A decade ago, progressive environmentalists fought to protect the ground from excess sewage, the schools from overly large class sizes and the habitat of the endangered spotted salamander. Open space, trees, water recharge areas and fewer cars choking the air with noxious fumes were the height of environmentalism. Save the planet!

If you paid attention to Ezra Klein, you would think this happened a hundred years ago in “another era,” and is now the bastion of right-wing  extremists trying to destroy the lives of the homeless and marginalized potential UC Berkeley students. It’s not that these aren’t concerns. They were always concerns. It’s that younger pundits are reinventing the narrative as their priorities shift. So who’s the NIMBY? Continue reading →

Combine the concerns of a Harvard Law grad with the tech savvy of MIT and what do you get?

Legal documents, such as contracts or deeds, are notoriously difficult for nonlawyers to understand. A new study from MIT cognitive scientists has determined just why these documents are often so impenetrable.

After analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently inserting long definitions in the middle of sentences. Linguists have previously demonstrated that this type of structure, known as “center-embedding,” makes text much more difficult to understand.

Continue reading →

Judge Naita Semaj was not kind to the officers who arrested “drill rapper” Camrin “C Blu” Williams.

“There was absolutely zero reason for any of those officers to approach this individual,” Semaj said on Tuesday in Bronx Supreme Court. “They approached him. They detained him. They searched him, and no officer even bothered to come up with a halfway legitimate reason for any of that.”

Continue reading →

Friends, today is an exciting day. We’re going to take a dive into the life of the Patron Saint of Scoundrels.

One could come up with any number of superlatives to describe our subject: the Prince of Hustlers, the Grandest of Grifters, the Sultan of Swindle. The name most knew him by, however, was “Titanic” Thompson. Continue reading →

An ordinary sentencing takes about 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. But the sentencing of Jussie Smollett lasted five hours, which was par for the course in a case that put together so much of what’s so very wrong about the current climate of criminal law.

At the end of a hearing that lasted about five hours, Judge James B. Linn excoriated Mr. Smollett from the bench, saying that he had concluded that the actor had premeditated the hoax and that despite his and his family’s admirable past work in social justice, he had an arrogant, selfish side and had planned the stunt because he “craved the attention.” Continue reading →

When first mention of Emma Camp’s NYT op-ed appeared here, it seemed to raise an issue so uncontroversial as to require no defense. After all, would anyone question that the Overton Window on college campuses has narrowed to a slit, where challenges to progressive orthodoxy were treated with good faith disagreement? Well, the answer was apparently, “you bet your ass,” and I failed to see it coming.

Continue reading →

It was a stirring and bold announcement by Martin May, director of the Cardiff Philharmonic.

The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its programme of its upcoming concert ‘in light of the recent Russian invasion’.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was due to be included in the orchestra’s upcoming all-Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but it was considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time’.

Continue reading →

Daniel Muessig was sentenced to 60 months in prison for selling weed. It wasn’t a wrongful conviction. He did it. He admitted it during his plea allocution. And unlike others, he’s got no excuse for not knowing better. He was a lawyer. Not just a lawyer but a criminal defense lawyer who got caught.

Muessig was swept up in a far-reaching federal investigation into trafficking of cocaine and heroin when agents discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana during a raid on “stash house” in Squirrel Hill on May 24, 2019. (Muessig admits to dealing marijuana but says he has never sold or taken harder drugs.) He escaped from the raid on foot and lived in limbo for more than two years. Gradually, his fear of going to prison gave way to hope; he and his wife, Laura Boyarsky, began the process of adopting a child.
Continue reading →

What Yale did to Saifullah Khan after his swift acquittal on a rape charge is a fiasco of the highest order, and so he pursued a defamation action against his pseudonymous accuser for having given false testimony against him at Yale’s Title IX hearing. The district court dismissed, holding that the accuser was entitled to absolute quasi-judicial immunity for  her testimony.

The issue has been raised and decided in other circuits based on the state caselaw as to what constitutes a quasi-judicial proceeding, and what level of immunity for testimony should apply. The Second Circuit certified questions to the Supreme Court of Connecticut to decide. Continue reading →

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wooden v. United States was unanimous, though it didn’t get there through the ordinary route of agreement.

KAGAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS, ALITO, and BARRETT, JJ., joined as to all but Part II–B. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a concurring opinion. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a concurring opinion. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to Parts II, III, and IV.

Continue reading →