entries to be interesting to people. This is not going to be a blog that is dedicated strictly to Estate Planning law. I think we can all agree that would be pretty boring. Instead, I want to write about topics in the area of the law that are of interest to people. Ever since I became a lawyer, I’ve been asked by my non-lawyer friends and family to explain legal concepts or legal happenings in the news, and I’ve always been happy to do so. I think lawyers have an obligation to try to explain difficult or misunderstood concepts to non-lawyers because, unfortunately, a lot of what we see in media and entertainment is completely wrong. If I can help people understand the law better by correcting widely-held, erroneous beliefs, or explaining why certain high-profile cases came out the way they did, maybe our legal system won’t seem so strange and arbitrary to people. To be clear, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in both our criminal and civil legal systems. But I’ve noticed that people who believe the legal system is “broken” tend to form that opinion on the basis of one or two high-profile cases where the results seemed incongruous with what people believe should have happened. (For example: O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby, Johnny Depp/Amber Heard, Roman Polanski). And in some of these cases, popular opinion doesn’t take into account constitutional principles that, if they were known to the public, might make the case easier understand. The Cosby case is an excellent example of that, and in my next blog entry, I’m going to try to explain the Cosby case, and why it was decided the way it was.
ST