If you didn’t know better, Joan Biskupic’s post at CNN might give rise to a serious concern: why are the judges not condemning this atrocity?

President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been widely denounced as another instance of the President’s scorn for the judiciary. Yet one set of voices has been missing: that of Chief Justice John Roberts and the nation’s leading judges.

They have been silent since the beginning, when Trump derided a judge of Mexican heritage during the 2016 presidential campaign and during the furor over an immigrant travel ban early in his presidency when he referred to a “so-called judge.”

Wait, what? Oh my god, she’s right!!! Except this is utter nonsense, as she begs the question by falsely suggesting that judges are politicians who can, or should, show up on the Rachel Maddow Show with furious tears in their eyes for this affront to the Least Dangerous Branch. Continue reading →

I asked Senior United States District Judge John Kane (D.Colo.) his thoughts about Judge Jack Weinstein’s plan to push law firms to allow younger female lawyers the opportunity to speak in court. This is his response:

Just about anything Jack Weinstein does or says is great in my book. I admire him for this as well as a host of other actions he has taken. I must state, however, that I haven’t noticed a paucity of female lawyers in the cases before me. That is probably because our U.S. Attorney’s Office and our Federal Public Defender’s Office are about equally balanced between women and men.  We also do quite a few Section 1983 cases because Colorado has the largest federal prison complex in the country and a very active and dispersed state prison system.

Many of the defendants are represented by insurance defense firms that have a fairly large complement of women, and so do the municipal governments and the state Attorney General’s office. Our Criminal Justice Act panel is comprised largely of former public defenders and I don’t see any gender disproportion there either. Continue reading →

Any lawyer should have seen this coming. It was obvious to me.

But this isn’t just about one’s colleagues, the fellow lawyers of the Legal Aid Society, as the hurt and trauma one might endure from discrimination and harassment can come from anywhere. So anywhere it is:

This policy is for the benefit of and applies to all employees and applicants for employment, regardless of whether the prohibited conduct is engaged in by fellow employees, supervisors, managers, or someone not directly connected with the Society (e.g., a client, judge, opposing counsel, co-counsel, volunteer, or outside vendor).

Apparently, the LAS policy dictates the words and actions of not only its own people, but judges and opposing counsel. How, exactly, it plans to discipline judges and prosecutors for not using a LAS lawyer’s preferred pronoun is hard to imagine, and as for co-counsel, chances are poor that they will find their dictating prohibited conduct to aid in cooperation for their clients’ benefit. Continue reading →

In a Medium post, Cathy Young provided a detailed and exceptionally kind vision of political correctness. She began with its definition by the ever-dubious Sally Kohn:

Political correctness is simple idea everyone should be treated with equal dignity & respect. It’s not cause of terrorism. It’s antidote.

Warm, fuzzy, vague and meaningless. As a wag replied, “Pretty sure you mean “The Golden Rule”. Political Correctness is a form of language-control.” Of course, language control doesn’t sound nearly as warm and fuzzy, so it was left off the bumper stickers. But Cathy goes on to provide examples of how the scolds of political correctness work in real life, how it eats its own and treats no one with dignity and respect who doesn’t adhere to the orthodoxy.

So far, nothing you don’t already know. Continue reading →

While it doesn’t exactly say so, the New York Times op-ed by Columbia journalism and sociology prof Todd Gitlin gives the clear impression that the Antifa arose to deal with the Naxos in Charlottesville. There is no mention of them existing before, and every reference relates to their fight against the fascism of white supremacy.

Were they not the same Antifa that trashed Berkeley last February to prevent Milo from speaking, pepper-sprayed a female Trump supporter, hit a guy on the head with a bike lock? Not if one reads Gitlin’s description.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, the presence of antifa activists during the violence in Charlottesville, Va., this month was evidence that the far left is just as violent as the far right: “You know, they show up in the helmets and the black masks, and they’ve got clubs and they’ve got everything.”

Surrogates have aped Mr. Trump’s “blame both sides” rhetoric; overnight, antifa — and its assumed synonym, “alt-left” — have become right-wing shibboleths, right there with “social justice warrior” and “liberal snowflake.” In truth, there is no symmetry between either “alt-right” and either “antifa” or “alt-left.” Antifa is the backlash to the backlash, a defensive response to the growing presence of right-wing extremism.

Continue reading →

There are things that should never happen, one of which is that a person ends up dead in the back seat of a police cruiser. Yet, 17-year-old Xavier McMullen is very much dead.

AKRON, Ohio — A 17-year-old boy in police custody died of a gunshot wound to the head while sitting in the back of an Akron police cruiser, a police spokesman and the Summit County Medical Examiner said.

The incident happened about 11 p.m. on 7th Street between Kenmore Boulevard and Maryland Avenue, Akron police Capt. Daniel Zampelli said. Xavier McMullen was later pronounced dead at the scene. An officer found a gun next to McMullen, Zampelli said.

McMullen was taken into custody along with two others for an armed robbery. Somehow, the police found their way to three young men. Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, one of the writers from Fault Lines told me that he heard from another, ending in the salutation, “fuck you.” He said nothing to the potty-mouthed pal. Not just nothing to justify such a foul reaction. He said nothing to him at all. Rather, he was expressing some thoughts that were middle of the road, which means they weren’t progressive and failed to include that Trump was literally Hitler.

This was enough to cause a colleague to respond, out of the blue, with outrage and venom.

On the twitters, insanely stupid replies from random twitterers is the norm. The nature of the beast is that some will understand a twit and others will react with outrage. For me, it’s usually outrage from either right or left, as I constantly disappoint them both. The alt-right has a simple message, that America is and should be a white Christian country, to the flagrant exclusion of others. It’s an easy message to reject, so it needs no Gertruding to reject.

Yet, failure to respond in kind to insanity breeds insanity. If you are not sufficiently dedicated to howling epithets, you are complicit.

In a New Yorker interview, which was actually more of a debate, between Columbia prof Mark Lilla, who has either become the embodiment of old school liberalism or a racist academic pariah, and David Remnick, the issue was revealed: Continue reading →

When Joe Patrice explained his deepest thoughts as to why it was horrifying, it became clear that there was merit to the idea.

This actually tells you everything you need to know about the laughable swill these two dropped on an unsuspecting public this week. This dynamic duo of dumb spend the op-ed concocting a theory as terrifying as it is bereft of factual support when they posit that all of America’s woes really do stem from failing to live up to the ideals of an era when (white) men were men and everyone else kept their goddamned mouths shut. Make America Great Again indeed.

What could possibly be so dumb, so laughable? Two lawprofs who argued that America was paying the price for the breakdown in “bourgeois culture.”

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

Continue reading →

On a Friday night with a disastrous hurricane bearing down on Texas, North Korean missiles exploding and a full dump of news that would otherwise give CNN a day apiece of outrage, President Donald Trump issued his first pardon to a man awaiting sentence for contempt for his refusal to abide by an order requiring him to stop violating the Constitution.

In hard terms, the pardon won’t have an impact on the real world. The man is out of power, at least for now, and it’s not as if the man, at 85 years of age, will go out on the streets again to viciously harm people. The purposes of prosecution and incarceration will not suffer terribly by this pardon. But this was the rarest of cases where the symbolism, sending a message, mattered far more than the actual fact of imprisonment. Not that the image of him in a pink tent wouldn’t be cherished by a great many people.

Joe Arpaio was pardoned.

Continue reading →

Kevin O’Keefe and I disagree often about whether technology is the solution to all the problems facing law schools and the legal profession. But one thing we both agree about is that too many of the hypesters are snake-oil salesmen. So Kevin pointed me to the National Law Review to take a peek at the bio of the author of a post on the glories of technology for small law.

If your law practice’s viability relies on the Chief Imaginist’s education in “postcolonial and feminist literature with an emphasis on food studies,” you should give serious thought as to whether you’re cut out for law. I thought you should know.