Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

From Lawyers Weekly USA: To succeed in a legal malpractice case against his attorney, a criminal defendant must prove that he was "actually innocent" of the underlying charges against him, the Washington Supreme Court has ruled. A psychiatrist and his wife were indicted on 18 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, bank and tax fraud and filing false statements. On the advice of counsel, they agreed to plead guilty to two of the counts. Case: Ang v. Martin, Washington Supreme Court No. 74698-2. June 23, 2005.

Two interesting posts about the most commonplace of linguistic phenomenon...click on the post title to link over to Language Log.

The 9th Cir. rules that it is unlawful discrimination for an employer to insist on calling a worker by an Anglicized nickname (in this case, "Manny") instead of his actual Arabic name. Click here for an article and here for the court's opinion... I'm not sure if I agree with this. It would be one thing if the nickname was somehow pejorative (like to Texas law students referring to their professor from Connecticut as "Yankee" or "Liberal"), but some foreign names are just hard to pronounce. I spent a lot of the summer around people whose native dialect (Portuguese) prevents them from pronouncing "r" in certain words, and I would tease them by asking them to say, "Drury" (my full name) or "squirrel" - endless hours of entertainment, at least for me. On the other hand, I suppose in today's world an adult should be able to request to be addressed however they want.

I am back from my summer vacation and can start blogging again! More to come... Here's a couple pictures of me with my youngest son, Jonathan, enjoying the summer...more pictures of the fam are parked on my family's photo blog... I was traveling in May and my electric razor broke on the trip, and I decided to wait until I got home to shave.