One Night, Two Adventures

Adventure Number One:

So, last night, on a bit of a whim, and with some prompting from my secretary, I took Hunter and Emma to see our very first live NHL game. We saw the Anaheim Ducks play the Nashville Predators. It was tons of fun. My firm has a suite at the arena that’s mainly for “business development” (i.e., schmoozing clients) but if no one is taking clients to any particular event (which seems to be the case fairly often) then any attorney that wants to can use it.

We had a great time and Hunter and Emma really got into the spirit of it, cheering whenever the Ducks scored or had a great save. I did my best to explain the rules and everything else I knew about the game but I’m not sure how well I did. I don’t think I lived up to my Canadian heritage very well. “Daddy, why did the referee blow the whistle and make everyone stop playing?” “I don’t know, son. I don’t know.”

Is it just me, though, or is it weird that the Ducks started out as a marketing tie-in for a Walt Disney movie? And how weird is it that they won the Stanley Cup last year? Anyway, it was a great time. We watched the Ducks beat the Predators 3 to 1, we ate some nachos, took some pictures, and when it was all over, headed out for the approximately 20 minute drive back home, which leads us to…

Adventure Number Two:

It’s 10:00 o’clock at night, we’re about half way home and cruising along the freeway when I look down and notice that the tachometer on the dashboard is showing 0 RPM’s. I realize this would only happen if the engine is no longer running (hey, I’m a bright guy). I test my theory by pressing down on the accelerator and, sure enough, nothing. We’re in the car pool lane but, fortunately, we’re right at a spot where there’s a wider than usual median on the left. I pull over, we glide to a stop and I put on the hazard lights.

This now is where a nice mix of modern technology and good people turns something that could have been a really big problem into a bit of an inconvenience. I call the highway patrol on my cell phone and get a really helpful officer on the other end. He gets our location, dispatches a patrol car and then conferences in a AAA dispatcher. The woman at AAA was really helpful, too. She orders a tow truck and tells them it’s a priority call, figures out the closest repair shop to tow us to and orders a cab to be at the repair shop to take us home.

Hunter and Emma were great, too. They made a contest of who could spot the police car or tow truck first and then compared notes with each other over everything they’d have to tell their friends at school the next day. As for the car, we’re still waiting to get the whole story on what caused the breakdown. At first the mechanic thought it was just a problem with the distributor, but they replaced it and it’s still not working so they said they’ll dive back into it tomorrow and see what they can figure out. Yikes! We’ve had this car since our BYU days and I’m really hoping we can squeeze a few more years out of it before it totally bites the dust.

So, basically, it was just another day around the old homestead. Mostly fun, with just a little bit of crazy thrown in to make things interesting.

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A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Ebert & Roeper and the reviewer that was filling in for Ebert had as his video pick of the week a documentary called “A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…“. He said it’s been making the rounds at the film festivals and getting really good reviews. I found it on Amazon and ordered it (when I ordered it, it was $14.99. Now, it’s $21.95. Must have gotten popular). Amy and I just watched it last night. It’s really interesting. It follows 6 law school grads as they study for the California bar exam. It’s also interspersed with interviews of well-known lawyers and commentators (Alan Dershowitz, Nancy Grace, Scott Turow, John Stossel) talking about lawyers and the craziness of the legal system. I posted a couple of short clips from it below.

It brought back a lot of memories from my time studying for the California bar. It was by far the hardest, most stressful thing I’ve gone through so far. I basically had no life other than studying for the bar for the 3 1/2 months between graduating from law school and taking the bar. For me, the main source of stress wasn’t that it was just a hard test, but that it was pass/fail. I couldn’t just stop studying and say “I’ll just accept a lower grade on this one” (something I’d done on plenty of other tests in the past). It was all or nothing, and if I didn’t pass, that pretty much erased the degree I’d just worked three years for; not to mention that it would put in jeopardy the job offer I had, the reason I was taking the California bar in the first place. It was a lot of stress. I’ll have to get Amy to post about how it was on her end. I know it was pretty brutal for her too. We stayed with Amy’s parents that summer, I don’t know how Amy could have managed with the kids if we hadn’t stayed with them. Amy was a “bar widow” that whole summer.

One of my best memories though, was coming back home after taking the bar up in Sacramento (it was the closest testing site and an hour and a half from Amy’s parents’ house so I stayed in a hotel up there for the 3 days of the test). When I walked in the door, I was greeted with balloons and a cake and a big banner that Hunter, who was 7 at the time, had written on in big letters, “Lawyer or not, you’re still our Daddy”. That was pretty great.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm3eZamdVnw

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEMBsS4VZD4

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How It Should Have Ended

Ok, here’s a random post with a couple of funny videos. Credit goes to our friend, Heather from One Woman’s World, for first tipping us off to these. I thought they were really fun and had to post a couple of my favorites. There are more videos (and better resolution) at their website, HowItShouldHaveEnded.com. It’s amazing what you can do with a lot of talent and a lot of time on your hands. Enjoy!

Willy Wonka
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsE0UOz1uw4

Superman
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yavK0mnE3wI

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For all the Lost fans out there

Here’s a recent interview with the actor that plays Ben on Lost. I think anyone that stuck it out on the roller coaster ride of this last season will enjoy this.

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Habeas Schmabeas and Guantanamo Bay

I recently finished listening to an episode of This American Life from NPR. It’s essentially a documentary series on the radio. This episode, called “Habeas Schmabeas,” was a look at the prison at Guantanamo Bay. It was fascinating and I would love for any of you guys to listen to it too and tell me what you think about it. You can get it by either subscribing to the free podcast through iTunes or other program like it, or just click here to listen to it online.

The people that created this show said their idea for this episode came from the realization that, while it’s known that there have been several hundred former detainees that have been released from guantanamo over the years, no one they knew of had ever heard an interview by any of these former prisoners. So, these guys tracked down some former detainees and talked to them. They also talked with some U.S. attorneys that had been assigned to represent prisoners at guantanamo about what it is like to represent a detainee.

One thing I found very interesting is that guantanamo was built to house high-profile terrorists—the worst of the worst—like Bin Laden and others like him. It’s essentially a supermax prison. However, one of the complaints that has come out from the military commanders in charge of the prison is that they’ve never received those high-level prisoners, they’re all kept in “black sites” run by the CIA. Instead, guantanamo ended up being used to house mainly lower-level, fringe players that provided very little valuable information, or very often, people that weren’t even terrorists to begin with. You’ll need to listen to the interviews to find out why it is that guantanamo received so many detainees that, upon review, got re-classified as NLEC’s (No Longer Enemy Combatants) and what the consequences have been.

The title of the episode “Habeas Schmabeas” refers to habeas corpus. A petition for habeas corpus is what’s known as a collateral attack against criminal charges. It doesn’t address the actual charges against you, it is a way of saying to the government, “before I answer anything else, you need to show me first that you had the right to arrest me and charge me with this crime, because I believe you didn’t follow the rules.” It requires the government to justify their actions and show that they behaved properly. This right first popped up in the Magna Charta in 1215 (Wow! politics, legal terms and now history. Could this post get any better?!) and is in Article I of the U.S. Constitution—it was such a fundamental, non-controversial right that it didn’t even need to wait until later to go into the bill of rights.

This concept of habeas corpus comes into play with the detainees at guantanamo because the current administration (we’re not naming any names here) has made a very interesting claim concerning the legal rights of the detainees. On the one hand they claim that U.S. legal rights, chief among them habeas corpus, don’t apply to the detainees because they’re prisoners of war. On the other hand they claim that the rights of the Geneva Convention don’t apply to the detainees because they’re not really prisoners of war. A little crazy, huh?

So, if I haven’t totally turned you off of it (and put you to sleep just a little), go listen to it and let me know what you think.

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