At the Institute for Advanced Criminal Law Studies, we refuse to be constrained by conventional boundaries. We understand that conventional wisdom has gotten us to where we are today, and we don’t particularly like it.

We pursue the projects that don’t make sense for lawyers to take on alone. These are fights that stand to make the world a better place—specifically to make people more free—but that no individual client has the ability or the inclination to fund.

Some of these projects have horizons that stretch far into the future. We are putting pieces in place now—planting ideas in judges’ minds—to snap into a clockwork of our design only in years, or decades.

Or maybe never. We may try and fail. If we don’t try, we fail. We see no other choice.

Meanwhile, we collect a library of PDFs of the old books that show what the law was when the Texas Constitution was written. Some of that law we have lost, and hope to regain.

We help lawyers with litigation in the Court of Criminal Appeals, because the defense needs a counterweight to the State Prosecuting Attorney, but also to exercise our skills, to build our credibility, and to plant our ideas.

We offer high-quality CLE to better train our colleagues, and to foster the tremendous talent that the trade organizations are missing, because it is hiding in plain sight.

We share our ideas with the criminal trial and appellate bars because good ideas are rarely adopted with a single case; novel legal arguments need an army of lawyers making them at every opportunity, until eventually the courts cannot avoid them.

We promulgate checklists for criminal-defense lawyers because we believe in the power of creativity, and checklists free lawyers to use their creativity.

We file extraordinary writs (mandamus, prohibition, and habeas) and judicial complaints because in many cases the direct-appeal process is itself broken, and the only relief is extraordinary.

In the criminal-justice system, the conventional no longer works, if it ever has. Lawyers cannot keep taking appellate courts’ ill-reasoned opinions as gospel. We aim to solve the problems that common sense and complacency have created.