This episode, we bring in a fellow law podcaster, Charone, and a public defender, Bryan, to discuss the convoluted 2011 Matthew McConaughey “vehicle,” The Lincoln Lawyer. The four of us discuss attorney-client confidentiality, sleeping with opposing counsel, clients’ rights, and the practicality of working from your car. ***NOTE*** For those of you using the All Too […]

Possibly the most timely episode we will ever release, Philadelphia (starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington) tells the story of a young lawyer fired by his law firm for being gay and having AIDS. He files a lawsuit against his old firm, capitalizing on an early landmark case for those suffering from HIV/AIDS, School Board of Nassau County, […]

This adaptation of a John Grisham novel provides the guys with an opportunity to discuss a number of the ethical rules that lawyers must abide by, including the duty of candor toward the tribunal and avoiding conflicts of interests with clients, as well as some finer points of trial advocacy.

Hello to all of you very… very loyal All Too Common Law subscribers. First of all, I have to thank you for still subscribing to this feed after three years of silence. As you’ve probably guessed, producing a show like ATCL just proved to be too demanding on my time to do consistently. Plus the […]

Coming up in this Orangefinger-free(!) episode, we'll revisit some of the lawsuits I covered in previous episodes and add a couple of new and interesting ones to the list. I'm Geoffrey Blackwell, I'm telling you to eat shit, Bob, and you're listening to Docket # 17-004 of All Too Common Law.

Warning The following podcast contains law words like “judiciary,” “rules of procedure,” and “criminal indictment.” Please don’t think that just because I’m using these words I’m giving you legal advice. I am not your attorney. Intro Coming up in this episode: the first installment of an occasional, recurring topic: Impeachment Watch. I’m Geoffrey Blackwell, I’m […]

Thanks to the swift pace at which current events are shifting, this episode is a little more raw than the episodes I usually put out, but I think it’s important to give you all the opportunity to hear this interview in a timely manner. On Wednesday, February 8, 2017, one day after the State of […]

Special thanks to the guys from The Lost Signals for inviting me to appear on their podcast. The guys over there are working their way through the AFI Top 100 Greatest American Films. This episode reviews the classic jury room drama 12 Angry Men. I had a great time recording this episode and I look […]

Thanks to a wedding, this episode is going to be a short one. Coming up: I sat down with my former co-host, Amanda Knief, author of Citizen Lobbyist: A How-to Manual for Making Your Voice Heard in Government, to talk about the recent surge in progressive activism; and The Boy Scouts seem poised to repeat […]

In this episode: The Supreme Court is set to decide how fair a fair trial needs to be; What Attorney General Jeff Sessions would mean for the legalization movement; It's been a tough year for the International Criminal Court, so I sat down for a chat with Roger Clark, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who helped create it; Plus a surprising amount of abortion law news. What fun. I'm Geoffrey Blackwell, I've set up a Google alert for Archduke Ferdinand, and this is Docket #16-8 of All Too Common Law. Opening Statement I understand the conservative point of view. The classic liberal and conservative political philosophies are more about different priorities than anything else. But we aren't even working in that spectrum anymore. Classical conservativism is essentially dead. The libertarians make feeble head-fakes toward it--when their party isn't nominating goofballs like Gary Johnson. It's not about balancing different sets of priorities anymore. What the Republican Party is about now is holding onto power. To the exclusion of everything else. Don't get me wrong. All politicians want power. I'm not naive. But their motivations and how they use the power when they have it makes all the difference. We're watching this all play out now in the microcosm of North Carolina. And I want to set aside the ins and outs of the bills that the lame-duck legislature and outgoing governor Pat McCrory passed and signed into law. Just consider the general principles of democratic societies: government by consent of the governed, an informed electorate, fair and open elections, all of that. Hold those bedrock principles in your mind while you consider that after the people of north Carolina voted for the candidates they wanted to hold elected office in their state, the party that lost power decided that the proper thing to do was to change all the duties of a whole slew of elected officials. Democracy cannot work if the people don't know the powers they're voting to give to candidates. If we're holding elections for sheriff and the county board doesn't like who the people pick, the answer is not to strip the sheriff's office of all it power and give it to the dog catcher instead. The people elected a dog catcher for that job. They didn't know she would also be vested with police power. But that's exactly what we're watching go down in North Carolina. The Republican legislature didn't get the governor they wanted so they've reallocated all the authority in the state into offices they still hold. The governor appoints a majority of the state board of education? Take their authority away and grant it all to the state superintendent. The governor appoints Election Board officials? Let's change the very nature of the Board. This is greed. This is avarice. This is lust for power. This is why I will never vote Republican.