Articles Tagged with “Judge Posner”

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It’s difficult not to love an opinion that contains this paragraph:

Heraclitus famously said that one never steps into the same river twice. What he meant was that one never steps into the same water; the river is the same, even though its substance is always changing. And so a conspiracy can be the same even if all the acts committed pursuant to it are different, because it is the terms of the agreement rather than the details of implementation that determine its boundaries.

Federal prosecutors love conspiracies more than Oliver Stone. Prove an agreement between A and B to further an illegal end, and you can bring in all sorts of stuff against A that she didn’t actually do (B did). And you only have to prove a constructive agreement – not an actual one.

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A Joke:

What’s the difference between a white-collar investigation and a blue-collar investigation?

In a blue-collar case, the government knows what the person has done, they just don’t know who done it.

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Deanna Costello’s love knew no boundaries. Literally. For years she had a romantic relationship with a man who was not in the United States lawfully. It led to a strong judicial slapdown of the Department of Justice by one of our nation’s leading jurists, in United States v. Costello.

Ms. Costello’s Boyfriend

Ms. Costello lived in Cahokia, Illinois, perhaps five miles from St. Louis. She lived with a man from Mexico for a year ending in July 2003. That time ended when he was arrested on a federal drug charge. He plead guilty and was sent back to Mexico after his prison sentence.

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In Tapia v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a federal judge, when imposing sentence, cannot give time in prison in order to rehabilitate the person who is being sentenced.

Tapia turned on this statutory language from 18 U.S.C. § 3582(a):

The court, in determining whether to impose a term of imprisonment, and, if a term of imprisonment is to be imposed, in determining the length of the term, shall consider the factors set forth in section 3553(a) to the extent that they are applicable, recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation

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I’m a big fan of Judge Richard Posner. As I’ve mentioned here before, Judge Posner is very bright – and has almost single-handedly revolutionized the role that economics plays in thinking about the law.

I was, therefore, happy to see that Judge Posner authored an opinion for the Seventh Circuit dealing with the relationship between heroin wholesalers and heroin retainers in United States v. Alvarado-Tizoc.

Alvarado-Tizoc dealt with two men who sold wholesale quantities of heroin and fentanyl. As Judge Posner explains,

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Judge Richard Posner is sui generis. The Seventh Circuit judge is a towering legal intellectual. He writes on moral theory. He founded a journal. He writes about current political controversies. He is one of the few intellectuals of our time who has “changed the world” according to Tyler Cowen – unlike such slouches as Paul Krugman, Richard Dawkins, and Noam Chomsky. He’s lectured in Second Life. He even blogs for the Atlantic.

He has been called “the world’s most distinguished legal scholar.”

He is also, most importantly, a serious bluebook hater (apologies that the link just goes to the first page of the article at JSTOR – though what a great first page it is. My favorite line comes later as advice to law students – “Make certitude the test for certainty.” It summarizes so cleanly what’s wrong with so much legal writing.).

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