Law against the people/The empire strikes back

George E. Bisharat Emeritus Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law. George E. Bisharat was a trial lawyer for the Office of the Public Defender in San Francisco before joining the UC Hastings faculty in 1991. Professor Bisharat studied law, anthropology, and Middle East studies at Harvard, and wrote a book about Palestinian lawyers working under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. He writes frequently on the Middle East, both for academic audiences and for major media sources in the U.S. and abroad. After taking emeritus status in 2015, Bisharat, as �Big Harp George,� has recorded two blues albums that earned award nominations and critical acclaim. SUMMARY The objective of this article is to describe and analyze how supporters of Israeli state policies have, since 2000, used legal forms often associated with efforts by the powerless to challenge entrenched power to instead turn those forms into tools of the powerful. This movement to use �law against the people� has come about largely as a reaction against attempts by activists to use courts and other legal fora to advance Palestinian rights. This unexpected boomerang effect provides reason for reflection on the role of law in the struggle for justice in Israel/Palestine, suggesting that law offers little promise of relief, at least when it is not integrated with and supported by a broader political strategy.

LEGAL PERSPECTIVE: Q&A WITH DANIEL F. GOLDSTEIN

For students with disabilities to have the same opportunities to succeed as their nondisabled peers, access to educational technology and digital content is critical. It is essential that higher education boards, administrators, faculty, and administrative staff understand why accessibility must be on the forefront of our educational programs, co-curricular initiatives, support services, and infrastructure for on-campus and online programs. This question and answer session with Daniel F. Goldstein, a partner and trial lawyer with Brown, Goldstein & Levy, provides a legal perspective on issues relating to accessibility and online learning.

A Legal Tourist Visits Eighteenth-Century Britain: Henry Marchant's Observations on British Courts, 1771 to 1772

At the Rhode Island Historical Society there is a copy of an amazing journal, kept by Henry Marchant (1741–1796) during his eleven-month sojourn in England and Scotland as a colonial agent for Rhode Island. He was a practicing lawyer who had the first-hand opportunity to observe law as it operated on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. He was not the only lawyer to do so, but his background as a trial lawyer made his perceptions differ substantially from those of the many colonial law students who received their legal educations in England. Dozens of young colonists ventured from home to London for the legal training and social polish twelve terms at the Inns of Court could provide; their legal notebooks record activities at the Westminster courts as students saw them, learning the law one case at a time, before they returned to the colonies and went into practice. A few more experienced lawyers, such as John Adams, likewise had the opportunity to visit Westminster Hall, but they typically went once or twice, and did not return.

Metapragmatics in a courtroom genre

Taking as a starting point a broad conception of metapragmatics (Lucy 1993), this study describes a wide range of reflexive elements in closing arguments of criminal trials, and on the basis of their habitual use by trial lawyers, it enquires about the general underlying function as part of the sociocultural practice (Bourdieu 1990). The corpus of was collected at twenty-two criminal trials observed and recorded by the researcher. Five kinds of metapragmatic indexes – from the maximally explicit to the implicit – are identified and analyzed in their interactional, situational and societal context: (1) performatives, which count as official acts by the trial lawyer, (2) formulations and other evaluations of speech, (3) descriptions of aspects of the sociocultural practice and allusions to the principles governing the event, (4) strategic descriptions of contextual conditions, which are exploited with group identity and relational effects, and (5) style. The analysis reveals that these metapragmatic features contextualize the communication as expressing a specific social capital, and at the same time, they contribute to define what does not count as legitimate practice. Apart from the specific effects of individual types of indexes, in closing arguments metapragmatic indexes basically function signaling that the social actor and the practice they are engaged in rightfully belong to the social field of the law.

Patient Statement: A Canary's Tale

I am Jacob B. Berkson, a 68-year-old resident of Hagerstown, Maryland. I was a trial lawyer for some 40 years. I am now retired and writing a book on Environmental Pollution and Environmental Illness, titled A Canary's Tale. I was invited to speak to you as a patient one who was poisoned by an organophosphate pesticide and who subsequently developed Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS, or sometimes referred to as Environmental Illness, EI).