When beepers emerged as a new communications tool, a client told me he was going to get me one. I thanked him but refused. “I will not be ‘beeped,'” I told him. If he needed me, he could call my office, and if I wasn’t there or able to take his call, he could leave a message. I would get back to him. Then again, my clients knew I would always get back to them as soon as possible. It never occurred to me to do otherwise. These were my clients.

The ubiquity of being constantly available has changed the rules for many in ways that were easily foreseen. When email and texting became a “thing,” it was a glorious means of communication in the sense that someone could reach out to you at their convenience and you, in turn, could get back at yours. It could have been wonderful. It is for some of us. But for others, it’s too much of a burden to endure. Continue reading →

The story behind the sentence of Memphis Black Lives Matter activist, momentary mayoral candidate, lawful-then-unlawful-then-lawful-then-unlawful voter and person-with-a-lot-of prior-convictions, Pamela Moses, is ugly, convoluted and hard to follow. Was she an honestly confused person who sought only to register to vote as her probation officer certified she could, or a person who arrogantly flouted the chance to walk away and earned the sentence imposed as a result of her long history of engaging in criminal conduct?

Various permutations of the backstory are laid out in the New York Times and Washington Post and elsewhere, The facts of the case were disputed, but what was clear was that she had a long rap sheet of three prior felonies and a bunch of misdemeanors, voted at least six times since 2015, when she was last sentenced, despite being ineligible, and decided in her Shelby County case not to take a plea that would have let her escape another felony and prison, but to go to trial. She had what was arguably  a triable case, but by no means a strong defense. Moses rolled the dice and found guilty by the jury. That’s how trials work. Continue reading →

Three members of the San Francisco school board were recalled. So what?

By large margins, San Francisco voters on Tuesday recalled three members of the city’s school board, including board president Gabriela López (with about 74 percent supporting recall), Alison Collins (78 percent), and Faauuga Moliga (71 percent).

The margins were stunning, as was the politics of the losers. Continue reading →

The old joke asks why Willie Sutton robs banks. The answer is the obvious: Because that’s where the money is. While states are legalizing the sale of marijuana, whether for medicinal or recreational use, there’s a gaping hole between businesses legally growing and selling marijuana and where the money from its sale goes.

The dashboard camera video shows eastbound Interstate 70 traffic whizzing past Dickinson County sheriff’s deputy Kalen Robison’s patrol car, which is parked crosswise in the median about three miles west of Abilene. Continue reading →

The shoot was bad. Worse than bad. Incomprehensibly bad. But when you’re a cop, a bad shoot doesn’t necessarily make it a crime. That this feeds into the narrative that cops can get away with anything, that cops shoot black people because they’re racist, that all cops are bastards, is understandable. After all, this was one truly bad, horrific, and from almost any rational perspective, wrongful shoot.

Continue reading →

As jurors were deliberating in the suit by Sarah Palin against the New York Times, SDNY Judge Jed Rakoff informed the parties of his intention to grant the Times’ Rule 50 motion on the basis that the evidence was legally insufficient to establish “actual malice, as required by Times v. Sullivan and its progeny.

But the judge didn’t grant the motion, as many media outlets incorrectly announced, and stated he would let the jury deliberate and reach a verdict so that the Second Circuit would have both his ruling and the jury verdict, in case the circuit decided he was wrong. Continue reading →

When it was announced that Spielberg would remake one of the most beloved movies and plays ever, West Side Story, my first thought was why? The new version, of course, would be more politically correct, apparently under the belief that it was unfair and demeaning to Puerto Ricans. For reasons that were unclear, this new version would correct the casting, the story, the songs, for their sake, as the original failed to serve to show them as they, today, would prefer to be shown.

West Side Story bombed. It’s been a massive box office failure. Huge failure. And not, apparently, because it wasn’t well done, even if it still failed to be as woke as some demanded. Was the problem that Maria wasn’t as Hispanic as she should have been or that nobody needed a woke remake of West Side Story? Why can’t beloved old shows, whether movies, plays, television, be left alone? Do we really need a new, serious, remake of Fresh Prince of Bel Air? Continue reading →

There has been an ongoing war between criminal law reformers and the media. Not with far right media, which has never been their metric of acceptable journalism, but with their loss of trust and fate with the outlets they thought were their allies, like the New York Times.

It’s not that the Times isn’t far more accommodating of their ideology than other, lesser, outlets, but that they still write stories that include occasional facts, positions, news, that does not shamelessly promote only their desired views. Why can’t all media outlets be like Slate, they demand to know, as they cancel their New York Times subscription in protest? Continue reading →

So what if it’s on the brink of bankruptcy, has lost the faith of the vast majority of America’s lawyers and is held captive by a small coterie of fringe social justice warriors who are using it to pursue their ideological agenda to the harm of the legal profession. It’s the American Bar Association, and so it continues to hold the one small bit of power given when it was the old, stodgy, legacy organization that could be “trusted” to maintain the standard of the profession: Accrediting law schools.

At its midyear meeting, now being held virtually because few of its members can afford to travel, Resolution 300 was just approved by a vote of 347 to 17, which amends the curriculum requirements to include the following: Continue reading →

How far does DNA travel? It’s one thing to recognize that, as a matter of science, it finds its way where it wants, but it’s another thing entirely when the police take the DNA collected from a rape victim, plug it into their DNA crime database and find that the rape victim is now a suspect in a crime. Yet that’s what happened in Frisco.

The police crime lab “attempts to identify crime suspects” by searching a law enforcement database that includes DNA collected from sexual assault victims, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday. Continue reading →