As in great works of literature, the narrative arc of judicial opinions is often apparent in the first line. Consider this opener from a recent California appeals court case: "A 15-year old high school student was pursuing a career in entertainment and maintained a Web site for that purpose." If I tell you that said website was comment-enabled, I probably don't need to add that this kid's electronic ode to himself became a repository of homophobic juvenalia within hours of its discovery by his classmates. READ MORE

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that Vaughn Walker, the James Coburn/Wilford Brimley look-alike who is overseeing the federal court challenge to California's Proposition 8, is gay. (Awkward!) Since the story broke, journalists and pajama-bloggers have debated whether it's appropriate for a gay man to adjudicate the constitutionality of a law aimed specifically at depriving gays of their rights. READ MORE

If you've ever spent any time on a college campus, chances are you've encountered a group of maybe-students with makeshift signs and ink-smeared pamphlets urging that you "Free Mumia." And if you bothered to grab a pamphlet or engage one of these activists, you would have discovered that "Mumia" is Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of the fairly brutal 1981 shooting death of 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal has always claimed that he is innocent, and in the nearly thirty years since his conviction, his banner has been taken up by an array of frequent bedfellows: assorted civil rights groups, low-wattage celebrities, slices of the international community and college kids. READ MORE

For 2000 or so years, conventional medical wisdom/quack science held that various bodily substances, known collectively as the four humours, governed a person's physical and emotional disposition. I have my own four humours theory, which is basically that the only things people really find funny are cursing, typos, pratfalls and old people. (This means, for a lawyer, that your day job is about as amusing as a Chris Buckley piece.) READ MORE