Most of the people we know manage to live in the country by having a job in the city. We are no different, except that most of my paying work doesn't involve a commute...except when it does. I therefore write this entry from the road.

At the US Supreme Court building shortly after arguing Voisine v US, No 14-10154

And what a winding road it has been. I started my career in the Federal Defender system nearly 25 years ago by writing a Supreme Court brief on a juvenile sentencing issue. (We won.). I like to think that I influenced the course of the sentencing of so-called "Armed Career Criminals" by writing a petition to the Supreme Court challenging the law on due process grounds in 2005. It was probably coincidental that the Court started taking cases in an effort to establish a workable standard to determine what kind of prior conviction qualifies. It took the Court 9 years and a long series of cases to decide that part of the statute was unconstitutionally vague. A former colleague of mine in Minnesota won that case.

So my latest foray into the breach may not turn out so well. The problem is that my clients have been labeled "domestic abusers" even if that moniker may not fit what they actually did. Or rather, the problem is that we can never really know what they actually did because our misdemeanor court system is such a conviction mill. We sweep too many people into the criminal system and then, because they are now "criminals," no one has any sympathy for the proposition that they are not intrinsically bad people. So then we, collectively, feel justified in restricting rights to those "bad" people.

What I learned from both my parents is that there are very few "bad" people. There are all of us, and we all have strengths and weaknesses. If you keep yourself distanced from people and their problems, you have no ability to understand what the problems are or how they may be overcome. If you do not believe problems can be overcome, they never will be. If you do not expect people to be able to overcome problems, they never will. So my father, who began his career by picking cotton in west Texas at the age of 5, and who is the last of his generation still alive, bore witness to to the fact that I was continuing his fight for social justice. My mother, who can look at a pile of junk and can pull beauty from chaos, was there to witness my efforts to mirror her ability to work minor miracles. (This WAS the case in which Justice Thomas broke a 10 year silence to highlight the civil rights implications of a ruling against my clients).

No, this case will not make my fortune and allow me not to moonlight. Yes, we will have to continue to balance working on making our 40 acres a subsistence farm with caring for those who cared for us. But it is all good work, whether for golden apples of the sun or silver apples of the moon.