Toledo Law’s John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values Lee Strang won an award. Normally, that would raise at worst a yawn, at best an eyebrow. But not this time. The award Strang won is called the Inclusive Excellence Award, and he won it “overwhelmingly.”

UToledo College of Law Professor Lee Strang received an overwhelming number of faculty nominations focused on his presence in the classroom where he “enjoys and respects a good healthy debate,” as one nominator wrote. The individuals who nominated Strang for the award recognized his conservative point of view as a minority in academia and a benefit to legal debate. Continue reading →

There’s a really good reason why I never mention Tucker Carlson. He can’t sing. He can’t dance. He can’t tell a joke or throw a ball with great velocity. Yet, there he is on Fox News entertaining the masses by providing the right wing version of a whiny traumatized scold for the downtrodden . . . maskless.

Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.

If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — "call the police immediately, contact child protective services" pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021

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I never had a problem with Batson, per se. Of course the prosecution shouldn’t discriminate against potential jurors on the basis of race. But its rationale concerned me, creating a right on the part of individuals, potential jurors, to be free from discrimination. The right to a fair and impartial jury of one’s peers belonged to the accused, not the public.

And then the other shoe fell, as it obviously would, that the same right could be infringed by the defense, since the right no longer was limited to the defendant, but was now a public right. Reverse Batson was born, and the defendant’s ability to strike jurors was, like the prosecution’s, subject to the invented right of someone who wouldn’t go to prison. Continue reading →

The reaction to the killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant brought out a lot of hardcore sophistry, desperately seeking to shift the focus away from the fact that she was about to plunge a knife into another human being to another black person killed by the cops. It’s true, she was. It’s also true that there was a reason for it. It’s further true that the people arguing the cause studiously ignore the reason and only focus on the outcome.

It’s a dishonest argument, but the days when people were ashamed of being disingenuous are in the rearview mirror. Arguments that get people to the “correct” outcome matter, no matter what fallacious reasoning is required. The ends justify the means when the end is social justice. Continue reading →

I knew George Floyd. Not the George Floyd who was killed in Minneapolis, but the generic George Floyd. I knew him. I knew a thousand George Floyds. Guys trying to survive on the street. Nice enough guys with few prospects trying to make their way through life as best they could. Some were surprisingly smart, inherently knowing a great deal about organizational behavior because they surely didn’t learn it at Harvard Business School. Some weren’t very smart. Many were addicted to drugs.

Addicted to opioids doesn’t make one evil, or even an unpleasant person. People who are addicted can be good people, but they tend to do dumb stuff and get themselves into trouble. That’s largely why I knew George Floyd, because he would come to my office, sit in the chair across my desk and talk to me. Continue reading →

There seems to be an ongoing competition between Harvard and Yale Law Schools to see which can be more ridiculous than the other. While Dersh does his best to balance out Larry Tribe on the Harvard team, Yale came on strong this week with its condemnation of prawf Amy Chua.

The Yale Daily News reported recently that a professor at the university’s law school, Amy Chua, had been disciplined for allegedly inviting students to dinner parties at her house in violation of a 2019 agreement with the dean. Current and former students of Chua’s sent dozens of emails to the administration to protest the decision. Some high-profile supporters condemned her treatment: One deemed it “sinister,” while others suggested it might be racist and sexist. Chua herself called the whole thing “surreal,” denied any wrongdoing, and demanded an investigation. Continue reading →

No, it’s not the answer to all police abuse problems, as some have been disingenuously claiming to push their agenda to the unduly passionate, but abolishing qualified immunity is certainly a hugely important reform. And with the bipartisan support of Republican Senator Tim Scott, it should be a done deal. Yet, it’s not. How is this possible?

Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) has reportedly proposed a compromise to rein in qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult for victims to sue government officials when their constitutional rights have been violated. Continue reading →

One of the three foundational components of a public education, children need to read. Part of that is to teach them to love reading, to want to read, and part of imparting an appreciation of books is to read books to them so they learn to love books and want to read. So far, so good. But as long as we’re reading books to them, why not use the opportunity to send a message, to teach them something that the teachers believe they should know?

Heather has Two Mommies was published in 1989. In 2020, Ibram Kendi published Antiracist Baby. In between, a book was published that received somewhat less attention than either of these, but is coming into its own in the current climate. The MacArthur Elementary School in  Binghamton, NY, put up a Youtube of someone reading Something Happened in Our Town for its students to watch. The Binghamton Police were not amused. Continue reading →

At first, it was only about the ingredients for the usual mindless reaction. Black 16-year-old girl shot and killed by cop. What more could anyone need to know? Of course, it didn’t take long to find out.

The cry of “split second decision” making is often ridiculed, but this was the moment when the cop had to make a decision. Did he take out the person about to murder another person or not? Only in a fantasy world were there alternatives, like the cop shooting the knife out of her hand or asking the killer to take a moment while he pondered his choice of weapons in the expectation that his Taser might do the trick before the knife plunged into the heart of the victim. But a black woman was shot by a cop, and that can’t happen. Continue reading →

A few years back, I got a call from a client who was deeply afraid. He donated money to the defense of a pretty awful guy who was, the client believed, being silenced. The client was a believer in free speech, not the miscreant’s underlying cause or beliefs, and thought that he should support free speech for the worst in order to protect free speech for the rest of us. It was an ACLU kinda thing, back when they defended the Skokie Nazis and backed constitutional rights.

But he later feared that the names of donors would come out and people would mistakenly believe he was a supporter of the guy rather than a supporter of free speech. He wasn’t but, given the climate, would anybody care or believe him? His fear was justified, but what were the chances the names would go public? Today, the chances seem pretty damn good. Continue reading →