This manuscript is about the sense of justice that limits what individuals can do in pursuit of their ends and opens them to exploitation. It shows how flawed agents choosing under partial information advance those of their ends having nothing to do with justice by maintaining such a disposition.

Throwing away the rule book to deliver justice

USE THIS FIRST PARAGRAPH ONLY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... The First Amendment right of free speech is a fragile one. Its fragility is found no less in legal opinions than in other, less specialized forms of public discourse. Both its fragility and its sometimes surprising resiliency are reflected in this book. It provides an examination of how the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt with the problem of restrictions on media coverage of the criminal justice system, as well as how lower courts have interpreted the law created by the Supreme Court. The author explores the degree to which the Court has created a coherent body of law that protects free expression values while permitting reasonable government regulation, and examines the Supreme Court's jurisprudence concerning prior restraints, post-publication sanctions on the press, and their right of access to criminal proceedings. This is a study of the evolution of constitutional doctrine -- particularly when transported from the rarefied air of the Supreme Court to lower court judges who may not share the values of the jurists above them in the judicial hierarchy. The book's greatest strength lies in its thorough analysis and critique of how judges apply First Amendment doctrine to the complex problem of providing for both a "free press" and "fair trials." Much of the available literature on this topic focuses on legal doctrine, but with attention to the legal rules that emerge from the courts, rather than examining and critiquing the judicial techniques that produce those rules. Moreover, although a significant body of scholarship has explored Supreme Court doctrine, this work is one of the few that trace the influence of those doctrines through lower federal court decisions. The hope is to produce a reasonably accurate -- if partial -- picture of how intermediate appellate and trial courts use U.S. Supreme Court doctrine to decide First Amendment cases. Note: This book is necessarily influenced by the 'round-the-clock' press coverage of the recent O.J. Simpson trial. Although the Simpson case did not make new law, the trial and its outcome seem to be -- at this writing -- an inescapable part of how many people think about these issues. The simple truth, however, is that the Simpson case was an anomaly that has little relation to the everyday concerns of media coverage of the criminal justice system. While the venerable "parade of horribles" can be an effective strategy for the legal advocate, it is not always the ideal way to address larger concerns, particularly when fundamental rights are at stake.

Inspired by real-world events, AN ABSENCE OF FAITH: A Tale of Afghanistan is a novel of the collapse of Afghanistan, seen through the eyes of two protagonists, Daniyal, an Afghan army private, and Colonel Trevanathan, a U.S. Army officer, assigned the Sisyphean task of ending Afghan government corruption. Daniyal is a university student in Kabul, who is forced into the Afghan army by a military press gang. He is starved, beaten, and watches his friends die from incompetent leadership. When he is made the Headquarters clerk for the heartless Command Sergeant Major Mahmood, he learns his army’s leaders are getting rich from selling their soldiers’ food and medical supplies. Daniyal is torn between the privilege and safety his headquarters’ job provides versus his complicity in the widespread corruption. The second parallel story is the arrival in Kabul of U.S. Army Colonel William Trevanathan, who is to be the Counter Corruption Director for the NATO command in Afghanistan. It is November 2015. Trevanathan learns that multiple NATO countries plan to pull out of the war from their frustration with Afghan embezzlement of NATO military aid. The domino effect of departing Western allies will likely lose the war against the Taliban, as the Afghan military is incapable of fighting on its own. Trevanathan’s job is to prevent that NATO pullout by ensuring the corrupt Afghan government players are prosecuted, despite no Afghan politician or senior military commander having been charged in the past fifteen years. The challenge is great enough, before Colonel Trevanathan learns his efforts are being undermined by The U.S. Embassy. Both Daniyal and Trevanathan embark on a Kafka-esque adventure across the breadth of Afghanistan to save the Afghan people and themselves, as they fight to cling to their humanity and beliefs in a war where allies are enemies and yes almost always means no. For anyone who has ever wanted clarity why the U.S. was unable to defeat the Taliban despite spending $2 trillion, investing twenty years into building the Afghan National Army, and suffering tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, this is the book you've been waiting for.