About me

How I think about practicing law

I love my work. At its best, lawyering brings together intellectual rigor and creativity, moral seriousness, and caring — to end in practical help for someone who's been hurt.

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Excerpts from past work

From Lawyers, Judges & Semi-Rational Beasts (2020)

As a kid, I wanted to be a preacher. I knew the world was broken (though I didn't know the extent of it). I still have an occasionally annoying moralistic streak: I can't stand bullies. Lies offend me. It disgusts me when people won't own up to mistakes that hurt others. The following excerpt is from my 2020 book Lawyers, Judges & Semi-Rational Beasts: Cognitive Science and Persuasion:

"The idea of the lawyer as an amoral technician debases everyone who embraces it. Lawyers sometimes talk of lawsuits as a game, with all the moral consequence of a poker tournament. ... But in most of our work, someone has harmed another person either carelessly or deliberately — or has been wrongly accused of doing so. We may disagree about what the truth is, but the truth matters. ... Most of our work sags under the cargo of moral consequence. If we participate in causing or perpetuating an injustice, we bear some of the blame. A bar card does not immunize us from moral responsibility."

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From a brief using a defendant's gamesmanship against the defendant

The stereotype is true: There's a shocking amount of dishonesty in litigation. This is ironic, because formally at least, the legal system is built to demand honesty and punish dishonesty. But somehow the legal culture has come to accept an enormous amount of dishonesty. I do not accept that. The following excerpt is from a motion I filed in 2026:

It cannot be that Dr. [redacted] is as limited in knowledge as her interrogatory responses make her out to be. Presumably she and her lawyers thought the misrepresentation of her knowledge was permissible. After all, this is litigation, and it's conducted through language, and language is always to some degree indeterminate. So who's to draw the line between falsehoods and harmless word games? And don't lawyers do this sort of thing all the time? How can it be held against this Defendant when others do it so often?

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From a motion to sanction a medical expert and the lawyers and litigants who sponsored him

I don't yell at people, and I try to keep my language civil even when I very much want to be uncivil. I try to remember that we are all frail creatures in a fallen world. We all need a little grace from time to time. But precisely because we are frail, we must have accountability. Better rules make better people. The less accountability, the more wrongdoing.

In a 2022 case, I believed the defense expert committed perjury at trial, and that the defense lawyers knowingly sponsored the perjury. The following excerpt is from my motion for sanctions against the witness and the lawyers:

"INTRODUCTION At trial, Emory’s hired witness, Dr. Guzzi, testified that Jeni Carswell suffered a cardiac arrest during her “Code Blue” event from 6:26 AM to 6:43 AM. That testimony was false. The Code Blue record shows that Jeni had a strong heart rate and blood pressure during the Code Blue — and that no CPR was ever performed (which it would have been, if her heart had stopped pumping blood). As Dr. Guzzi acknowledged in his deposition, the presence of blood pressure and heart rate means the patient has not gone on to cardiac arrest. As Dr. Guzzi also stated in his deposition, Jeni Carswell “never” had cardiac arrest. His contrary testimony at trial was false, and intentionally so. Emory’s defense boils down to a simple rhetorical move: redefine cardiac arrest as cardiac or respiratory insufficiency. Even for a non-medical person, this should sound suspicious. ... To support their re-definition of cardiac arrest, Emory would need to produce compelling evidence.

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From a brief asking the Utah Supreme Court to reverse a century of its precedent on sovereign immunity

Reason without emotion is heartless, but emotion without reason is foolish. Persuasive power comes from combining them.

In a 2025 brief I filed in the Utah Supreme Court, I asked the court to overturn a century of precedent endorsing the perverse doctrine of sovereign immunity — the doctrine that the government (and every single governmental employee) has a privilege to hurt the rest of us without accountability. That was a big request, and the chances were slim. But the best chance came from combining analytical rigor with emotion.

Here's the Introduction to the brief:

“The Utah Constitutional Convention of 1895 considered and rejected a limited sovereign-immunity clause. It would have applied to the State but not to other government entities or to employees. On Day 38 of the Convention, Mr. Eichnor proposed a clause stating, “The Legislature shall not pass any law authorizing suits to be brought against the State.” The Convention rejected that proposal.

The Constitution did not (and still does not) contain any provision for sovereign immunity. To the contrary, Article I, § 11 of the Constitution guarantees redress for every injury: “every person, for an injury done to the person in his or her person, property, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law….” The Constitution makes no exception for injuries committed by government entities or their employees. The Constitution was adopted by people whose parents, or they themselves, had been harassed, sometimes murdered, and driven from their homes by government-sponsored actors.

The Constitution recognized claims against the State. Article VII, Section 13 gave jurisdiction over such claims to a Board of Examiners. (That jurisdictional provision was repealed by Constitutional amendment in 1992.)

Looking beyond the Constitution itself: The territorial laws before adoption of the Constitution, and the State laws shortly after, also contain no provision for sovereign immunity. To the contrary, in a multitude of ways, the statutes confirm the State, other government entities, and their employees could be sued for torts.

If the Constitution includes a sovereign-immunity clause, it is unwritten, a ghost-clause. Advocates have supposed sovereign immunity was such a basic part of federal law and English common law that the drafters of the Constitution took it for granted and forgot to write it in. That would be odd, since the drafters remembered other basic things — e.g., “All men have the inherent and inalienable right to enjoy and defend their lives and liberties,” “All political power is inherent in the people,” etc.

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From a brief challenging 15 years of how Georgia courts and lawyers understood the "Emergency Medical Care" standard

Lawyers are as prone to group-think as anyone else. We develop habits and assumptions based on how we've seen things done. Those habits and assumptions blind us. Repeatedly over my career, I've discovered valid arguments that had gone unnoticed for years, even decades, because they did not fit within conventional practices. I've gotten used to opposing lawyers complain that they've never heard this or that argument I'm making.

I think I've found these arguments because of a life-long habit of trying to understand issues from the ground up — starting from first principles — and looking only to authoritative sources instead of assumptions or norms for each step in the reasoning.

This excerpt is from a motion I filed in 2022. The motion addresses a Georgia statute that creates a heightened burden for the plaintiff in a medical malpractice case involving "emergency medical care." For over 15 years, Georgia lawyers had overlooked what I referred to in the motion as the "severity requirement" in the definition of "emergency medical care." Because of that, the heightened standard had been applied in many cases that it should not have applied to.

The excerpt is less effective here, if you're not a Georgia medical malpractice lawyer. From the excerpt, you wouldn't know that my argument about the "severity requirement" was new. That's the point of writing it that way.

INTRODUCTION This is a medical malpractice case. The main acts of negligence occurred in an emergency room. Normally, medical malpractice cases involve a “regular” standard for negligence: Any deviation below the standard of care — large or small — makes the defendant liable for any harm caused by the deviation. But Georgia law creates a special “gross negligence” standard for a narrow subset of emergency department care. The law creates multiple requirements that must be met, in order for the jury to apply the gross-negligence standard, rather than the regular standard. The Defense obviously wants the jury to apply the gross-negligence standard, because that standard makes the case harder for a plaintiff, easier for a defendant. As the proponent of the gross-negligence standard, the Defense bears the burden of presenting evidence that the requirements are met, for applying that standard. The undisputed evidence, however, is that in this case the requirements are not met. So Plaintiff asks the Court to grant partial summary judgment, finding that requirements for applying the gross-negligence standard are not met, and ordering that the jury must apply the “regular” negligence standard. ——— Georgia law — at OCGA 51-1-29.5 — creates multiple requirements that must be met in order to give the defendant the benefit of the special “gross negligence” standard. The two main requirements before applying the gross-negligence standard are: (i) a location requirement, and (ii) a severity requirement. The location requirement is straightforward: As relevant here, the statute requires that the medical care at issue was provided in an emergency room. Plaintiff agrees that the location requirement is met in this case.

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