Joel Jacobsen has been practicing law for too many years. He's done civil litigation and criminal appeals, working in a large firm, a small firm and for the government.
You can learn about his new book, For the Sake of Argument: A Life in the Law, here. And you can sample it here.
Joel's blog Judging Crimes: A View of the Bench from the Trenches, has been named one of the nation's top 100 law and lawyer blogs. You can find Judging Crimes here.
And if you really want to know the lowdown about violence and the rule of law, check out Joel's first book, Such Men as Billy the Kid: The Lincoln County War Reconsidered. The Old West wasn't lawless, as the cliche would have it. If anything, there was an excess of law, or at least an excess of lawyers and judges and writs and counter-writs. And gunfire.
Biographical stuff
I graduated in January, 1986, from Northwestern University in Chicago (not Evanston, pretty as that suburb is - the professional schools are on the north side of downtown). I also studied law at two other universities, my hometown University of New Mexico and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn.
I've practiced in a large corporate firm, a small firm and for the government. Until I got too busy writing books I taught part-time in the Paralegal Studies program at Central New Mexico Community College, and hope to start doing that again soon.
I started my career in the field of commercial litigation, with an emphasis in media law, but since 1991 I've specialized in criminal appeals. I'm an Assistant Attorney General representing the prosecution in New Mexico's appellate courts and wardens in federal habeas corpus actions. (Please note the disclaimer at the bottom of every page of this blog. The blog is a personal project, with no government affiliation or sponsorship.)
Because most violent crimes are prosecuted in state rather than federal courts, and because New Mexico traditionally has the highest violent crime rate among non-Southern states, my cases – many hundreds by now – have included all of the obvious violent acts one human being can commit against another and many of the more obscure ones.
By this point I've probably handled more than 50 appeals involving murders and several times that many cases dealing with lesser degrees of homicide or nondeadly violence. I've dealt with beheadings, an evisceration, toddlers locked in a remote cabin to starve to death, a fatal anal rape perpetrated by mop handle, a hoe murder, and a murder solved only because a Navajo man was curious enough to step out of his hogan to investigate strange noises in one of the most isolated areas of the continent. Not many people in America have as much experience handling appeals from convictions for violent crimes.
Judging Crimes isn't a right-wing rant against judicial activism. I'm a Democrat, in the mainstream of the party on most issues. On the hot-button issue conventionally used to separate the sheep from the goats, I don't support capital punishment and I don't handle death penalty cases, but New Mexico's death penalty was mainly theoretical even before it was recently abolished, anyway.
I think my views on democracy and the criminal law are consistent with the values of modern liberalism. The United States is several times more violent than any other developed nation. One reason, I believe, is that we've tolerated so much violence over the past 50 years.
The American judiciary's policy of requiring citizens to tolerate ever-greater levels of violence in their society has been terrific for social scientists who study such things, and who have long since established the association between victimization and subsequent victimizing. (Here's a slide show setting out some statistics from Australia.)
Our judges have been prepared to tolerate increasing levels of violence, I believe, because the victims are demographically unlike themselves. Victims of violent crime are overwhelmingly the poor, members of minority groups, the disabled and the mentally ill.
Violent victimization is the single most reliable mark of social status in the United States. People at the high end of the economic and social scale are very nearly immune from criminal violence. That's why it's man-bites-dog news whenever a well-to-do white middle-aged man gets murdered.
As Richard Hofstadter demonstrated half a century ago, social Darwinism remains the template for American attitudes about the proper role of government. Social Darwinism remains the most common political attitude encountered in our criminal courts, all the more potent because judges - the enforcers of the status quo - tend not to question received wisdom. After all, the law is received wisdom, except when it isn't wise.
(The peculiar history of social Darwinism in the US was recently retraced by Barry Werth in Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.)
Judging Crimes explores the strange paradox that the social Darwinist -- or, to phrase it more politely, the libertarian -- view has come to be considered "liberal" in one isolated area of American public life: the administration of the criminal law.
(A Slate contributor actually treats "liberal" and "libertarian" as synonyms in this comparison of Scalia's and Alito's records in criminal cases. That's not merely like saying Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are ideological soulmates -- it's coming right out and saying it.)
My undergraduate degree in literature was from the College of Creative Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was lucky enough to study with Robyn Bell and the late Marvin Mudrick, author of Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (I've never heard a satisfactory answer to that question.)
I also spent a year studying Anglo-Irish literature and Guinness at Trinity College, Dublin. I've published scholarly articles in New Mexico Historical Review, Oregon Law Review, Akron Law Review and the sadly-defunct New Mexico Bar Journal and New Mexico Lawyer.
Other pieces of varying types have appeared in various journals. Years ago I reviewed movies for the New Mexico Independent (the old paper, not the modern website), which was a blast but paid like something that was fun to do. But I'm still one of those people who stick around until the last credits have rolled.