Squat Thrust

Whether it’s an epidemic or just a rare but outrageous scenario, squatters have emerged as a manifestation of what’s wrong with ‘Merica. Even if its little more than the latest hysteria, it’s worthwhile understanding how and why this happens and the squatters manage to get away with it.

A recent string of incidents in Georgia, New York and Washington has brought squatting, the practice of occupying someone else’s property without their consent, into the spotlight.

In Washington, a squatter named Sang Kim made headlines after preventing Jaskaran Singh, a landlord, from possessing his $2 million property following Kim’s refusal to pay rent for two years. Continue reading

Tuesday Talk*: Right, Wrong and Ronna

Her excuse was that as head of the Republican National Committee, it was her job to be a good team player and take one for the team.

After conceding that the insurrection of January 6th was “not acceptable,” there was no rigged election and Biden won “fair and square,” Ronna Romney McDaniel says she now gets to be herself and say what she believes. Does she get a free pass for the lies she intentionally spewed “for the team”? A lot of people at NBC and its lefty cousin, MSNBC, oppose her hire as an on-air commentator (at $300,000 per year). Are they wrong? Continue reading

Collecting Judgments

I’m not a collections lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, but I’ve known enough of them to be acutely aware of the complexity and problems of getting the money awarded by the jury. Large damage awards are often reported without much comment about the fact that the plaintiff now holds a piece of paper. Converting that paper into money is a separate issue. When the defendant is covered by insurance, collections are easy. Otherwise, they can be difficult. Often, very difficult. You can’t get blood from a rock, for example.

But this is the day upon which Trump must either bond the award to the State of New York or Tish James gets to start to collect the judgment by fiat. There may be restraining notices sent to banks and other financial entities that will freeze Trump accounts. There may be an application for orders from the court to seize assets. There may be post-judgment discovery demands to ascertain assets and, in this particular case, identify the ownership of assets. It’s not at all clear that buildings with the name “Trump” on them are owned by Trump, or to what extent. Continue reading

Until Hamas Is Fully Defeated

There has been a constant drone that what Israel is doing in Gaza is “over the top,” and Israel must do something else. But what? No one has an answer. At the New York Times, David Brooks sought to provide one. His column runs through the various alternatives and their efficacy. It’s a more important read than anything I can offer today, so I commend it to you.

One point worthy of further discussion is the role the Biden administration, pro-Palestinian protesters and others in the international community have played.

Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

Continue reading

Authority And The Amicus Grift

Of course you wouldn’t mold your serious views based upon what some actress or director believes, because they may be authorities about acting or directing, but obviously have no authority when it comes to thing like, oh, law. But law professors? While they may lack a certain practical knowledge of law, surely they are reliable sources of deep legal thought, and you can rely upon their signature when an amicus brief is proffered to a court that this is what they, in their highly intelligent, deeply considered, opinion is the law.

Right. Right?!?

The number of amicus briefs submitted by academics has increased dramatically over the past several decades. In principle, such scholars’ briefs should help courts resolve difficult cases by sharing relevant expertise. Judges are necessarily generalists. Scholars in a particular field, on the other hand, may have genuine expertise about the specific issues at hand in a given case that could assist the judges in making a decision. Continue reading

Seaton: Season Passes

“We should get season passes for Dollywood this year,” my wife tells me one afternoon. “If we go twice we’ve essentially justified using them.”

“Sounds lovely,” I said, “Let’s do it.” I thought at most we might get a discussion out of it, and maybe we’d even make plans to go some point later in the year. My daughter loves roller coasters and my son’s a huge fan of the park’s midway area so a Dollywood visit is almost a certainty when we’re deciding what to do during the year.

But season passes were different. Season passes meant we got free parking, food discounts and a slew of other benefits. It meant we were some of THOSE people who did fun things like go to damn amusement parks twice a week. Continue reading

Who’s An “Authority”?

At the Academy Awards, a winning activist actress had her say.

In 1978 the English actress Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her role in the film “Julia” and used the occasion to denounce “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews everywhere.”

Later in the ceremony, the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky used his own turn onstage to offer a memorable rebuttal: “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave,” he said to applause, “that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Continue reading

The Only Person Ever Arrested

It was a longshot, but somehow 72-year-old Sylvia Gonzalez managed to pull it off. She was elected to the city council of Castle Hill, Texas on a platform of going after the city manager. That did not make her popular with the mayor, who decided to do something about it.

Gonzalez started a petition for the ouster of the city manager. After a council meeting, she collected her papers and put them in a binder. Included was the petition, which the mayor, Edward Trevino, asked for and which she immediately found and gave to him. Big deal? Big enough, as it turned out. Continue reading

First Grade Orthodoxy

Rarely will there be a federal court opinion addressing the free speech rights of a first grader, mostly because most parents are sufficiently aware of the damage involving a child in a suit will cause and that the cost, whether financial or psychological, will end up being detrimental. But  subsequent circumstances compelled B.B.’s mother, Chelsea, to sue, only to learn that Central District of California Judge David Carter preferred the harm imposed by Capistrano Unified School District on an innocent and well-intended first grader to the pain suffered by a classmate’s mother.

A cleaned up recitation of the facts by Eugene Volokh, Continue reading

Tuesday Talk*: The Line Between Suasion And Coercion

During oral argument in Murthy v. Missouri, a few of the justices, whose prior experience with the government informed their perspective, raised that the government regularly sticks its nose into the  propriety of content in order to persuade media to say, or not say, things the government prefers, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan, both former White House lawyers, said interactions between administration officials and news outlets provided a valuable analogy. Efforts by officials to influence coverage are, they said, part of a valuable dialogue that is not prohibited by the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a similar point. Continue reading