One of the privileges of life in federal prison is access to a law library. I’ve never been in a law library outside of prison and I’m sure that prison law libraries pale in comparison to those that lawyers rely upon. But over the decades that I have served, I’ve educated myself by spending thousands of hours reading case law.
Most all federal prisons keep several hundred case books in stock. We have subscriptions to the Federal Supplement series that publishes decisions from federal district courts; we have subscriptions to the Federal Reporter series that publishes decisions from the various U.S. appeals courts; and we have Lawyer’s Editions series that publishes cases from the U.S. Supreme Courts. We also keep a copy of the Shepard’s citations to help us cross reference, the American Jurisprudence legal encyclopedias, the U.S. Code annotated series, and a smattering of other law books.
I sometimes walk to the law library and lose myself in the case law. Today I was looking for legal decisions that revolve around corporate governance issues. I’m particularly interested in Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Many white-collar offenders serve time because decisions they made as corporate officers violated securities laws that fell under Sarbanes-Oxley. I wanted to read more so I could understand what responsibilities officers of publicly held corporations have to shareholders.
The trick to reading case law effectively is to limit the distractions. That takes discipline and a methodical approach. In every legal decision, the judges support their decision-making with citations of other court decisions. Each legal citation is a distraction, offering tidbits of information that fascinate me, and within minutes I’m pulling different cases off the shelf to follow the trend of logic. I keep a sheet of paper and a pen by my side to write out cases that interest me and to summarize what I’ve learned.
Since I knew that my wife’s responsibilities wouldn’t allow us to visit this weekend, I spent several hours in the library. I’ll likely return on both Saturday and Sunday.
In the morning I exercised by running my usual 10 miles. I followed my run with 500 pushups.
[Consecutive running log: 3,600 miles in 406 days]
[Pushups in 2010: 6,700]
Friday, 22 January 2010
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