For lawyers, our courtroom attire is a uniform, spanning the color universe of gray to blue and seeking to accomplish two things: make us appear serious and credible to the judge and jury and not distract from the more important things happening. We strive to create an impression that enhances our function without undermining that function.

This goes for all lawyers, regardless of gender, although men have it far easier than women given our clearer options and fewer possible fashion faux pas. Our shoe choices are black or brown, and the biggest issue at the toe end is plain, cap or brogue. No peeking.

Are we really so constrained by fashion protocol? Should we be? Is it just another manifestation of “toxic masculinity”? It’s one thing to take a risk when the only person who might suffer is you, but when we’re there solely for the sake of a client, is it irresponsible to risk our client’s interest to express our own fashion sense? Continue reading →

It was unsurprising when a friend, a teacher, told me that one of her students expressed a desire to be called by a name other than the one given by her parents. She told her principal, and inquired whether she should inform the child’s mother. Her principal instructed her that it was district policy not to do so, that the teacher was to acquiesce to the child’s preference and keep it from the parents.

In one story, parents are wonderful nurturing people. In another story, parents aren’t. The school wasn’t taking any chances of being on the wrong side of transphobia. Maybe the child is gender-dysphoric. Maybe not. But if they snitch to the parents, and the parents lack sufficient prescience to be supportive of a second grader who wants to be called Billy instead of Suzie, all hell could break loose. They don’t need that sort of backlash, and so the choice of keeping the parents in the dark prevailed.

Bioethicists have seized upon this mindset by invoking the power of the State not just to conceal information from parents, but to seize the child to be raised and medicated in the “right” way. Continue reading →

Dr. SJ and I watched Roma on Netflix because, as she explained to me, it was going to be an Oscar contender and we should watch Oscar-contending movies. We were about fifteen minutes into the film when she turned to me and said, “I don’t think it gets any better. I don’t think there’s any plot, any story at all.” It took us about a week to watch the movie, in small chunks, because we were bored.

As an aside in her Times op-ed against quota-izing our world to assure that the right number of genitalia are omnipresent, Reason Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Katherine Mangu-Ward, describes the movie.

But consider “Roma.” If there is any justice in this world, it will win the Academy Award for best director on Sunday. This wrenching, beautiful film is set almost entirely in the world of women; it delicately engages class and race, stares unflinchingly at the darkness and light of motherhood, and yet it shows up on the wrong side of the gender ledgers: The director is Alfonso Cuarón, a man.

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The group Turning Point USA had a table on campus at UC Berkeley, where legend has it that the free speech campus movement was born. Whether you like the group or not is irrelevant or all that matters, because they’re either entitled to express their views or not based upon whether you believe free speech is a right or speech is violence, and therefore to be met with violence.

This fellow falls into the speech is violence crowd because of his refined sensibilities of morality. Or maybe he embraces the punch a Nazi, punch a teenager in a red MAGA cap, punch anyone who disagree with you mentality. Or he just likes to punch. It’s impossible to say for sure since he has yet to explain himself.

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It served as one of the primary arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment, that if this came to pass, women would be drafted into the military. But such a fear was misguided, as this nightmare, if that’s what it is, has now come to pass by ruling of Southern District of Texas Senior District Judge Gray Miller.

If ever there was a time to discuss “the place of women in the Armed Services,” that time has passed.

The court held that “male-only registration” for selective service was unconstitutional, so the law requiring males to register, but not females (or any other gender, as the case may be), violates the Equal Protection Clause.

The decision deals the biggest legal blow to the Selective Service System since the Supreme Court upheld the draft in 1981. In Rostker v. Goldberg, the court ruled that the male-only draft was “fully justified” because women were ineligible for combat roles.

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Satisfying as it may be to sucker punch someone who says something you deem awful, you can’t punch a pickup truck. It’s an inanimate object and will just hurt your fist. So Andrew Bartell came up with an alternative. Torch it.

Bartell, a 26-year-old student at the University of Kansas, was visiting his grandparents in Holton in early July 2016. On July 3, Bartell’s grandparents’ neighbor, Steven Battles, had parked his truck on the street near Bartell’s grandparents’ home. Battles’ truck had a Confederate flag painted on the hood and a Confederate flag flying from the bed. Bartell found this very disrespectful because he felt the Confederate flag was “a symbol of hatred, slavery and the KKK.”

Bartell asked Battles to move his truck. Battles refused. Bartell went to the police, who refused to take a report of this hate crime. What else could he do? Continue reading →

His blog, Slate Star Codex, is very popular, as well it should have been based on content, and yet somewhat surprising based on length. Scott Alexander’s posts are, well, long. Much as he is an excellent and interesting writer, it is a serious dedication of time to read what he wrote. It is usually worth it, but had he worked a bit harder, he could have accomplished the same thing in far fewer words. Then again, who am I to call the kettle black?

What he was not was close-minded, which was perhaps his undoing. A subreddit to discuss his posts was created, and as he describes it (since I’ve never read it), some people with outlier views used it as their platform. While they were a small minority of redditors, they became the focus of the perpetually outraged and their connection to Alexander via a subreddit empowered the attribution of their views to him.

In their twisted rationalizations, the fact that a handful of people with bizarre (if civil) views took comfort in a subreddit about him, he must be complicit. At the very least, he should have silenced wrongthinkers and made clear he was a warrior for social justice, for failure to do so is tantamount to all the bad things they despise and must punch you for.  Then came the attack of the killer tomatoes. Continue reading →

Having grown up poor, nobody taught me which fork to use, which wine glass was “correct” and whether the bread plate goes on the right or left. I remember being invited to dinner by some of the old guard in my neighborhood and, in the midst of my brilliant small talk, grabbing the wrong glass of wine. A lovely woman to my left whispered in my ear, “That’s my glass. Yours is to the right.” My small talk may not have been as fascinating as I thought either.

It’s one thing for a poor black kid with huge potential to get into an elite college like Harvard, but there’s a good chance he’s not going to know which fork to use either.

Within that cohort, he documented separate groups: the “privileged poor,” who had gained access to day, boarding, or prep schools that introduced them to the social norms and academic culture of elite higher education (for example, making use of office hours); and the “doubly disadvantaged,” whose path led from under-resourced public schools into an often bewildering environment on campus. For the latter group, that transition risked making the very students the colleges had recruited feel vulnerable and alienated, and thus more exposed to academic failure.

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It’s no crime to be poor, but is it a crime to be rich? Farhad Manjoo argues that we should “abolish” billionaires.

“Some ideas about how to make the world better require careful, nuanced thinking about how best to balance competing interests,” [Tom Socca] began. “Others don’t: Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires. All of them.”

Mr. Scocca — a longtime writer at Gawker until that site was muffled by a billionaire — offered a straightforward argument for kneecapping the wealthiest among us. A billion dollars is wildly more than anyone needs, even accounting for life’s most excessive lavishes. It’s far more than anyone might reasonably claim to deserve, however much he believes he has contributed to society.

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It was my first case in the hinterlands of Kings County, a foreign land known to the locals as Brooklyn. A deal was cut to plead out for a sentence of time served, which my client happily accepted. After the judge announced sentence, the court officer was told to “take charge,” which in court lingo means to physically seize the defendant and put him back in the pens.

I immediately got between the court officer and my guy, blocking him from grabbing my client’s upper arm and leading him out of the courtroom. “He got time served,” I said loudly. “He’s walking out with me.”

The judge then explained that they did things differently in the hinterlands than they did in the Big City of Manhattan. Here, he informed me, a defendant had to be “processed out” by corrections before he could be released, but the judge assured me he would be out “today.” Continue reading →