In a few years, lawyers, judges and scholars will look back at opinions written over the past few years and think one of a few things. Are they watching the budding of a new appreciation of gender identity and the rise of courts twisting their decisions to reflect the personal pronoun choices of litigants play out in legal decisions. Are they watching dinosaurs try to cling to the old ways of objective gender identity or use of pronouns and refusing to twist the language of decisions around the personal “dignity” of litigants?

Or are they watching judges who want to neither acquiesce nor offend and don’t know what the proper reaction should be, and therefore go on at silly length about their reasons for falling on one side of the other of a cultural divide, made necessary so they don’t appear to be playing woke or anti-woke jurists and so their writing isn’t incoherent nonsense gibberish laden by fanciful wording that gives readers a headaches and exposes opinions to confusion and pointless inconsistency? Oh wait, it’s not pointless. It recognizes the “individual dignity” of a litigant’s expectation that the court honor his/her/their/xir/its pronoun du jour, as in In the Interest of C.G. Continue reading →

While the law, at least for the moment and somewhat theoretically, only compels a university to act when the conduct at issue is “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive,” that doesn’t mean the school cannot appreciate the delicate feelings of an extremely sensitive student.

Here are the facts. On April 1, the University of Idaho College of Law (“University” or “Idaho Law”) held a “moment of community” in response to an anti-LGBTQ+ slur left anonymously on a classroom whiteboard. Event attendees included plaintiffs Peter Perlot, Mark Miller, and Ryan Alexander, who at the time were law students and members of the Idaho Law chapter of the Christian Legal Society (“CLS”), and Professor Richard Seamon, the CLS faculty advisor. Continue reading →

As Eugene Volokh notes, it’s fairly obvious that a 6th Grade lesson about Hammurabi’s Code as part of a a unit on ancient Mesopotamia does not constitute a violation of Title VI, prohibiting discrimination in education on the basis of race, because it mentioned slaves. Not even if the lesson fell during Black History Month, together with a lesson about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

But the problem is that this challenge, putatively raised due to a poorly framed question at the end of the unit, could put the government in the position of prohibiting schools from teaching words or concepts which, today, could possibly offend someone. Continue reading →

It’s your right to protest, to bring your grievances to the attention of others, the world. That the world might not care about your grievances, or at least not care as much as, or in the way that, you might be a good line beyond which you shouldn’t go. But that’s such an old school notion, quaint and archaic.

You see, if you believe it’s important, it is important. If others fail to grasp its importance (fools), then they must be made to understand that it is the most important thing ever and must become the center of their universe because, you, a smart and passionate person, believe it to be so. After all, your opinion is entitled to respect. Everybody says so. And if people won’t respect your opinion, they must be forced to do so. And by respect, they mean you make it the center of your universe just as they have. Anything less would be heresy, and you know what happens to heresy. Continue reading →

In light of the Bruen decision, the attorney general of Massachusetts has provided guidance on the issuance of concealed carry permits.

• It remains unlawful to carry a firearm in Massachusetts without a license….
• Licensing authorities should continue to enforce the “prohibited person” and
  “suitability” provisions of the license-to-carry statute….

The guidance goes on to create the appearance of compliance while suggesting that little more has changed than creating the appearance. Suitability? Nothing subjective there, right? Continue reading →

America is a great nation, and Americans are a great people. Not perfect, but great. If you can’t see this, but can only see failure, misery and horror in this nation, then the problem isn’t this nation but you.

Never lose hope. Never give up. And reject those who believe there is no hope, everything is horrible and we are a failed nation. Believe in our values, our freedom, and to the extent we have not yet achieved them, work to make this nation ever better.

I’m proud to be an American and I love this country. Happy 4th of July.

Remember women? Of course you do, even if you’re afraid to say so lest your woke friends shun you as if you’ve just announced that you hate kale. At the New York Times, Pamela Paul makes a point that I’ve raised in various contexts between the right and left,and why the former is obvious while the latter is insidious.

Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.

The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.

Continue reading →

In light of the crushing, if entirely expected, blow of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen, the New York legislature did what it does best, rushed to pass a law. So it did, and the default governor signed it, proclaiming how she’s on the side of freedom and liberty by making the exercise of constitutional rights as difficult as possible.

The state’s new gun law bars the carrying of handguns in many public settings such as subways and buses, parks, hospitals, stadiums and day cares. Guns will be off-limits on private property unless the property owner indicates that he or she expressly allows them. At the last minute, lawmakers added Times Square to the list of restricted sites.

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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.

From the perspective of the defense, excluding the defendant does not require that the person who made the fingermark (an unintentionally made impression) be identified.  However, when they point to an alternate suspect, they gain value as evidence.  The location or medium in which fingermarks are made occasionally give probative value, for example when a medium such as blood localizes the time period in which the fingermark was made.  There are over 160 million fingerprints (deliberately made impressions) in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).  Therefore, an automated searching system, followed by manual checking, is used to identify the source of fingermarks. Continue reading →

The video is hard to watch, the clear and graphic view of 36-year-old Randy Cox sitting in the back of a police wagon, his hands cuffed behind him, then suddenly being hurled into the door head first and, well, you’ll see.

https://twitter.com/AttorneyCrump/status/1541572334569394176?s=20&t=w7ERjHLmfSQT-SsqMO26cQ

Continue reading →