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Legal Commentary

Houston's Clear Thinkers

Wide-ranging observations on law, business, medicine, culture, sports, and other matters of general interest to members of the Houston business, professional, and academic communities.
By Tom Kirkendall

Post Frequency: 4.2/day

Last Entry: July 20, 2010 at 03:01:00

Cooling heads over the Ashby high-rise

Posted on February 15, 2008
So, Mayor White has figured out that his ostentatious initial position and statements regarding the proposed Ashby high-rise project weren't such a good idea, after all: The city risks exposing itself to a "takings lawsuit" if it passes a new...

The Southwest Airlines culture

Posted on February 15, 2008
While Continental Airlines continues its speculative merger dance with United Airlines, Southwest Airlines continues to be the most profitable company in the U.S. airline industry. This Jeff Bailey/NY Times article reports on the unique culture of Southwest that makes it...

The DOJ loses another Enron criminal case

Posted on February 14, 2008
As expected, the Fifth Circuit denied the government's appeal yesterday of U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore's decision to vacate the final count of the government's odious five count conviction against former Enron Broadband CFO Kevin Howard. The Fifth Circuit's decision...

The aftermath of the Clemens hearing

Posted on February 14, 2008
Many folks have been asking me about my thoughts on the Roger Clemens saga, but I am so disappointed with the abysmal level of discourse regarding the issues involved with the use of PED's in sports and society that I...

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The charming Bobby Knight

Posted on February 14, 2008
And Larry the Cable Guy's crack on Coach Knight is pretty good, too....

Criminalizing Capitalism

Posted on February 13, 2008
If I didn't know better, I'd say that Nicole Gelinas has been reading (H/T Professor Bainbridge) my blog over the past several years: [I]n the end, Sarbanes-Oxley has just made it easier for ambitious government attorneys to criminalize bad business....

On the DeGeurin-DeGuerin brothers and Houston's G-man

Posted on February 13, 2008
A couple of interesting stories have popped up over the past several days regarding Houston lawyers. First, there was Mary Flood's profile of the DeGuerin (or was that DeGeurin?) brothers, Mike and Dick, two of the best in Houston's formidable...

The psychotherapist-patient privilege

Posted on February 13, 2008
Gosh, as if Paul the psychotherapist, Gabe Byrne's character in the new HBO series, In Treatment, didn't have enough to worry about. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just issued this interesting opinion on the psychotherapist-patient privilege in the...

Lerach's sentence

Posted on February 12, 2008
Former plaintiff's class action securities lawyer Bill Lerach was sentenced yesterday to two years in prison, fined $250,000 and ordered to complete 1,000 hours of community service (Peter Lattman's W$J interview of Lerach is here). Lerach pled guilty last September...

Bill King's "Let'em ride free plan"

Posted on February 12, 2008
Longtime Houstonian Bill King is a common sense fellow who serves on the Transportation Council, a group of elected officials and agency staffers that sets priorities for transportation spending in the 13-county Gulf Coast region. In this Chronicle op-ed from...

Guilty verdict in the latest natural gas trader case

Posted on February 12, 2008
We in Houston have become so jaded by dubious prosecutions of businesspeople that the guilty verdict in the latest natural gas trader case passed almost unnoticed late last week. The Department of Justice's press release on the verdict is here,...

The winds of prosecutorial power

Posted on February 11, 2008
When the Department of Justice decided to prosecute Arthur Andersen out of business despite a manifestly weak case, that confirmed that the creation of enormous wealth for thousands of employees and an impeccable reputation built over decades of fine work...

Comparing Tiger's swing with Hogan's

Posted on February 11, 2008
In comparing the swing of Tiger Woods with that of Ben Hogan in this Links Magazine article, long-time golf teacher Bob Toski makes the following observation about how changes in the nature of golf have prompted swing changes: One year...

Vetting the Trans-Texas Corridor

Posted on February 11, 2008
This Ralph Blumenthal/NY Times article does a good job of summarizing the massive scale that is the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor project: . . . the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state?s ? or probably any state?s ?...

Pictures from Houston's neighborhoods

Posted on February 10, 2008
Robert Boyd is a Houston-based blogger who regularly tours Houston neighborhoods and posts interesting pictures and comments on his adventures. His latest tour is the neighborhood just north of downtown, and his dozen or so other tours are here. Check...

Elevating form over substance

Posted on February 09, 2008
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill was not John McCain's finest hour. John Lott makes a good point about the utter hypocrisy of it all in connection with the Clintons' recent loan to Hillary's cash-strapped campaign: Former President Clinton stands to...

Another Enron Task Force alum rings the bell

Posted on February 08, 2008
Fresh off his victory in the Joseph Naccio trial, former Enron Task Force prosecutor Cliff Stricklin is the latest former Enron Task Force prosecutor to land a cush job at a big firm. Sean Berkowitz and Andrew Weissmann, among other...

The Dear Abby of business

Posted on February 08, 2008
Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times columnist and associate editor, pens an entertaining blog called Dear Lucy in which she solicits letters from businesspeople about various business problems. Sometimes she comments on them, but all the time she opens them up to...

Why betting against Pete Maravich in H-O-R-S-E was not a good idea

Posted on February 08, 2008

Warning labels?

Posted on February 07, 2008
Remember when the various credit-rating agencies contended that their relatively sanguine ratings of Enron's debt up until the company went belly-up were the result of the company's misrepresentations? One of the more ludicrous allegations was that the rating agencies didn't...

Are they finally getting serious?

Posted on February 07, 2008
The Wall Street Journal ($) reported yesterday afternoon that Houston-based Continental Airlines seemingly perpetual merger negotiations (see also here) with Chicago-based United Airlines are accelerating for a variety of reasons. A Continental-United deal is contingent on Northwest Airlines' ongoing merger...

The importance of recruiting classes

Posted on February 07, 2008
The institutionalized fanaticism that is college football recruiting reached its annual zenith yesterday as hundreds of the nation's best high school senior football players signed National Letters of Intent with various big-time college football programs...

A nice reward

Posted on February 06, 2008
So, what's the reward for inducing Microsoft to overpay for Yahoo!? Answer: Playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am (scroll down to the bottom of the list). Perhaps Bear Stearns' board should have thought of such a reward? ;^)...

The First and Last 100 Days?

Posted on February 06, 2008
Over at the University of Houston, the university is celebrating the arrival of its impressive new Chancellor and President, Renu Khator. As a part of that celebration, the university has posted this interesting website entitled Building Our Future: The First...

Waxing philosophic on bad announcing

Posted on February 06, 2008
My standards for announcers of football games are not high, but it seemed to me that the Fox Sports announcing team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman in last weekend's Super Bowl LXII game were unusually bad. For example, neither...

The human cost of questionable prosecutions

Posted on February 05, 2008
One of the more discouraging aspects of the societal tide of resentment and scapegoating that has permeated the Enron related criminal prosecutions has been the utter lack of perspective or compassion regarding the horrendous human cost of those prosecutions...

Pro Dome? Or just anti-Emmett?

Posted on February 05, 2008
I understand that Ed Emmett is not the Chronicle's favored candidate for Harris County Judge. But isn't it a bit odd for the Chron to be fanning criticism of Emmett for showing rare leadership over the pie-in-the-sky Astrodome hotel redevelopment...

What was so super about that?

Posted on February 05, 2008
While most Americans who watched Sunday's Super Bowl XLII were thrilled with a close game that wasn't decided until the final seconds, Financial Times ($) Simon Kuper examines why American football does not translate well to other cultures: . ....

A birthday wish

Posted on February 04, 2008
Don't miss Greg Mankiw's birthday wish: My birthday wish is for all of us to stop asking what the government can do for us today. Instead, we should focus on what we can do together to prepare the economy for...

An uncomfortable issue for John McCain

Posted on February 04, 2008
The hypocritical and unproductive nature of government policy regarding illegal drugs has been a frequent subject on this blog (see here, here, here and here), so this Radley Balko post about Cindy McCain, John McCain's wife, caught my eye: ....

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