As David Bernstein notes, the four months it took for Georgetown Law to “investigate” Ilya Shapiro’s two twits was longer than most Supreme Court nomination hearings, excluding Merrick Garland since he was never given a hearing. Ilya called the twits “inartful,” which they certainly were, but “reckless” would be a better characterization, which is what I called them.

Could it have really taken four months to “investigate” two twits? Of course not. Perhaps the expectation was that the flames of social media seeking to burn Shapiro at the stake would die down, maybe even flame out. Perhaps they could have come up with some other way to graciously remove Georgetown Law Center from the bullseye of woke outrage without having to court disaster from the unduly passionate children while recognizing that pretty much everyone with the intellectual age of greater than 12 condemned Georgetown Law’s suspending Ilya. Academic freedom was very much on the line here, as was the realization that hypocrisy would eventually serve to eat them all if legal academics didn’t draw a line. Continue reading →

While I’ve chronicled the ACLU’s very deliberate fall from grace, as it persists in reminding us about its defense of Skokie Nazis that happened a mere 44 years ago, I didn’t follow the defamation trial of Johnny Depp (or “Derp,” as a very serious Stanford law professor calls him) and Amber Heard over an op-ed published in the Washington Post.

It wasn’t until the jury found Heard liable and awarded compensatory and punitive damages that this case, one which surprised many lawyers by making it past a motion to dismiss for failing to suffice to establish defamatory statements, became interesting. Continue reading →