"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I'm watching Season Three of The Good Wife. In one episode, a British character who is defeated in a libel suit re-opens the suit in a British court and requires the defendants (who are defended by the starring firm and a team including the central character) to provide letters rogatory (essentially a deposition) via teleconference to a court in London.

Only problem with this? It doesn't work that way. From Wikipedia (my emphasis):

Another reason why a court may require assistance from a foreign court is to obtain evidence from a witness. This evidence may be to answer questions relevant to the determination of an issue of fact, or for disclosure of documents.

Courts only have power to subpoena witnesses from within their own country. So for example Alice in the U.S. could not summon Jean from France to the U.S. courthouse. Instead the U.S. court would issue a letter rogatory to a French court, who would then examine Jean in France, and send a deposition back to the requesting court.

Insofar as requests to United States courts are concerned, the use of letters rogatory for requesting the taking of evidence has been replaced in large part by applications under 28 U.S.C. section 1782, or Section 1782 Discovery.

So, if the British court wanted testimony from US persons, the testimony would be taken in a US court. And it wouldn't be done by a letter rogatory in any event.

Oh, and the concept that this is a British practice that the American lawyers would not have heard of? Also not so valid.

The use of letters rogatory for purposes of service of process to initiate court action is now largely confined to the Americas, as between countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, service of process is effected without resort to letters rogatory, under the provisions of the Hague Service Convention.

Thanks to my friend David for linking to this piece by a former GW Bush advisor, which equates the NRA (and other groups) to racketeers. Hopefully the GOP will heed his call to "refuse to endorse anyone who runs in a primary with N.R.A. money against a sitting Republican".

And thanks to Nicholas Kristof for putting the lie to some hoary canards of the gun control debate and for linking to this study (PDF) that (so to speak) shoots holes in the faulty Lott research that sought to suggest that the answer to guns was more guns (it's not; in fact the researchers found that "there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these [shall-issue] laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it.")

And thanks to Charles Blow for this graphic that shows how deplorably dangerous our country is in comparison to our social and economic peers.

On the other hand, a few factoids for those on the gun control side of the house.

"Assault weapons" is a meaningless term; it's a Humpty-Dumpty word, that means whatever its current speaker intends it to mean, but nothing by itself. What I gather, from watching the debate over most of my lifetime, the majority of people react adversely to are semiautomatic rifles.

"Semi-automatic" (or, as the British military used to call them "self-loading") rifles are ones that have a magazine (a container holding bullets attached to the gun) and which automatically (through the action of the expanding gasses of a fired round and a strong spring) load a new round from the magazine into the weapon when the weapon is fired. This is not a feature of restricted to military weapons, though most military weapons feature it. Almost all rifles and almost all pistols do this. Restricting weapons just because they are semi-automatic is not practical. Such a regulation would affect most weapons owned for perfectly legitimate hunting uses and would never get enough support to pass Congress.

Restricting weapons because they "look" like military weapons is also not practical because the look does nothing, because "style" is in the eye of the beholder and therefore hard to define, and because it can be easily changed to circumvent a law designed to limit "military style" weapons. The last assault weapons ban restricted weapons based on irrelevant features like the style of the grip or whether a rifle had military mounts--things that had nothing to do with the mass killings we have seen these weapons used in.

As scary as people seem to find the *look* of such rifles, the only relevant feature is the magazine. Most modern weapons (pistols or rifles) have detachable magazines, to allow quick reloading. The most productive restrictions on rifles would be to limit the size of the magazine that can be carried (the old assault weapons ban limited magazines to ten rounds) or, to take it one step further, to ban detachable magazines, which would force a shooter to reload a gun's magazine by hand, one shell at a time, after emptying it.

All of this doesn't get to the most significant fact, however: although rifles *look* scary (to some) and are often used in shooting massacres, these shootings constitute only a tiny fraction of the gun homicides in the US every year. Far and away the largest number of people are injured or killed, intentionally, accidentally, or through suicide, by handguns. If people want to affect the rate at which people are killed by guns, rifles are far less relevant--handguns are the place to look. And since the SCOTUS decision in Heller, which designated handguns as "an entire class of 'arms' that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense", banning handguns is a non-starter. Creative and thoughtful efforts to control who can purchase such weapons may help.

But, in the end, nothing will stop just what happened in Connecticut: an adult, non-felon citizen of (as far as anyone knows) sound mind purchased, over time, several weapons that were kept in the home and used for legitimate reasons (self-protection and target practice). And then someone stole those weapons, killed the owner, and went on to kill many other people. The only things, even under a strong and reasonable gun-control regime, that would have prevented some or all of this killing would have been the institutionalization of the shooter before he gained access to guns or an armed security officer at the school.

We can look to gun control to try ans stem the tide of killing, but we will never find a 100% solution to murder. And if we stop at guns, we will be missing some of the major elements of the tragedy that also need to be addressed.

One of my friends posted a link to this story in the Post about the erosion of civil liberties in the US. I started to reply, and then realised that it would perhaps be more appropriate to post my response here than co-opt his entry.

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1. The Diane Rehm Show today had an interview with two members of a family that decided to take half of the "stuff' it had accumulated and turn it into value for others. They sold their home, bought a smaller one, and invested half (actually slightly more than half) the proceeds into a project to help improve rural communities in West Africa (redactrice, as soon as I heard them say "...we wanted to take on world poverty..." I knew who they had probably contacted! :-)

What I didn't understand was the sheer volume of animus directed at them by those who called and emailed the program. Folks, these people aren't saying everyone has to do this! They're not saying "you're a bad person if you don't help others". They're just saying, "We decided to give up a lot of what we *didn't need*, and not only were we able to help others by doing so, but our family grew stronger as a result." JFC, how did we get to a place where there is hostility towards geenerosity?

2. The Maryland State Police and a state's attorney are trying to persecute prosecute someone for videotaping his interaction with a state trooper who had pulled him over to ticket him for speeding. They are claiming that a state policeman, conducting a traffic stop along an interstate highway, has an expectation of privacy. ! This when police in Maryland are specifically authorised to video and audio tape interactions with the public themselves. Seems like Humpty Dumpty Syndrome to me.

3. People are apparently outraged by the SCOTUS decision that if, having been warned of your rights, you speak to the police when you are being interrogated, what you say can be used in court against you. Someone please explain to me why this is not blindingly obvious. Look, the police arrest me. They tell me I have the right to remain silent, but that if I do not remain silent what I say may be used in court. They then ask me questions I don't want to answer. What in the name of little green apples makes someone think that, in that scenario, any answers to the questions the police are asking that I subsequently choose to give should somehow *not* be admissible?

ETA: This...

"If Thompkins wanted to remain silent, he could have said nothing in response to [the detective's] questions, or he could have unambiguously involved his Miranda rights and ended the interrogation," wrote Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Scalia, Thomas, and Alito are three justices I would not want to agree with normally, but I find this argument so simply and obviously rational that I can overcome that aversion with ease.

Thanks to fionnabhar for highlighting this.

Senate vote prohibiting funds from going to contractors who prohibit employees from suing them for "sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention".

fionnabhar provides a summary of the case that caused Sen. Franken to submit the amendment. It passed, but it had a lot of conservative, white, Southern men voting against it. Apparently they think that what happened is acceptable, or at least not as objectionable as not allowing employers who behave this way to be kept from getting federal funds. I can only hope (without much confidence) that this will disgust enough of their constituents that they will change their minds.

I had missed this article on Bush's arrogation on Constitutional power, but was pointed to it by a link from a link pf percyprune's.

The breadth of arrogance reflected in this, and the consistency with which the president has been attempting to undermine the rule of law in the United States is beyond my ability to express a coherent opinion at this time.

EDIT: Requires free registration. Feel free to use the username/pw freeregBC and bostoncom.

EDIT2: Can't resist adding this quote from the end of the piece:

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.

''This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. ''There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power."