Lawrence R. Velvel, JD

A few comments about last Thursday’s hearing before Judge Chin on the Madoff matter may be warranted. Reading the transcript with a lawyer’s eye, it seems evident that Judge Chin had made up his mind as to what he was going to do before he walked into the courtroom. Giving people a right to speak…

I am writing this commentary on an airplane. Several points will be made, each with relative brevity – at least for me. Now, I think that all but the most partisan Republicans would hope that Obama succeeds in efforts to fix the economy and stop wars. But, to an extent I think too great, he…

To date there has been little discussion in the MSM – actually, there seems to have been no discussion there – of a variety of possible legislative steps to ease the pain and suffering of thousands of people. I am not speaking here of what is generally called a bailout, which shall be discussed below.…

At this point in time, there still has not been much talk about lawsuits against the government or FINRA. I think the relative silence on these subjects to date arises from people’s shocked focus on more immediate questions: what can they recover quickly and how do they go about this; will the bankruptcy trustee try…

The courses of action discussed here previously all have major shortcomings: they leave people very short of money to live on, they harm the innocent, they take way too long, they are uncertain. There is a different course of action, however, which would avoid most of these pitfalls. It would be speedy. It would be…

The SEC’s failure to investigate and put an end to Madoff’s crime, its announcing in 1992 that there was no problem with Madoff and its failure ever to correct that statement, its consequent sabotaging of thousands of investors with the literal impoverishing of countless numbers and the crippling of many charities, medical research organizations and…

Renditions For Torture Infamously, prisoners were “rendered” to other countries for torture. Men were kidnapped off the street, hooded, shackled, sedated by anal suppositories or syringe injections, dressed in jump suits, and flown by private Gulfstream jets (registered to dummy corporations) to countries such as Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan to be tortured at the behest…

On December 11th, commenting that I had been “off the air” for awhile because this had been the busiest fall in 45 years as a lawyer, I said I nonetheless could not resist publishing a commentary on Blagojevich. Surprisingly, it received many more comments than most of what I write in National Affairs. It must…

I have been “off the air” for some time now, basically because the last couple of months have been perhaps the most intense work-siege I have experienced in the 45 years since graduation from law school. I plan to write at least one other commentary before New Year’s – likely a sort of semi-all-encompassing one…