When I was young, teaching, like nursing, was still largely a women’s job. It was one of the jobs where women were predominate, and so smart, capable women went into it for lack of alternatives where they would be accepted. But since women were rarely the primary breadwinners, and their incomes were secondary to the family, their pay was decent, but not great. After all, these were women, so whatever money they brought home was atop their husband’s. It was gravy, if you will. Continue reading →

For years, people have asked how they can get out of jury duty. My response has always been the same, that we need good jurors or the system doesn’t work. People tend to agree, but they still want to get out of jury duty. Let some other guy be the good person.

But now a Legal Aid Society lawyer with a felony conviction has decided he not only wants to be on a jury, but that his exclusion from jury service for having a prior felony conviction is racist and unconstitutional. Continue reading →

My old friend, Ken, announced that he was leaving twitter yesterday. His reasoning was fair and internally consistent with his oft-repeated position on free speech.

This is exactly how it’s supposed to work, as I’ve been arguing for years. Twitter — or whoever runs it — has rights. I have rights. If one of us disagrees with the other’s exercise of rights, we can part company. That, not government regulation, is the way to do it. I’m repulsed by the flood of triumphant bigotry and trolling, and by Musk’s sad-lonely-boy leaning into the arms of freaks who embrace him in his fruitless quest for love. But I’d never ask the government to stop it. I’m voting with my feet, exactly the way I’ve been telling people to do for years.

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The crux of the Bulwark post was that limiting abortion to women who were raped raises a serious, and underappreciated problem: It puts the burden on women to prove they were raped to avail themselves of the exception, and police have not always been been accommodating of women who complain that they’ve been raped. Of course, there is the possibility that someone will falsely claim to be a rape victim to get an exemption from an abortion ban, leaving the question whether to favor false positives or negatives. This is more a political issue than anything else.

But buried within the post was this assertion. Continue reading →

The release of an American imprisoned in Russia should be a joyous occasion. And that Brittney Griner is back home with her family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. So why then is it so controversial? Even worse, why are so many upset by it?

There is the question of whether the one-for-one prisoner swap for arms dealer Victor Bout was a good deal, but that emits the unpleasant odor of rationalization. Few gave any thought to Bout until his name was highlighted in this swap, and suddenly he’s so important that his  continued imprisonment for another seven years until his sentence is served is more critical than this swap? It may not have been a good deal, but that’s not what’s really bugging people. Continue reading →

On the surface, it’s one of those laws that has surface appeal to people who have neither  a functional understanding of the nature of litigation nor a firm appreciation that not all disputes fit into their simplistic mold of one side good, the other evil. The Speak Out Act has now been signed into law by President Biden.

On Wednesday the President signed the “Speak Out Act,” now Public Law 117-224. The law exempts disputes over sexual assault or harassment from pre-signed nondisclosure or nondisparagement agreements, in the hopes of encouraging survivors to come forward without fear of being sued.

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Most of you might have heard of ChatGPT these days. It’s an AI chatbot that can do an amazing number of things from selling sprockets to writing episodes of “Friends.”

Because I am busy this week I’ve outsourced the Friday Funny to ChatGPT.

I blame the robots for taking my job.

Tell a humorous story about cash bail. Continue reading →

As it turned out, a bad stock market and rocky economy is just as bad for pension fund investments as it is for everyone else’s. It sucks, of course, but it’s not as if this comes as a surprise. Unless you’re a Teamster. And unless your president really loves unions and wants your love in return.

President Biden announced Thursday that he was investing $36 billion in federal funds to save the pensions of more than 350,000 union workers and retirees, a demonstration of commitment to labor just a week after a rupture over an imposed settlement of a threatened rail strike.

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Years ago, the word “rape” was reduced to meaninglessness. So too was “sexual assault,” a conclusory phrase that offered no clue as to what actually happened, but wrapped it up in the “survivor’s” grievance of victimization for having suffered…something. But as uninformative as “sexual assault” was, rape still held the cache of creating a mental image of a man throwing a woman to the ground in a dark alley, ripping off her clothing and overpowering her while ramming himself into her. Continue reading →

In 2012, at the request of the ABA Journal, Dan Hull and I wrote an article about the importance of mentoring, both as a duty of experienced lawyers to give back and a duty of new lawyers to get up to speed as quickly and effectively as possible for the sake of clients. Despite their having asked for the article, and our having put in the time to write it, the ABA Journal decided not to publish it because they felt our expectations of young lawyers to be good mentees was too hard and might hurt their feelings.

But mentoring has been a very important part of my career, and I’ve mentored many law students and young lawyers over the years. Some have been white. Some black and brown. Some male. Some female. None told me they were of another orientation, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t. With a couple exceptions, it’s proven very fruitful. Continue reading →