There were five propositions on the back of the ballot in New York. If you didn’t know about them, you might not have turned the ballot over and voted. Apparently 11% of voters didn’t, although it’s unclear whether they didn’t know or chose not to vote. Two of the propositions related to issues that have generated extreme outrage elsewhere, in the red sort of states where some focus their cries of voter suppression, like Georgia and Florida. As New York is safely blue (except when it isn’t, as was learned in Nassau County), few seemed to take notice.

For months Democrats have been arguing that it’s too hard to get a ballot in America, so Congress must step in to keep the electorate from being suppressed. New Yorkers apparently don’t agree, since they soundly rejected two big ideas that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation via their other voting bill, H.R.1. The first is same-day voter registration. New York’s constitution says updates to the voter rolls “shall be completed at least ten days before each election.” A ballot measure to delete that provision failed, as of the latest numbers, 58% to 42%.

Continue reading →

My old pal Carolyn Elefant is the guru of solo practice. She wrote an excellent book on the issue, Solo by Choice, and has been a stalwart of the blawgosphere at My Shingle. A decade ago, after law imploded following the 2007-08 recession that turned law school into death valley, and simultaneously gave us a bunch of lawyers, academics and marketeers who sought to take advantage of this “new” thing, the internet, to reinvent the practice of law, Carolyn found her niche arguing that life didn’t end when biglaw didn’t make a job offer, but that there was a future, a good future, in starting one’s own practice and hanging out a shingle. Get it? Continue reading →

Much as I appreciate Columbia University professor turned New York Times columnist John McWhorter’s insights on culture war issues, he remains a linguist by profession. Years ago, he contended that ebonics, given the more formal title of African American Vernacular English, was a legitimate language.

As sexy as this issue was to a linguist, it was unpersuasive bordering on counterproductive to regular folk, including black folk, who still thought students, including black students, would do better learning boring, old standard English. The question wasn’t whether slang existed or people used it. Obviously, it did and they did. The question was whether that was sufficient for linguists to declare it “official,” turning street talk into the stuff of textbooks. Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal broke the story, that the Department of Justice was “in talks” to provide compensation to families that were separated at the border.

The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.

Continue reading →

A relatively new phenomenon has developed with Supreme Court Justices writing dissentals when cert is denied. For the most part, lawyers, pundits and the public kinda dig them, as they give us insight into what the justice’s views will be if and when the issue finally gets the nod for a merits ruling. As much as people hate the “shadow docket,” few make a stink about this aspect of it.

But an even more problematic aspect of the court’s shadow docket has received scant attention. These are opinions being issued by justices when the Supreme Court rejects an appeal of a case from a lower court — what are called “cert denials,” or denial of petitions for certiorari.

Continue reading →

Jury selection for the murder trial of the three defendants charged with the murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery did not go smoothly. Ultimately, only one black person was selected to be a juror in a county where more than 25% of the population is black.

After a grueling process that lasted two and a half weeks, a jury was selected on Wednesday in the trial of the three white men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased through a suburban Georgia neighborhood before being fatally shot by one of his pursuers in February 2020. Continue reading →

I should have seen it coming. In retrospect, it’s obvious. If elected progressive district attorneys can simply choose which duly enacted laws they prefer to prosecute and which they can ignore because, legislative action notwithstanding, they fail to conform to their ideological vision of their jurisdiction, why not a sheriff?

Lomax embraces the unique powers of elected sheriffs, who report directly to voters, unlike police chiefs, who are generally hired and fired at will by city councils. “You pretty much have no authority above you government-wise; you answer to the voters,” Lomax said, adding that despite this freedom he plans to be “a sheriff who enforces the laws.”

Continue reading →

There was a time when the idea of having female cops seemed silly. After all, they weren’t strong enough, tough enough, threatening enough, to deal with all the bad dudes out there. And yet here we are, with women in blue who are just as familiar with the First Rule of Policing as the guys. And yet, Slate posits that we can fix the excesses of police violence with this one cool trick.

“We’re not the ones out there shooting,” says Janeé Harteau, former chief of police of the Minneapolis Police Department. “This is really about gender at its very core.” Continue reading →

Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.’s feelings were hurt when it was asserted that the audience at a rally in Germany at which he spoke, run by a group called Querdenken, weren’t just “very fine people,” but neo-Nazis. It was fairly widely reported, including the usual suspects like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The rally and his speech were widely covered in the mainstream media, which reported that his rally was heavily attended by neo-Nazis  and that a variety of antisemitic and neo-Nazi factions  had been involved in organizing the event. Kennedy was infuriated by this coverage of the audience to whom he had become connected by speaking at the rally.  His position is that any neo-Nazis were at some other rally on the same day, and that Querdenken is a fine group unsullied by neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic ties. Our expert witness says otherwise.

Continue reading →

The CEO of American Airlines, Doug Parker, said “this type of behavior has to stop.” And he’s not wrong, caveats of what happened and why notwithstanding. The allegation is that a first class passenger on a flight from JFK Airport to Santa Ana punched a flight attendant twice in the face.

Why this happened is unclear. Maybe it was that the flight attendant bumped him (and apologized), or maybe she said “let’s go, Brandon.” Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, it provides no excuse for his assault, even though punching people with whom you have a difference of opinion has become all the rage. Continue reading →