“You were the heart and soul of PCI?” Dixon asked, referring to Petters Co. Inc., which acted as the engine of the Petters business conglomerate.

“Yes,” Petters replied.

“You signed promissory notes week after week to pay investors millions?” Dixon said.

“Yes,” Petters answered.

“The reality is, you obtained millions [of dollars] from other Petters companies?” Dixon said, recalling testimony about Petters funding his lavish lifestyle from investor proceeds.

“Whatever the record shows, I’m not going to contest it,” Petters answered.

“You were a corporate tycoon with enormous personal wealth,” Dixon went on.

“I guess that’s the way it was viewed,” Petters said.

Petters acknowledged that without PCI, Petters Group Worldwide — his Minnetonka holding company — likely would not have existed.

“Without PCI, Tom Petters, captain of industry, wouldn’t exist?” Dixon taunted him.

“That’s speculation,” Petters replied. “But you’d be right.”

Dixon said Petters Group Worldwide lived high on the hog with virtually no revenue coming in year after year.

“PGW was living high, yes,” Petters said.

Did AT&T’s top public-relations people have any input before the go-ahead was given to a highly-paid law firm [McKenna Long & Aldridge] to file this muddled request for a temporary restraining order?

[I]it seems ludicrous to me that AT&T is focusing so much attention on its inferior network, which is exactly what this lawsuit does. . . . Thanks to AT&T’s suit, Verizon is now getting more attention for its snarky TV ads and its plain-speaking legal response to AT&T’s lawsuit, with sentences like “AT&T may not like the message that the ads send, but this Court should reject its efforts to silence the messenger,” another turn AT&T was probably not counting on. . . . It would have been smarter to come back at Verizon with its own clever ad campaign, and put some of the millions it is paying its lawyers into further upgrading its network

As trial lawyers, we are often unaware of the fact that we’re not the only brain or mouth in the room,” Chesler warned, “and what we think about the problem is not necessarily the best way for the client to view or solve the problem.

I know that’s hard for lawyers to accept. It has taken me decades and I’m not cured yet. But it is nevertheless true.”

I think it’s required reading for journalists. It’s probably too long. It’s long. But he has capsule portraits of [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara, [President Lyndon] Johnson, [National Security Adviser] McGeorge Bundy and so forth that I think are simply brilliant. A quarter of a page or a page. Just absolutely brilliant. I was asking myself what book I’d want [President Barack] Obama to read, and that would be one of them. Other than for length.

I’ve said this many times before in my books and articles: there are as many reasons to go to law school as there are applicants, but there are some wrong reasons to go.

DON’T go to law school, for example, because you’re lured by the prospect of making money: Most law grads will not get the six-figure salaries so often touted.

DON’T go because you’re trying to please someone else who thinks law school is the right path for you. Only you should make that decision.

DON’T go because you think law school will serve as a “default” option. With a grueling workload and rising tuition costs, you need to make sure you’re enrolled because you want to be, and because the law degree makes sense as a lucrative option for your future.

But again, I assume there are many more improvements to come in the coming years, and perhaps even one day support for Lexis– or Westlaw-like queries, with good proximity searching, segment searching, and more. And even for now, searching for (and linking to) caselaw is much easier today, at least to those without Lexis and Westlaw, then it was before the new Google features.

Free case law is not new to the Internet and is included on some of our own sites . . . However, our legal customers generally require more than raw, unfiltered content to inform their business decisions. They look to LexisNexis to find needles in the ever-growing information haystack, not the haystack itself.

We believe that government-authored information should be accessible to the public, and Google joins existing sites such as FindLaw, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School and scores of others as sites that offer this information free of charge.

Our customers rely on us for very specialized information and legal insight, and use Westlaw to find exactly the right answer on very specific points of law.

[W]hat is the answer? It is surely this: the Obama administration has decided to offer a two-tiered system of justice. We might call them the “high-quality” (civilian) tier and “low-quality” (military) tier. The high-quality approach offers greater accuracy; the low-quality approach offers less accuracy. The Obama administration will use the high-quality system against people when it has a strong case, and the low-quality system against people when it has a weak case.

This approach makes sense. Endless detention without trial is no longer a politically viable option. The government will make a judgment as to whether a suspect is dangerous or not. If the case is good, the high-quality system will be used. If the case is bad, the low-quality system will be used. In this way, the government can ensure that people it thinks are dangerous will be locked up.

This system is superior to the two possible one-tier systems. A pure low-quality system (military commissions only) suffers from credibility problems. People will not believe that all the people who are convicted are guilty. A pure high-quality system (civilian courts only) would result in too many acquittals. People who the government believes are dangerous will be back on the streets. The two-tiered system allows for credible convictions when credible convictions are possible, and (non-credible) convictions when credible convictions are not possible. The two-tiered system produces higher overall credibility without sacrificing the incapacitation of dangerous (or supposedly dangerous) people.

Judge Hamilton explained in his written opinion that the ruling did not “prohibit the House from opening its session with prayers if it chooses to do so, but will require that any official prayers be inclusive and non-sectarian, and not advance one particular religion.”

It’s tempting to dismiss the sluggish pace of judicial confirmations as politics as usual. But delays in filling judicial vacancies interfere with the administration of justice and discourage able candidates, not all of whom are sitting judges, from considering careers on the bench. In the cloture vote on Hamilton, rank-and-file Republicans should show more maturity than their colleagues on the Judiciary Committee.

Incoming White House counsel Bob Bauer is widely respected as a skilled and pugnacious lawyer and has the unquestioned trust of President Barack Obama’s inner circle and a deep knowledge of the ways of Washington.

But the announcement Friday that he will take the place of Greg Craig, which had been rumored for weeks, nonetheless prompted questions about whether his experience as a campaign law expert and partisan warrior is appropriate for a job dealing with some of the most sensitive constitutional and national security issues in government.