While most people were losing their heads over the “big” Supreme Court decisions about guns, abortion and prayer, there was another ruling, unanimous, that would have (or at least, should have) been huge in less controversial times to criminal defense lawyers. In Ruan v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions of two medical doctors, for running what the government contended were “pill mills.”

Petitioners Xiulu Ruan and Shakeel Kahn are both doctors who actively practiced medicine. They both possessed licenses permitting them to prescribe controlled substances. The Government separately charged them with unlawfully dispensing and distributing drugs in violation of §841. Each proceeded to a jury trial, and each was convicted of the charges.
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The past week has been pretty hard at the Supreme Court for some, and pretty great for others. If you’ve been on the winning side, whether on guns, abortion, prayer or all three, you may take the attitude, “We won, you lost, get over it.” And, perhaps, you would also argue that if the other side was able to stack the deck with its ideological loyalists, they would have done so in a flash and been just as pleased with being winners.

But what about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court?

“Legitimacy is for losers,” a political scientist once said. It’s a profound concept. The winning side in a decision will gladly accept it without asking why. But the losing side — whether the decision is made by a basketball referee or the Supreme Court — will accept defeat only if they believe the decision was made fairly and by the book. Continue reading →

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Express, FIRE, which has picked up the gauntlet tossed in the trash by the ACLU on such civil liberties issues as free speech for people who don’t pray at the alter of identity politics (or donate to the ACLU), has taken up arms against the Biden administration’s proposed changes to Title IX regs for campus sex tribunals.

• eliminating students’ right to a live hearing;
• eliminating the right to cross-examination;
• weakening students’ right to active legal representation;
• allowing a single campus bureaucrat to serve as judge and jury;
• rejecting the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment in favor of a definition that threatens free speech rights;
• requiring colleges and universities to use the weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine guilt, unless they use a higher standard for other alleged misconduct.

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Since Heller and McDonald are the law, holding the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental personal right applicable to the states, the only remaining question was whether a state like New York, or more to the point, a City like New York, could just say “nah,” do as it always did with a warm hug from the Second Circuit and have the Supreme Court look away and pretend it saw nothing.

That looked pretty much to be the net outcomes until N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, where, painful as it is to say, Justice Clarence Thomas’ rationale is entirely sound. Continue reading →

Regardless of whether you support the policy choice of being for or against abortions, and for most people, it’s some more nuanced point in the middle rather than the extreme “all or nothing” position of ideologues and fools, you may well come to regret the Friday when the majority of the Supreme Court proved themselves as venal as they’re been painted. They didn’t need to do it. They shouldn’t have done it. But they could do it, so they did.

And for Clarence Thomas to then throw fuel on a bonfire, while Ginni cackles, was one of the single stupidest and self-indulgent things a justice has ever done. But, of course, he did it. Continue reading →

As expected, the 50th Anniversary of Title IX wasn’t merely a day to remember when women got to play sports and men’s teams were eliminated because there weren’t enough women interested to align the numbers. It was the day Joe Biden’s renominated head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights would have her last hurrah. As expected, Catherine Lhamon introduced her new rules designed to undo the regulations instituted by Betsy DeVos to provide minimal due process to the nightmare of campus sex inquisitions.

You see, Lhamon has dedicated her public service to the nightmare of campus sex inquisitions. Continue reading →

There’s no lack of discussion of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, but that’s about what activists have turned Title IX into, not what it was or was meant to be. Now that it’s reached its 50th birthday, there’s some discussion of how it worked out.

But in some ways, Title IX was a Pyrrhic victory. For all its successes, the groundbreaking legislation has failed to allow girls and women to excel on terms independent of boys and men. Like so much in our culture, sports are still based on a male model — a man’s body, a man’s interests. Current models of success in mainstream sport leave women competing on standards that exclude us, where in most cases we are not set up to thrive. Continue reading →

Given the makeup of the 6-3 decision, with the usual suspects on their expected sides, there was almost no chance that the analysis of Carson v. Makin wasn’t going to be spun into an existential crisis preceding the end of the world as we know it.

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional.

“Effectively” is doing far too much work there. The decision did nothing of the sort. Continue reading →

I still remember the surprise when I read a post by David French promoting Red Flag Laws as the solution to gun violence.

A so-called “red flag” law fills the gaps in criminal law and the laws governing mental-health adjudications by granting standing to a defined, limited universe of people to seek temporary seizure orders — called gun-violence-restraining orders — for a gun if they can present admissible evidence that the gun’s owner is exhibiting threatening behavior.

Properly drafted, these laws can save lives while also protecting individual liberty. Improperly drafted, they grant the state an overly broad tool that can be systematically abused to deprive disfavored citizens of a fundamental constitutional right.

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Did the January 6 Committee’s public hearings do the trick? According to an ABC/Ipsos poll, it would appear to be the case, as almost 60% of those polled believe Trump committed crimes.

In the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, 58% of Americans think Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the riot. That’s up slightly from late April, before the hearings began, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 52% of Americans thought the former president should be charged.

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