Legal Industry News

Baby, You Can Drive My Carr . . . Or Maybe Not

The ink is barely dry on the Supreme Court’s decision in Carr v. United States, and already we have a contentious case in the Seventh Circuit questioning its meaning.  In Carr, the Court had to interpret a notoriously clumsy bit of legislation from 2006, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (part of the so-called Adam Walsh Act).  SORNA makes it a federal crime for a person who is required to register as a sex offender to (1) travel in interstate commerce, and (2) knowingly fail to register or update a registration.  In Carr, the Court held that a person may not be convicted under SORNA based on travel that occurred prior to SORNA’s enactment.

At the time Carr was decided, the Seventh Circuit already had pending before it United States v. Vasquez .  Vasquez was convicted of a SORNA violation on the basis of stipulated facts that showed (1) he failed to register as a sex offender as he was required to do in Illinois, and (2) he subsequently traveled from Illinois to California for some undetermined purpose.  On appeal, Vasquez argued that the statute required the government to prove he had knowledge...

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What Causes People to Be Successful in Their Careers? Part II: Effective Listening

Let us review Part I. We asked the question: What causes people to be successful in their careers? I provided my own answer to that question. I believe that those who understand and develop their “soft side skills,” not just “technical skills,” will be the most successful. Clear evidence exists that career success stems as much from people skills as from technical skills. In fact, we noted that researchers at Harvard, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Center have all concluded that 85 percent of job success comes from people skills—only 15 percent comes from technical skills and knowledge.[1] Perhaps this percentage is overstated, but there is no question that there are no professional jobs where communication excellence does not contribute to life success. Many people who pursue a professional career think of their “work” as their technical expertise, but as one takes on more and more responsibility, it becomes clear that managing or dealing with people is of equal significance.

Communication as a Premier People Skill

We also noted that effective communication represents one of the most significant elements in what are called the people skills. One-on-one conversation, coaching and mentoring, team...

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Best of the Blogs

What do we have this week? Over at the wonderful Mirror of Justice, you can follow a debate involving Michael Perry, Mike Scaperlanda, Robbie George, Robert Hockett and Rick Garnett  and others (I’ve linked to some but not all of the posts in the thread) on the Pope Benedict XVI’s concern about the “dictatorship of relativism.”  Professor Hockett’s argument that terms like “relativism” and “tolerance” often mask conclusions rather than do much argumentative work reminded me of Steven D. Smith’s excellent new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. I just finished reading it and hope to  blog on it shortly.

At Public Discourse, Rob Vischer considers the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez upholding a requirement at Hastings Law School that recognized student organizations may not exclude students based upon their refusal to accept the organization’s objectives or beliefs. Rob concludes:

The next challenge is clear: we must think seriously about how to help deepen our public discourse about discrimination and diversity to include recognition that associational diversity is a key component of religious and moral liberty, and that even if a university now has the right to make all...

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