Bruce Cockburn Music as Bar Exam Study Aid

Twenty-five years ago, I was studying for the Missouri bar exam. Even after all this time, it remains a touchstone experience for me.

My base of operations, from the beginning of June until the middle of July, was Rockhurst College in Kansas City, which was hosting the BAR/BRI review course. The exam was scheduled for the end of July in the state capital, Jefferson City. My judicial clerkship, with the Hon. Charles Shangler of the Missouri Court of Appeals, would follow in due course.

I had graduated from Valparaiso University School of Law in May, and my parents had given me a Sony Walkman to celebrate the occasion. That's right - a Sony Walkman. Strange as it may seem, in this I-pod / I-pad world, the Walkman was once a state-of-the-art way to play recorded music.

During breaks from bar exam study, I would listen over and over on my Walkman to Bruce Cockburn's latest album, World of Wonders. I'd purchased the cassette tape at a mall in Merrillville, Ind. before leaving Indiana for Kansas City.

Today, opening up my e-mail again after an off-the-grid vacation week, there were two messages that reminded me of the Bruce Cockburn backdrop for my bar studies. One was an e-vite to a 25th anniversary reunion of my law school class.

The other was a notification on Facebook that a friend had tagged me in a post about the Bruce Cockburn postage stamp recently issued in Canada.

Thanks, Rick, for the heads-up about the stamp!

Unemployment Up, Crime Down: Why?

Why have American crime rates gone down as unemployment rates have gone up?

James Q. Wilson's recent essay in the Wall Street Journal explores this intriguing question.

The factors in play are many. They range from the sociological (the incapacitation effect of extensive incarceration) to the environmental (the decrease in lead in the atmosphere).

Better, data-driven policing can rightly take some of the credit. Targting  empiricallly identfiable crime hot spots for a stronger law enforcement presence has been shown to reduce crime in those areas. Some of this reduction, however, is offset by increases in other areas.

And then there is the matter of drug use. For two decades, crack, heroin and other hard drugs have taken a terrible toll, particularly on the black community, in lethal street violence, fatal overdoses and widespread imprisonment. It may be that a younger generation is finally learning hard truths from these consequences.

Wilson rightly ends his essay on a humble, Socratic note. Criminologists, he argues, should admit they don't  have all the answers. Such an admission, as Socrates showed, can be the beginning of wisdom.

Harry Potter and the Presumption of Innocence

Even those who have not read the Harry Potter books, or seen the movies, know that the tone grows relentlessly darker as the series unfolds.

I was reminded of this tonight as I started Book Four, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," which begins with the discovery of three murder victims. It's like opening an adult Whodonit novel, compared to the usual high-satire of the Dursley's that earlier books begin with. J.K. Rowling could easily have eclipsed Agatha Christie, one suspects, if she had chosen to write in this genre.

In describing the murder scene involving three members of the Riddle family, Rowling also convincingly sketches a scenario showing why the presumption of innocence is needed in criminal cases. When Frank Bryce, the Riddles' gardener, is arrested, public opinion in the village of Little Hangleton soon swings against him. But when new evidence emerges, the unproven (and very possibly erroneous) nature of the assumption of Bryce's guilt is unmasked.

If the new evidence had not come to light, however, it's hard to see how Frank Bryce could have found an impartial jury anywhere in the vicinity of Little Hangleton.

Up To Date In Kansas City, Summer 1986

The temperature hit 102.9 degrees Fahrenheit today in the Twin Cities (39.4 Celsius). Bizarre, for this time and place. What is the import of this whim of Mercurius?

The easy answer, I suppose, would be global warming. My topic in this post, however, is not suspicions about manifestations of climate change.

It is, rather, an occasion to recall those balmy summer nights in Kansas City in 1986 as I studied for the Missouri bar exam. To someone reared in South Dakota and Minnesota, those June and July days in KC were at times oppressively hot. The nights, though, after my evening bar review course let out, were beautiful.

The heat of the day had abated and I had done my bar exam study. This meant I was now free to enjoy the rest of the evening in an intriguing new city - the one which the cowboys in Rogers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma" had sung of as being all up to date.

What the Parole Board Had For Breakfast

The phrase "you are what you eat" has become drastically watered-down in contemporary American parlance. It is now more or less synonymous with "eat your vegetables."

But to materialist nineteenth-century thinkers, saying "you are what you eat" was like a call to arms against idealist mumbo-jumbo. "Mann ist was mann esst," went the play on words in German.

The idea was that even ideas themselves do not spring immaculately from an amorphous, pristine realm of spirit that humans access through their minds. Thoughts, the argument goes, are merely the by-products of purely physical processes, with each of us caught in an unbreakable causal chain.

Dostoevsky rightly railed against this type of deterministic, linear explanation of human behavior. For after all, to describe human actions as merely the inescapable consequences of external stimuli is to deny free will. Humans, in short, are not Pavlov's dogs.

From our 21st-century vantage point, however, it would be naive to deny that those external stimuli can play a powerful role in affecting decisions. As Al Gore pointed out in The Assault on Reason, there are numerous factors that can get in the way of rational decision making.

For legal decisions, the "legal realists" who came on the scene in the 1930s asserted that those factors often include a judge's personality.  The notion was that "law is what the judge had for breakfast,"as one of my law professors put it to me at Valparaiso in the mid-80s.

I was reminded of this two weeks ago, when a newspaper columnist named Chuck Shepherd reported on a recently released research study of parole decisions.  According to the lead researcher, Prof. Jonathan Levav of Columbia University, there are spikes in the granting of parole after lunch or snack breaks. But parole gets harder and harder to get as morning or afternoon sessions grind on.

Humans aren't Pavlov's dogs, but food does influence people's moods - and that cannot help but affect decisions at times. To say that isn't to accept hardcore nineteenth materialism; it's simply to acknowledge human limits.

Word of God Speak - Even in Prison

Two weeks ago, I worshipped with New Beginnings Church at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility. I was there in Denver with other members of the board of Prison Congregations of America, which helps facilitate the founding of congregations like New Beginnings.

One of the centerpieces of the two-hour within-the-walls church experience was the song Word of God Speak. It was familiar to me from contemporary worship services I've attended in recent years.

It's a wonderful song inside the walls or out. Some of the words, however, carried extra depth when sung from the depths of prison.

"To be still and know
That You're in this place
Please let me stay and rest
In Your holiness
Word of God speak"

The simple words and gentle music indeed helped us all know that God was. is, and will be in that place - and in all places where people are sent as punishment.

3 Strikes and You're Out is Not Immutable

In Apple Valley, Minnesota, second graders at bat in their youth baseball league get five strikes, not three.

Even in baseball, the rule of “three strikes and you’re out” is not immutable.

This point needs to be considered when evaluating California’s notorious “three strikes” law that sends those convicted of a third felony to prison for a sentence of from 25 years to life. Even if the third offense was shoplifting.

A Stanford law professor, Michael Romano, calls it “the worst criminal law in the country.” I think he’s right.