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

A well-chewed bit of conventional wisdom holds that cultural conflagrations find no better accelerant than a Supreme Court opinion. Under this theory, smoldering social divisions explode into Samuel Pepys territory when the Court short circuits the democratic process and moves definitively to settle a social issue. Exhibit A is typically Roe v. Wade, which, in attempting to remove abortion from the realm of political controversy, instead visited upon us several decades of incessant yelling and pictorial craziness (think sonograms, bloody fetuses and snowflake babies). 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