At Volokh Conspiracy, Will Baude brought up the coming “reforms” to the Multistate Bar Exam of eliminating four of the 12 subjects to be tested, conflict of laws, family law, trusts and estates, and secured transactions. Will asks whether conflicts will exist as a course of study after being excised from the MBE.

Many transactions and incidents involve at least glancing contact with multiple jurisdictions, and the legal principles for what state can govern those transactions are not at all intuitive. (See this earlier post on this year’s Supreme Court conflicts case.) Indeed, my experience is that lawyers who have no knowledge of the field of conflict of laws often do not even know that they have encountered a conflict of laws question.

Continue reading →

Culminating in the report of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, it was clear that most forensic science had little to do with science. And if this wasn’t sufficient, the results were more vigorously restated in the 2016 President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, report. Not that Garland’s DoJ cares much about it.

So what are the chances that law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, have learned anything about junk science, such as it not being science, not being reliable, not being admissible in court and not using it to convict people because, well, it’s crap? Not much. Continue reading →

The issue at hand, the only issue, was whether John Eastman would be compelled to produce emails relating to his involvement with Trump’s trying to remain in office despite having lost an election. Eastman argued that the emails were protected as either privileged communications or work product. The January 6 Commission argued that they were discoverable under the “crime/fraud exception.”

Judge David Carter seized the opportunity to say the obvious out loud. Continue reading →

There was a time when you needed to wear a wristwatch because that was how you knew what time it was. That was back when being on time wasn’t a white supremacist trait, and was simultaneously appreciated and admired. It was a time when everyone didn’t walk around with a computer in their pocket that told them the time, and could also be used to make telephone calls, before people realized they wanted no actual human interaction.

Outside of olds and some odd folks who appreciated the mechanical marvel and beauty of a wristwatch, who needed a watch anymore? Continue reading →

For a while now, Eugene Volokh has been pushing for transparency in federal court proceedings, following his law review article, The Law of Pseudonymous Litigation. As Eugene recognizes, the strong presumption toward transparency means something very different in the age of Google than it did when identities of litigants were largely unknown in the past.

For many litigants these days, one of the most important questions is: Can I keep my name,
and its connection to the case and its facts, off the Internet? In the past, of course, some litigants wanted to keep their names out of the newspapers, and some still do. But the Internet, and the availability of court records on the Internet, has sharply magnified this concern.

Continue reading →

It was a carefully crafted FOIA request, limited in scope and entirely within the requirements of law.

Professor Johnson submitted a straightforward FOIA request on October 27 for the emails of the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon. The request was limited to emails she exchanged with 14 people and an advocacy group, Know Your IX.

The request was directed to Lhamon, the bureaucrat-activist who crafted the Title IX Dear Colleague Letter of 2014 that launched a thousand lawsuits and destroyed even more lives with its grossly subconstitutional process designed to expel male students, whether guilty or not, from colleges and universities lest any accuser be doubted. Continue reading →

If nobody reported on a Proud Boy rally, would that have been better? Like it or not, it’s news, and Jonathan Choe, a reporter for ABC affiliate KOMO in Seattle reported. For his efforts, he was fired. As it turned out, he reported “wrong.”

Let me start off by saying I am not a neo-Nazi, fascist, or white supremacist. Those are just some of the names I have been called over the past few days for my recent coverage of a protest in Olympia, WA. It was advertised as a “rally for America.”

Continue reading →

There may be some reason beyond the sphere of my knowledge, but I’ve never understood what’s so hard about turning off the motor of a vehicle if you aren’t imminently planning to drive away. And knowing that idling trucks spew some ugly, smelly fumes into the air that some of us like to breath, I’m not particularly sympathetic. When NYC passed an ordinance prohibiting trucks from idling for more than three minutes, it seemed like a beneficial law, reducing air pollution and putting no serious burden on the driver.

But enforcing such a law is another matter.

A white-paneled truck sat motionless and idling in Midtown on a recent morning, its driver wrapped up in his phone and oblivious to what was happening outside… Continue reading →

We’ve been down this road before. Many times. Too many times. We’ve been down it about the words that became untethered from well-established and meaningful definitions like “rape”  or “violence.” We’ve been down it with cool new phrases that were birthed by the left, seized upon by others, then denied by the left, like “social justice warrior” and “woke.” And we’ve gone down it again with characterizations of identitarianism as “critical race theory,” and we’re there again with “cancel culture.”

Continue reading →

A husband doesn’t control his wife. A man doesn’t control a woman. She is a free, independent human being, capable of, and entitled to, her own ideas, expressions and actions. But when your husband happens to be a Supreme Court justice, particularly one whose views tend toward outlier, what the hell were you thinking?

The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy. Continue reading →