No one really knows what lurks beneath the dynamics of the family relationship. Parents can be awful to their children. Children can be spiteful to their parents. Maybe they have good reason. Maybe no. But family has long been recognized as an entity of enormous value, to be encouraged in law and protected from outside attack. How, then, did the disintegration of the familial relationship turn Helena Duke into a hero?

For four years, Helena Duke, an 18-year-old high school senior in Massachusetts, had been growing further apart from her mother over their political views. She marched in protests for racial justice to her mother’s outspoken disapproval, she said. All the while her mother, a longtime Democrat, became ever more supportive of President Trump.

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In law, it’s long been established that the defense of property is not worth a human life. This notion has been twisted over the past year from valuing the sanctity of human life to justifying the destruction of property. It’s not big deal. It’s not “violence.” It’s just stuff. So what? The “so what” is that its destruction is being used to coerce political decision making.

Commissioner Dan Ryan said Wednesday that his home has been vandalized seven times since late October, when the North Portland dwelling he shares with his fiance was first targeted by protesters who wanted him to support cutting millions of dollars from the city’s police budget.

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Lawyers end up standing next to a wide array of clients, not because we necessarily like them, or even can tolerate them, but because we understand our duty to represent them. But that has limits.

An attorney representing President Trump in one of his dozens of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election moved to withdraw from the case on Thursday, telling a federal court that the president used him to “perpetrate a crime.”

Philadelphia-based attorney Jerome Marcus asked the court to allow him to withdraw, citing concerns over Pennsylvania’s professional conduct standards for lawyers.

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Dr. SJ loves to read books. Over the past few years, she’s taken to reading the books up for book prizes, which both she and her book club expect to be the best new books coming out. They tend to have one thing in common: they are about a young woman in another country, what we used to call a third-world country, who is overwhelmed by her sad feelings about her personal struggles. They are, I’m told, tedious.

Literature once reached up, elevated us to higher truths uttered in greater prose. If Disrupt Texts has anything to say about it, these will be the only books your child ever reads. Continue reading →

There is no rational argument that Twitter, a private corporation, was not entirely within its legal rights to throw Trump off its site, even if a handful of unduly passionate lawyers and scarily moronic congress folk cry First Amendment. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s a publicly traded corporation. No, it doesn’t matter that some call it the virtual town square. No, it doesn’t matter that you’ve been reliably informed that Section 230 protections require it to not discriminate politically. This isn’t a discussion.

But as Eugene Volokh points out in his New York Times op-ed, that’s not where the fair concerns end. Continue reading →

Is the House of Representatives’ second impeachment of Trump serious? Maybe they’re hoping the threat will push him to resign in exchange for Pence handing him that sweet pardon he can’t give himself, or the invocation of the 25th Amendment which would take the onus off Pelosi and the Dems and shift it onto Mike Pence and what’s left of the Cabinet.

There only being a few days left in the term, and the House both rushing while dilly-dallying its way to a vote, now supposedly set for Wednesday, January 13, when they could have had the deal wrapped up last Friday if it were so critical and necessary, or Monday, or Tuesday. That’s the thing about exigency. If it’s critical, do it now. If you don’t have to do it now, then it’s not critical. Continue reading →

There are a handful of reasons why academics have evoked the ire of students and administration, not to mention their fellow faculty members, causing the demand for their ouster. Most have been silly, legitimate if politically incorrect scholarship or pedagogy. Some have gone full-blown racist, from suggesting that white students suffer for their skin color to calling for “white genocide.” Most argue that it’s hyperbolic rhetoric, designed to bring attention to their grievance.

But what if a prof’s speech, outside the classroom, unrelated to scholarship, is both inflammatory and, how to say this nicely, crazy? Consider Oberlin’s Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition. Continue reading →

Having exhausted every show that seemed remotely interesting, Dr. SJ and I decided to watch a shonda called “Bridgerton.” It wasn’t entirely beyond the pale, as a British costume melodrama set in the early 19th Century. I loved Downton Abbey for its insight into life among the British aristocracy and those who served it.

Had I been alive then, I would have been a stablehand at best if I survived to adulthood, making me appreciate all the more that I have Georgian sterling on my formal dinner table. God bless America, the land of opportunity. But I digress. Continue reading →

The comparisons abounded, the insurrection in Washington and the riots last summer. Wasn’t the level of violence and destruction far worse when Kenosha burned? Why were militarized and armored police standing on the Lincoln Memorial when there were barely a handful of cops protecting the Capitol? Why did cops readily fire OS gas, rubber bullets and flashbangs at crowds of mostly peaceful protesters in Portland while they stood aside open doors leading to the Rotunda?

The comparisons still abound, as arrests of some of the more prominently identifiable rioters are made at home in distant states rather than at the scene after being clubbed down, kettled into dead ends or seized en masse as part of the amorphous mob of people whose foremost crime was presence at the scene? Continue reading →

If you can’t manage to pull off an interview with Gayle King, who did not attend the Mike Wallace Masters Class on how rip a target to shreds, you should seriously reconsider whether law is your calling. But that comes at the end of a series of very unfortunate choices, reflected by Miya Ponsetto’s decision to have her moment under the lights.

The 22-year-old woman caught on camera allegedly physically attacking a 14-year-old Black teen and falsely accusing him of stealing her phone was arrested in California.

In an exclusive interview, Miya Ponsetto and her lawyer spoke with @GayleKing hours before she was arrested. pic.twitter.com/ezaGkcWZ8j

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) January 8, 2021

The backstory is fairly clear. Ponsetto falsely accused a black 14-year-old of stealing her iPhone, screamed at him and tackled him as he tried to get away from this crazed 22-year-old. Whether her belief, what rational people would call a baseless assumption, that he stole her phone was based on his race, his age or something else is unclear. What is absolutely clear is that her interview, even under the withering questioning of Gayle King, was a fiasco. Continue reading →