A law prof emphatically made the point, that while Florida’s governor seems to be on a drunken unconstitutional law enactment spree, until such time as some of the goofier bills become law, and aren’t laughed out of court as unconstitutional crap, they’re not worth getting too worked up about.

After all, performative bills are nothing new, and until they actually become law and are sustained, they’re just plays put on to soothe the fevered breasts of useful idiots. Laugh or cry, they don’t matter until they matter. One such performative law seeks to undo the seminal 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. Ron DeSantis doesn’t like it. Continue reading →

It never really hit home until I was sitting with a bunch of friends at a party and the subject of dermatologists came up. I was the only straight male in the group, and I sat silently as the others gushed about how much they loved, not liked, but loved, going to the dermatologist. After a while, I spoke up. “Ew,” I said. Unless there was a serious problem, why would anyone want to see a dermatologist? They looked at me like I had two heads. They liked some random guy poking and prodding them. They liked being examined. Ew.

I don’t like doctors. It bugs Dr. SJ to no extent, but I will only go to the doctors if there is a damn good reason to go. The greatest invention of medicine is urgent care, what we call “doc in a box,” where you go without an appointment with a specific complaint and the doc deals with the specific complaint and otherwise leaves you alone. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

The murder of Janice May
Eight-year-old Janice Elizabeth May was attacked at about 4 PM on Saturday, 26 November 1955, in Canton, IL. She later died from her injuries (bleeding and skull fractures). Taxi driver Lloyd Eldon Miller left town shortly thereafter, concerned about the possibility of legal action involving child support. He was arrested in Danville, IL, and Mr. Miller signed a confession at 12:15 AM on 1 December. He was convicted of her murder, sentenced to death, and came within about seven hours of being executed. He was eventually released, and all charges were dismissed in 1971. Continue reading →

The time was 2018, and some women were feeling their oats. One such woman was Moira Donegan, who created the infamous “Shitty Media Men” list, an idea of such insufferable hubris that it would have been inconceivable at pretty much any other time in social history. Imagine throwing out to angry women an opportunity to take revenge on any man who did them wrong or pissed them off, and spread the word, true or false, factual or fantasy, where no one named, no one accused, needed to be proved bad nor had a chance to defend himself. Continue reading →

Each time a new law is proposed, enacted or signed in Florida, a smart and very decent friend twits something along the lines of, “and so The Atlantic will publish another million articles about why the real problem is college students.” I appreciate his angst, that from his perspective, whatever problems arise from campus consequence culture are dwarfed by  unconstitutional right wing laws that expressly seek to prohibit, if not criminalize speech and ideas. He’s frustrated and I can understand his frustration.

But that doesn’t mean he’s right. Continue reading →

If I had kept my notes from Con Law, I would check to see whether there was any mention of the “Major Questions Doctrine” taught when I was in law school that I’d somehow forgotten over the years. After all, memory is the 13th thing to go. But it’s emerging as a potent tool in the Supreme Court’s arsenal against Executive Branch administrative actions. Is there really such a doctrine?

The doctrine requires Congress to “speak clearly when authorizing an [executive branch] agency to exercise powers of vast ‘economic and political significance.'” If such a broad delegation of power isn’t clear, courts must rule against the executive’s claims that it has the authority in question. Continue reading →

When a private party, and his private law firm, are engaged in motion practice, one of the concerns that influences their tactics is that every motion comes with a cost. Lawyers have to work on it, and they want to get paid because of that whole “kids wanna eat dinner again tonight” problem. That means litigants have to pay their lawyers, and they don’t come cheap. In deciding whether to pursue a case, the cost of doing so is one of the most serious considerations.

Not so for prawfs. They can throw a skunk into whatever garden party catches their eye without worrying for a moment that they won’t get that sweet university paycheck. They win, they get paid. They lose, they get paid. Continue reading →

Michelle Goldberg compares Florida governor and putative Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ flurry of laws to prove that he is the leader of the anti-wokies in education to Hungarian president Victor Orban.

Many on the American right admire the way Orban uses the power of the state against cultural liberalism, but few are imitating him as faithfully as the Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s “wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.” Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom.

Continue reading →

There are some folks who argue that they just love ’em their guns. There are some who make arguments for their ownership, whether sport, defense or, in the case of an authoritarian government, offense. There are some, like me, who aren’t actually gun fans, but as long as the Second Amendment exists, will defend it as part of the bundle of rights protected from government intrusion.

But what is it about guns? Continue reading →

Another dirty little secret about law is that much of what lawyers produce is repetitive crap. Back in the olden days, we went to the corner legal stationer and bought pads of fill-in-the-blank forms for the sort of stuff like contracts of sale, authorizations and releases that had all the magic words already printed on the page and we would put in clients’ names and act as if it took a brilliant lawyer to make it happen. Truth is, we told the secretary to prep a release for Joe Smith and our work was done.

When computers came along, we input the same forms into the computer and did pretty much the same thing. You only had to type it in once, and it was there forever. Whenever someone came up with a new clause or some new language, we added it into the form and the form grew from one page to 25, which by definition meant we could charge 25 times as much because the client had no clue that it was invented just for him. And clients were thrilled, because they never read the forms, but merely felt the heft and were invariably impressed with our lawyer brilliance based on the weight of the paper. More paper, better lawyer. Continue reading →