Quietly Watching

  In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot in his own garage in Tallahassee, and the people who paid for it were his ex-wife's mother and brother. Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel, four parts, streaming on Hulu since September 1, is the fullest account of that case anyone has put on screen. It is also a four-hour test of the argument he spent his career making. The series never mentions that he made it, and I think that gap is the one real hole in an otherwise thorough four hours. The Family the Series Puts on a Shelf It comes from ABC News Studios, directed by Sebastian Smith, and it has people nobody else got. Rob Adelson, the eldest of the Adelson children, sits for his first interview. So does June...