Call it a nightmare of the bureaucratic state. Call it capitalism gone bad. Call it the “law bubble” (a la the “housing bubble”) that has popped. Whatever you call it, this story about skilled, highly accomplished attorneys having trouble finding work says a lot about our economy, or at least the legal economy. Things are bad.

But what makes this truly postworthy is the 2nd paragraph of the third comment:

All joking aside, when I worked at a certain federal agency that collects money from taxpayers many years ago, the fax machine for incoming resumes was in a locked closet on the fourth floor of an old building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once a week, a part-time secretary would take all of the accumulated faxes, and put about four of them on someone’s desk, and the rest went into the recycling bin. Often, there was not enough paper in the fax machine to last a day or two.

Can there be a better image of bureaucratic dystopia? If so, I have never seen it. Schwarzschild wormholes, indeed!

If you haven’t seen this video, you should. I’m not sure Paul Krugman has all the answers, but he’s been making some good points recently. For example, here are his thoughts on the Geithner “cash for trash” plan:

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.

That sounds about right, doesn’t it? Regardless, the song and video are fun and add a much-needed bit of levity to this whole bailout debacle.

If you like that, also check out Jonathan Mann’s website where he’s posting a song/video every day. I’ve also been enjoying “My Obama Neurosis (In the Key of C).” It succinctly and humorously captures the ambivalence and bewilderment I’ve been feeling about our new president.

Glenn Greenwald expresses something like my own sentiments about Twitter:

At the risk of appearing as crotchety as [John Cole] does, I share that bewilderment.  About Twitter messages, John says “they all read like cell phone text messages between 12 year olds,” and indeed, the only purpose I can discern is that it provides a format for expressing thoughts that are too inconsequential to merit a stand-alone article or post.  For precisely that reason, it is unsurprising that Twitter has become a huge hit among our media stars, for whom triviality is a guiding principle.

But, pre-Twitter, did we really have a shortage of venues devoted to petty musings?   I’d say the opposite is true.

That said, I have found one really useful thing that Twitter does and that I don’t think has ever before been possible: It gives you breaking news in real time before any other online outlet can get to it. Perhaps the best and most recent example was last Tuesday when Apple announced the details of iPhone OS 3.0. If we had to wait until traditional news outlets reported on it, we would have known nothing until several hours after the event. Of course, a few sites were “live blogging” the event, meaning they had people there and they were posting updates every five minutes or so to their blogs. That’s pretty helpful and close to what twitter can do. Still, the people there who were twittering the event were able to update continuously and twitter was able to aggregate all the updates and conversation about them into one stream that was easy to refresh and follow. All you had to do was search for the #iphone hashtag.

So twitter is really good at one thing: Breaking news. I’ve also followed a fire in Bozeman and the Tour of California bike race. If you know something is happening but can’t find much about it online, on tv, or elsewhere, try twitter. You just might find it exactly what you were looking for.

Congratulations and thank you to the state of New Mexico, which has become the 15th state to abolish the death penalty. Montana may be next.

Thanks to DNA exonerations the number of people against the death penalty continues to grow. The SCOTUS effectively suspended the death penalty in 1972, finding its application arbitrary and therefore cruel and unusual. State legislatures rewrote their laws to once again make the penalty possible. Now, those same legislatures are deciding no amount of tinkering is going to create a system they can live with. While it’s true that these legislatures could return someday in the future and reinstate the death penalty, the current trend is headed the other way and thank god for that.

We had our first real spring-like day yesterday in Chicago with temperatures in the mid-70s. It was beautiful, except apparently not for the ten people who got shot and the one who was stabbed. Apparently, the warm weather makes people violent.

That’s really not cool.

Something that is cool: this group of musicians playing “Kids” by MGMT on their iPhones and iPod Touches.

The above links are proof that there is bad crazy and there is good crazy in this world. Something about that is reassuring.  

L. took Sisu to the dog beach yesterday and someone caught her looking fierce!

I gotta hand it to the ABA for keeping me up to date on the magnitude of the collapse of the legal job market with a constant stream of information about layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs. Apparently, last Monday was another record-setting day for legal layoffs with more than 730 lawyers and staffers losing their jobs. This follows two other record-setting days on Jan. 29 and Feb. 12, with more than 600 lawyers and staffers laid off on those days.

Awesome.

People keep telling me that these people being laid off are not really competition for me; they are biglaw lawyers and I’m looking for a public defender position and these are totally different things. I see that point, but when these people can’t even give their time away I am certain there are public defenders out there who are looking at this and thinking, “Yeah, I was going to look for some other kind of work but I think I’ll keep my job for now until things look better.” This means fewer openings for me. There’s also likely some small fraction of the biglaw layoffs who are deciding that now is the time to change careers and become public defenders (or, possibly more likely, prosecutors). If so, that means more competition for what few positions do open.

I’m not whining, I’m just saying. I’m lucky enough to actually have an interview today, so things may be looking up… at least for me. Fingers crossed.

The SCOTUS yesterday held in Vermont v. Brillon that delays caused by a public defender do not count against the state in determining whether a defendant’s right to a speedy trial has been violated. (Opinion in PDF.) More specifically, the Court held that PDs are not state actors in the criminal justice system and that court-appointed attorneys should not be treated any differently than private counsel when assessing speedy trial violations.

Sadly, the good Justices demonstrated today that they live in a fantasy land when it comes to the 6th Amendment right to counsel. Their ruling would make complete sense if we lived in a world where appointed counsel had the same resources (primarily time, but also money) as private counsel. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a world where the State (embodied by state and county governments throughout this nation) has again and again and again made deliberate choices to provide court-appointed counsel as cheaply and minimally as possible. Therefore, treating court-appointed counsel the same as private counsel for purposes of speedy trial analysis is like treating a city bus and a motorcycle the same for getting you from one side of the city to the other. Sure, both can do the job, but one has many more obligations and demands upon it than the other.

That’s a far from perfect analogy, but the point remains that Brillon leaves a gaping in hole in the 6th Amendment for those defendants who get appointed counsel who are overworked and who delay their cases because of the State’s refusal to provide them with the resources to do their jobs adequately.

One solution to this is for public defenders to simply refuse to take cases when they know they are overloaded. Of course, by the time you realize you’re overloaded, it’s already too late; you’ve already got too many cases to adequately meet all deadlines and truly represent your clients.

So what does an indigent defendant do when his counsel just shovels his case along from continuance to continuance because counsel hasn’t had a chance to prepare the case? An Ineffective Assistance of Counsel claim can get a defendant new counsel or a new trial, but it does nothing to guarantee a speedy trial.

This city has absolutely the worst roads I have ever driven on. Potholes everywhere, and once they start, they don’t seem to get filled until they’re deep and wide enough to swallow your wheel whole. Oh, the city pretends to fill them, but the “patches” last for about an hour.

So it’s great that we’ve got the El for an alternative to driving, right? Except, well, you might get stabbed and no one will even try to help you.

!?

From Skelly quoting The AJB’s and Me:

…(T)he State of Montana Office of Public Defender may change how they handle their conflict cases, resulting in a significant decrease in the availability of contract work for us and many of our friends. Basically that’s like getting advance notice that layoffs are coming at your work… We naively thought we had pretty recession proof work because in hard times more people need public defenders…

Rah-roh, Raggy! Really? Anyone else heard anything like this? I have many friends who pay lots of their bills on conflict/contract work from the MT public defender’s office and I haven’t heard a thing from them about this, but maybe the rumor just hasn’t reached them yet?