Denny Hastert "was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch..."

"... anyone who disturbed Congress�s usual way of doing business," writes John Fund "How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?"

I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks � the special projects such as Alaska�s �Bridge to Nowhere� that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them....

The [Sunlight Foundation] found that Hastert had used a secret trust to join with others and invest in farm land near the proposed route of a new road called the Prairie Parkway. He then helped secure a $207 million earmark for the road. The land, approximately 138 acres, was bought for about $2.1 million in 2004 and later sold for almost $5 million, or a profit of 140 percent. Local land records and congressional disclosure forms never identified Hastert as the co-owner of any of the land in the trust. Hastert turned a $1.3 million investment (his portion of the land holdings) into a $1.8 million profit in less than two years. Hastert claimed at the time that the land deals had nothing to do with the federal earmark he had secured. �I owned land and I sold it, like millions of people do every day,� he told the Washington Post. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt, the former Tammany Hall leader in New York, once said of someone who made a killing in local land that later became part of a lucrative subway development: �He saw his opportunities and he took �em.� Plunkitt called such �opportunities� a form of �honest graft.�...

ADDED: But getting that money isn't the crime Hastert is charged with. Nor is conveying that money to a person who accused him of wrongdoing. Lawprof Noah Feldman describes the conduct the government cites in its charges (I've added some boldface):

First, [Hastert] made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each from his own accounts. The withdrawals were not criminal, but they did trigger a federal law that requires a bank to report any transaction or series of transactions of more than $10,000. In April 2012, according to the indictment, bank officials questioned Hastert about the withdrawals.

Presumably, in those conversations or in conjunction with them, Hastert realized for the first time that he shouldn't be making withdrawals of more than $10,000 if he didn't want to trigger scrutiny. Beginning in July 2012, Hastert switched his withdrawals so that they were less than $10,000 each -- to a total of $952,000. That was a crime under the law that prohibits knowingly structuring transactions to avoid reporting. And it's a crime that seems easy to prove, given Hastert�s change in his withdrawal practices.

Unfortunately for Hastert, when the FBI and IRS questioned him about the structure of the transactions in December 2014, he lied to them, insisting that he �did not feel safe in the banking system.� When asked directly what he did with the money, he said, �Yeah, I kept the cash. ... That's what I'm doing.� The lie to federal officials was a crime, too.

All of that is easy to prove, but we might nevertheless wonder whether the choice to prosecute is really based on the alleged wrong that Hastert spent so much money to hush up. Feldman asks why the government keeping things hushed up too and observes that if the underlying accusation is false and Hastert "was being blackmailed unjustly, then the government's prosecution seems heartless to the point of being abusive." Feldman concludes: "we should know what happened or Hastert shouldn't be charged."

But that assumes that the crimes Hastert seems to have committed should go unprosecuted unless there's something else that that makes us want to convict him of something. I think what is abusive is to have crimes that we don't believe in enforcing that are sitting around only to be used on occasions when we have some other problem with a person!

"I don't actually think the federal government will be executing people in 50 years."

"But if Barack Obama�s Department of Justice not only didn't stop using the federal death penalty, but also actively sought Tsarnaev�s execution, what are the odds that another, more liberal president will come along to do so in, say, the next 15 or 20 years?"

Asks lawprof Noah Feldman, who thinks that if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is actually put to death, "it will be a signal event in the history of" Massachusetts, "where I was born and have lived most of my life" and where "the death penalty has... come to seem distant, foreign and unfamiliar."

Even though "[a]lmost certainly, the execution won�t actually take place here."

"Every weapons system, from the bow and arrow to the intercontinental ballistic missile, sometimes kills the wrong people."

"So why has the revelation that a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed two al-Qaeda hostages �� a U.S. citizen and an Italian aid worker � created such a storm of drone 'rethinking'?" asks lawprof Noah Feldman.

I haven't read his answer yet, but mine is: People aren't good at thinking in the abstract. A problem seems different when you know the story of one individual. That's why Steven Spielberg had the little girl in the red coat, and why Joseph Stalin said: "When one person dies, it's a tragedy, but when a million people die, it's a statistic."

Now, I'm reading Feldman. He observes that there has been a "fantasy of precision has been at the heart of the political and tactical appeal for U.S. President Barack Obama." But:

The real military advantage of the armed-drone strike over a conventional airstrike... isn't the precision of the hit. It�s the fact that a pilot isn�t being put in jeopardy. Yet somehow the idea that drone strikes are more precisely targeted has lingered, giving the technique greater public appeal....

When it comes to drones, the fantasy of precision is just that, a fantasy. Killing innocent civilians, whether they�re Americans or Pakistanis or Yemenis, is an inevitable reality of war....

Feldman doesn't directly address why hearing about 2 specific innocent victims causes people to rethink anything. Is it too obvious?

"Why does law�s power and ubiquity require law school?"

"Because law school teaches students not only what the law is but also what it can be," writes Harvard lawprof Noah Feldman.

Yeah, but do law schools teach subject-verb agreement?

Or am I thinking only of grammar as it is and not also as it can be?

Maybe "law�s power and ubiquity" are � in a subtler manner of thinking, in a truer, better world � really just one thing: the big amazingness of law.

Harvard lawprof Noah Feldman says Robert Durst's confession is not admissible.

What we have is video of Durst, alone and looking into a mirror and saying "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." Feldman says he's "going deeply into the law" and "the circumstances of the statement" and encountering a "profound question about fantasy versus reality, the nature of a soliloquy, and the fascinating human strangeness unleashed by the era of reality television." All of that creates opportunities for presenting other evidence and making arguments about the meaning and weight of the words spoken by Durst, but it's not hearsay, because statements of a party offered by an opposing party are defined by the rules of evidence as not hearsay. [ADDED: Under some states' evidence rules, the statement of a party is hearsay but would fall within an exception to the rule against hearsay.] So what is Feldman's argument?
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