In an editorial of breathtaking absurdity, the New York Times blames the otherwise entirely blameworthy Jeff Sessions for police abuse in Chicago.

The wrenching shift in the Justice Department’s approach to criminal justice under President Trump is playing out painfully as Chicago tries to rein in a scandalous police culture that tolerated officers routinely abusing and killing residents, particularly African-Americans and Latinos.

The Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, has sued Chicago for a consent decree, putting aside the meaning of the word “consent.”

“In the absence of a committed Justice Department, my office will seek the reforms and support police officers need to implement safe and constitutional police practices,” said Ms. Madigan, a Democrat, who spoke of a “broken trust” between black and Hispanic Chicagoans and their police force.

Continue reading →

Listening to former SNL comedian, now United States Senate comedian, Al Franken read his book, it became clear that any mistake, any misunderstood joke, could end up splashed across social media as if he were just a total, idiotic, screw-up. Some people are in the public eye, and they can’t afford to court malevolent scrutiny.

Trump was that sort of person, whose every move, from dotting eyes to twitting covfefe, would cause howls of outrage. At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo cried, “leave Trump alone!”

As protesters across the country marched in opposition to neo-Nazis this month, President Trump did something truly shocking on Twitter: He issued a level-headed statement praising the marchers.

“Our great country has been divided for decades,” he wrote on Aug. 19. “Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before!”

But Mr. Trump’s belated attempt at statesmanship was overshadowed by what, for him, has become a frequent problem: He had flubbed his spelling. In some earlier versions of his olive-branch tweet, he had rendered “decades” as “decade” and “heal” as “heel.” The misspellings were up for only minutes before he deleted and corrected his tweets, but he was roundly mocked on Twitter.

While the rest of us were ridiculing the president for his bad spelling, Manjoo wanted us to chill out. Continue reading →

The Daily Kos is still around, much to the pleasure of conservatives, for whom it provides a perfect foil.

And, finally, I naïvely believed that liberals will finally take the threat of people who deny my humanity and call for my death seriously.

Instead, I’ve noticed a growing (and, frankly, confusing) pushback on Antifa from progressives. Suddenly, people who were supposedly on my side are denouncing a group of folks who organize against the people who will boldly march the streets shouting racist and anti-Semitic phrases. Individuals like Cornel West have explicitly said that Antifa activists have saved their lives, yet I see (white) liberals spending more time squabbling about alleged Antifa violence than pondering about what they’re doing to fight fascism and dismantle white supremacy.

There is one dilemma facing progressive calls for action. They can’t grasp that their jargonistic hysteria isn’t the least bit convincing to anyone but them. They argue the point they care passionately about as if to persuade no one who isn’t already desperately on their team, and can’t understand why everyone doesn’t see the world their way. It is, indeed, naive, not to mention unpersuasive, and yet they keep banging their head against the same wall over and over, expecting a different result. You know what that’s the definition of, right? Continue reading →

Calls come in all the time about doing TV shows. The truth is that they don’t really care about you, but that they can fill air time, which means they need you to show up, speak words, appear somewhat credible and kill time until the next TV commercial. What? You thought you were brilliant?

But sometimes, you get an odd call, such as a show about, say, an old case of yours, where you, rather than some other random attorney, are necessary.  The first question you ask yourself is why? Why would I want to waste my time to do this? They don’t pay. There’s nothing in it for you. It’s old news and the only people who will ever watch it are the terminally unemployed. There isn’t even a wisp of a prayer they will ever retain you. In fact, they’ll never remember your name, as the dead air will fill up with someone else within the hour.

Then comes the call, begging, imploring, that you give up a few hours and do it. Sigh. Fine, whatever. The chat with the producers to prove you’re not brain dead, then the car comes and takes you to the studio, where you try to maintain interest until they wrap. A waste of time, sure, but it’s done.

Usually, they have you sign a release beforehand that consists of a few lines of legalese agreeing to allow the production company to use your footage, likeness, voice in their show. You see, this isn’t a “news” show, but an entertainment show. This was old news, an old case, and there is nothing newsworthy about it, so they need your permission. It’s a two-second process, “I release…” and you’re out of there. Continue reading →

There’s a problem. Judge Kopf tried to show it with his post about Chief Judge John Marshall, and some of the comments, in return, made it hard to ignore. With the utmost earnestness, some struggled to find a principled distinction between the “good” old Americans and the bad ones. Others just condemned them all, because they failed miserably to meet the moment’s vision of a Great American.

Whom are we allowed to honor? Whom should we remember? How do we distinguish the good from the evil?

At Prawfsblawg, Rick Hills took his life in his hands by positing a metric that might satisfy the scholars with torches and pitchforks, as well as the little children who would gather the firewood so they can be burned at the stake.

That we should all be judged by the temper of our times naturally gives rise to the question: How well would we score if we were born in earlier times? There is a progressive smugness that judges the past by what we know today but avoids the touchy question of how we would be judged were we born in the world of yesterday. Continue reading →

She was an alpine skier in the 1998 and 2002 Olympics under the name Shaffer, and is now a nurse at Salt Lake City’s University Hospital. It may not take bravery to be an elite skier, but it takes grit. And Alex Wubbel had both bravery and true grit.

Det. Jeff Payne wanted to take a blood draw from an unconscious patient, not because he had any probable cause to believe that he was drunk or high, but because he was told to do so. The patient, a reserve police officer who drove a tractor-trailer, had been in a fatal crash and was severely burned.

Payne was told by his watch commander to draw blood. Wubbels refused to let him. Payne had cuffs and a gun. All Wubbels had was law and the grit to tell the cop “no.” Continue reading →

The National Enquirer and Radar Online claimed that Richard Simmons was a tranny, which really ground his gears. So he sued for defamation.

Simmons sued the publications in May over a story alleging that he was in the process of becoming a woman. While affirming his support for trans people, Simmons has vehemently rejected the claim.

But in his tentative ruling, Judge Gregory Keosian ruled that being misidentified as transgender does not inherently expose someone to “hatred, contempt, ridicule or obloquy,” and therefore does not rise to the level of defamation.

As Turley discusses, defamation per se had long been based on our American tradition of Puritan ickiness with sexuality. Continue reading →

While many shake their heads at the inane headline to Chicago lawprof Laura Weinrib’s op-ed, she’s got a point.

To correct the prevailing misconception, we need to look back to the 1930s, when economic desperation was fueling a battle between reactionary impulses and radical aspirations, and Nazis first appeared on American streets. Even as American fascists appealed to anti-Semitism and white privilege, the ACLU fought for their right to hold rallies. Although it did not oppose regulations against armed marches, it insisted that “the right to parade,” even “in brown shirts with swastikas,” should “never be denied.”

Why did the ACLU defend Nazis when they were terrorizing Germany and their virulence was painfully apparent? As the organization acknowledged in its pamphlet on Nazi speech, it was a “practical tactic” as much as an “abstract principle.”

Way back, the ACLU wasn’t the “civil liberties” organization we think of today, but a radical leftist organization. These were the days of Wobblies and Pinkertons, when the AFL and CIO hated each other, when the idea of workers joining together to amass clout against the bosses was anarchy. The ACLU was part of this fight, and very much on one side of the war between capital and labor. Continue reading →

Think for yourself.

In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student — or faculty member — faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink. At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them. Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Try it and you’ll never have to worry about being invited to the social justice sleepover party. Continue reading →

It’s fair that four female Harvard lawprofs express their views about how problems of “sexual wrongdoing” should be handled on campus. Expressing views is the American way, and they’re every bit as entitled as anyone else. Even better, they recognize that the current regime, invented in the fevered dreams of Catherine Lhamon when she ran her fiefdom at the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, is patently unfair to the accused and violates due process.

Yay? Well, somewhat, and advocates for changing the star chamber of Title IX adjudication are happy to have such august “experts” on their side, at least to the extent of supporting the elimination of the worst of the nightmarish system calculated to assure that males be found guilty and punished. Often, not in that order.

But this isn’t just a matter of Title IX team sports, but a matter of law. For these Harvard lawprofs, there isn’t much concern about law when it comes to the starting point of their feelings.

It is extremely important for colleges and universities to have robust policies and procedures to address sexual wrongdoing on campus. Schools’ struggles with providing fair procedures have led some observers to throw up their hands and propose 1) that schools should not decide these cases at all; 2) that schools should toss these cases off to law enforcement instead; and 3) that schools should be legally required to refer all reports of criminal acts to law enforcement regardless of whether the schools also adjudicate the cases (sometimes called “mandatory referral”). These proposals are irresponsible.

Continue reading →