Catherine Bernard

05/29/2026

Foggy morning; we started early for what is likely to be the last day of trial.

05/28/2026

The State's case continues.

05/27/2026

05/26/2026

One of my brave and amazing clients has written a book about her experience with the justice system - "Tough As A Mother" by Carrie Timms. I have ordered it and am very much looking forward to the read! Link in comments.

05/25/2026

Best wishes for a reflective Memorial Day honoring those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms.

05/22/2026

Avoid cult thinking, and there is plenty of it on all sides.

05/22/2026

"All nations, from the beginning, have been agitated by the same passions. The principles developed here will go a great way in explaining every phenomenon that occurs in the history of government. The vegetable and animal kingdoms, and those heavenly bodies whose existence and movements we are as yet only permitted faintly to perceive, do not appear to be governed by laws more uniform or certain than those which regulate the moral and political world. Nations move by unalterable rules; and education, discipline, and laws, make the greatest difference in their accomplishments, happiness, and perfection. It is the master artist alone who finishes his building, his picture, or his clock. The present actors on the stage have been too little prepared by their early views, and too much occupied with turbulent scenes, to do more than they have done. Impartial justice will confess that it is astonishing they have been able to do so much. It is for the young to make themselves masters of what their predecessors have been able to comprehend and accomplish but imperfectly. A prospect into futurity in America, is like contemplating the heavens through the telescopes of Herschell. Objects stupendous in their magnitudes and motions strike us from all quarters, and fill us with amazement! When we recollect that the wisdom or the folly, the virtue or the vice, the liberty or servitude, of those millions now beheld by us, only as Columbus saw these times in vision, are certainly to be influenced, perhaps decided, by the manners, examples, principles, and political institutions of the present generation, that mind must be hardened into stone that is not melted into reverence and awe."

--John Adams

05/21/2026

The legal system as a set of procedures for determining truth and punishing aggressors actually has a lot of value for civilization, and it's a shame it working that way is such a relative rarity.