Joel Jacobsen - that's him on the right, with an age-progression image on the left - will have two books coming out in 2009.Whatever Happened to Justice? The Disappearance of Truth from Our Criminal Courts will address many themes familiar to readers of Judging Crimes, recently named one of the 100 best law-and-lawyer blogs on the Web.
Here's more about the book. It will be published by Kunati Books, the Independent Publisher of the Year. (Of this year, though by rights it ought to be next year.)
For the Sake of Argument: Life in the Law (more here) will be a career memoir - never fear, I've made a firm vow to keep a lid on personal secrets, at least until I can think of any worth telling - describing the experience of becoming a lawyer, and the bizarre things that happen next. It will be published by Kaplan Publishing.
Joel Jacobsen is available to speak at your next bar convention. As the Clash said, Weddings, parties, anything, and bongo jazz a speciality.
(More appropriate PR stuff will be inserted here when I get some sensible advice about the kind of thing to include.)
Here's the original "about Joel Jacobsen" info
I've been practicing law for 20 years. My law degree is from Northwestern University in Chicago. I also studied law at two other universities, my hometown University of New Mexico and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. I've practiced in a large corporate firm, a small firm and for the government, and now I teach part-time in the Paralegal Studies program at Central New Mexico Community College.
I started my career in the field of commercial litigation, with an emphasis in media law, but since 1991 I've specialized in criminal appeals. I'm an Assistant Attorney General representing the prosecution in New Mexico's appellate courts and wardens in federal habeas corpus actions. (Please note the disclaimer at the bottom of every page of this blog. The blog is a personal project, with no government affiliation or sponsorship.)
Because most violent crimes are prosecuted in state rather than federal courts, and because New Mexico traditionally has the highest violent crime rate among non-Southern states, my cases – many hundreds by now – have included all of the obvious violent acts one human being can commit against another and many of the more obscure ones.
By this point I've probably handled more than 50 murders and several times that many cases dealing with lesser degrees of homicide or nondeadly violence. I've dealt with beheadings, an evisceration, toddlers locked in a remote cabin to starve to death, a fatal anal rape perpetrated by mop handle, a hoe murder, and a murder solved only because a Navajo man was curious enough to step out of his hogan to investigate strange noises in one of the most isolated areas of the continent. Not many people in America have as much experience handling appeals from convictions for violent crimes.
Judging Crimes isn't a right-wing rant against judicial activism. I'm a Democrat, in the mainstream of the party on most issues. On the hot-button issue conventionally used to separate the sheep from the goats, I don't support capital punishment and I don't handle death penalty cases, but New Mexico's death penalty is mainly theoretical anyway.
I think my views on democracy and the criminal law are consistent with the values of modern liberalism. The United States is several times more violent than any other developed nation. One reason, I believe, is that victims of violent crime are overwhelmingly the poor, members of minority groups, the disabled and the mentally ill. As Richard Hofstadter demonstrated half a century ago, social Darwinism remains the template for American attitudes about the proper role of government.
Judging Crimes explores the strange paradox that the social Darwinist -- or, to phrase it more politely, the libertarian -- view has come to be considered "liberal" in one isolated area of American public life: the administration of the criminal law.
(A Slate contributor actually treats "liberal" and "libertarian" as synonyms in this comparison of Scalia's and Alito's records in criminal cases. That's like saying Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are ideological soulmates.)
I'm also the author of Such Men As Billy the Kid: The Lincoln County War Reconsidered, published by the University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, long considered the nation's premier publisher of serious works on the American West, though it seems to have decided recently on a most improbable rebranding. (Oddly, they didn't consult me about the change in direction.)
Viewed abstractly, Such Men as Billy the Kid is concerned with how law is established in a community in which personal relations are defined by violence. From page to page, though, the book tells a wild tale that has fascinated readers for 125 years. The book is described here.
My undergraduate degree in literature was from the College of Creative Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was lucky enough to study with Robyn Bell and the late Marvin Mudrick, author of Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (I've never heard a satisfactory answer to that question.)
I also spent a year studying Anglo-Irish literature and Guinness at Trinity College, Dublin. I've published scholarly articles in New Mexico Historical Review, Oregon Law Review, Akron Law Review and the sadly-defunct New Mexico Bar Journal and New Mexico Lawyer. Other pieces of varying types have appeared in various journals. Years ago I reviewed movies for the New Mexico Independent, which was a blast but convinced me I'd never write a bestseller: my enthusiasms were sadly out of synch with the popular mood. But I still love the smell of popcorn when you enter the lobby, and I'm still one of those people who stick around until the last credits have rolled.