Ordinarily, when this column turns to things our government has done wrong, out of respect as much as anything else, it lays out the facts in some detail. This time, I’m sick of facts; I have waded through most of the 600-page report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, in particular the parts that had to do with torture.

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Still fuming over the media hoopla that surrounded the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library? (Wouldn’t, say, a mini-golf course be more appropriate for a guy famous for not reading books?)

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Since the Model Rules of Professional Conduct were first promulgated by the American Bar Association in 1983, they have been amended several times on an issue-by-issue basis, and the ABA has twice undertaken a more global overhaul.

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The University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law Immigration Clinic has two operational goals. First, to help people facing deportation. And second, to prepare student attorneys for the actual practice of law.

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Two recent court events involving public school systems help shed light on the nature of the relationship between parents and the institutions and people to which they trust their children.

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In late 2004, Mr. Jaron Tyree Grade was convicted of a double homicide and sentenced to two life terms. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed, and Grade’s case was argued before the Court of Appeals of Maryland on Oct. 3, 2007.

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Inequality hurts us all. Imagine if you could go back 45 years to 1968. That year, after three decades of creative policy from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the United States was one of the world’s most equal nations.

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Last November, Maryland had a referendum on same-sex marriage. In the run-up to the election, the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore wrote a letter effectively ordering the faithful to vote against gays and lesbians marrying, and directed that it be read aloud in every pulpit. A friend of mine, from a venerable and distinguished Catholic family, was in church that Sunday with her two teen-aged daughters, both of whom attend Catholic schools. After Mass that day and hearing the letter read, they announced to their mother that they were finished going to church — and obviously, short of dragging them physically, the mother had no way of forcing them into the pew. So that was that: the Church had just lost two bright young members.

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A quarter of children in the U.S. experience or witness a traumatic event before age four. And the number is nearly nine in 10 for children in the juvenile justice system.

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In my nearly 30-year career as a criminal defense lawyer, I’ve represented clients charged with murder, racketeering, money laundering, sexual abuse, drug dealing — you name it. But I have never participated in a case where there was the possibility of capital punishment. Not once.

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