The Commonwealth of Virginia accepted a gift of property in Richmond in 1890. The legislature approved a resolution in 1889. The Governor signed off on it in 1890. The property came with a catch.

On July 15, 1887, the heirs of William C. Allen (the Allen heirs) conveyed by deed (the 1887 Deed) to the Lee Monument Association a round piece of property (the Circle) located at the intersection of Monument Avenue and Allen Avenue, which is now in the City of Richmond, Virginia. The terms of the 1887 Deed required the grantee, the Lee Monument Association, to
use the Circle as a site for a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee (General Lee), and required the Lee Monument Association to hold the Circle “only for the said use.” Several months later, the Lee Monument Association commissioned an equestrian statue of General Lee and a pedestal (together, the Lee Monument) to be erected on the Circle.

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It’s hard not to ascribe the worst of motives to the former Glynn County, Georgia, district attorney over her decision to do nothing about three men, one of whom had worked for her, over the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. There was video. We saw it. Could this be anything but a whitewash?

But once Jackie Johnson was voted out of office as DA, after the case was transferred to other prosecutors for investigation and prosecution, and the three defendants were charged with Arbery’s murder, what was left to do? Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr indicted Johnson. Continue reading →

Regardless of what side you take on abortion, there is no doubt that Texas’ SB8 is unconstitutional under the extant Supreme Court decisions, and no justice suggests otherwise. They may not like precedent, but Roe v. Wade and Casey are still the law of the land. That can’t be changed by a procedural petition on the shadow docket, but that doesn’t mean critical and permanent damage can’t be done.

This wasn’t just any case, but as high profile and controversial a case as it gets. Indeed, if Texas was desperately trying to provide the people on the political cusp with a reason to vote Democratic, they couldn’t have done better than this. There is a good chance this will rally the left and overcome whatever misgivings the moderates have about the Dems’ embrace of its most radical fringe. They’ve been shrieking about what the crazy right will do with abortion, and Texas just proved their worst fears to have merit. The implications of this Texas lunacy are staggering. Continue reading →

For the Trump years, he was the darling of progressives, lending his once-formidable gravitas to ideas ranging from the bizarre to the ridiculous. And even after Trump, Harvard conlaw prawf Larry Tribe was the “go to” guy for Biden to manufacture a nonsensical rationalization to “reimagine” a CDC eviction ban that no serious person could take seriously. But since that was the outcome progressives so desperately wanted, Tribe was the hero they needed.

Larry Tribe was flying high on the left, the worthier bookend to the Harvard crimlaw prawf, Alan Dershowitz, who shockingly played the same role for the other tribe. And then it all came crashing down. Continue reading →

At Persuasion, possibly because the newest New York Times columnist couldn’t get through the editorial gate, John McWhorter presents a ten point catechism of the new religion of neoracism.

He’s given the high priestesses the title “The Elect,” because they take SJW and woke as derogatory and, outside of their ideological views on social justice, are otherwise perfectly nice people who do ordinary jobs and are fun at parties. They’re not zealots, he explains, except when they’re zealots. Continue reading →

It’s hard to blame Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen for making a basic legal mistake. After all, she’s no lawyer and her bachelor’s degree in comparative lit likely didn’t include much on the significance of mens rea. This is why she frames her post about sexual assaults around the “unintended,” even though an unintentional act cannot be an assault. And that’s why she goes so very wrong.

We are about to enter the Red Zone.

That’s the period between the start of the college semester and Thanksgiving break, during which more than 50 percent of campus sexual assaults occur. Continue reading →

You sit back down at the defense table after asking juror 19 the usual questions and getting the usual replies revealing nothing. In response to the judge’s question, she says without hesitation that she can follow the law as he gives it and can be fair to the defendant. But you see something in her eye, a glint of hatred as she stares at the defendant. She hates your client. She says she can be fair, but she can’t. You see it. You know it. But if this trial is happening in Arizona, there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it come next January 1st.

Arizona’s top court is eliminating the longstanding practice of allowing lawyers in criminal and civil trials in state courts to remove potential jurors without explanation, a move that proponents said would help prevent discrimination in the selection of trial jurors. Continue reading →

To be fair, I have no clue who Olivia Rodrigo is, but she is apparently a pop star, which means things she says are given some prominence. Enough so, apparently, to appear on Page Six.

Olivia Rodrigo knows the impact she has on fans of color, revealing in a new Q&A that she herself once believed only white girls could be recognized as true pop stars.

“I sometimes get DMs from little girls being like, ‘I’ve never seen someone who looked like me in your position.’ And I’m literally going to cry, like, just thinking about it,” Rodrigo, 18, said in the V Magazine feature.

“I feel like I grew up never seeing that. Also, it was always like, ‘Pop star,’ that’s a white girl.”

There were no pop stars of color? Pop stars were all white girls? Continue reading →

A southern California high school teacher made a Tik Tok video. I assume, since she decided to first create it, then post it, that she thought it was a good idea to do so. Why?

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1431375675903053829

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In the summer, the Westhampton Beach  police would hire kids to walk up and down the main drag. They had neither gun nor Taser, but were armed with a stick with a piece of chalk at the end. The kids would mark a line on car tires to show their placement. If the line was in the same place an hour (or two, who remembers?) later, you got a ticket. It was annoying, it left a mark on your tire and if you got nailed, it would cost money.

I understood why they limited parking time. There were a lot of people trying to park and not enough parking spaces. There were businesses who wanted to make money and they couldn’t if people couldn’t park to patronize them. And by chalking tires, the town could both easily determine who parked too long and make some decent pocket change off the fairly well-to-do summer visitors. It was a win-win with one possible exception. Was it constitutional? Continue reading →