With the election nearly upon us, a potential regional war breaking out in the middle east, and a never-ending stream of court decisions, you would think there would be something, if not many things, to write about daily. And, indeed, there is. The only problem for me is that I’ve already written about them. Some more than once. Some many times.

For those of you who are new here, you may wonder why I didn’t pound to death some facet of an issue that you believe deserves a damn good pounding. Some of you will make note of it by raising what you perceive as my shortfall in the comments. After all, if I was thorough, or perhaps a little smarter, I would have included your issue in my post because it’s important. That I wrote about it a year ago, or ten years ago, means nothing to you. It’s like TV reruns, if you didn’t read it the first time, it’s new to you. Continue reading →

Flooding is a bitch.

Last Thursday when I sat down to write—something, I’m not really sure what—I stared out the window and saw more rain pouring down than I’d seen in a long time. We were on about the third straight day of heavy rain here in East Tennessee, but why worry? After all we’re a landlocked state, right? There’s no way a hurricane could seriously affect my area, right?

Oh dear readers, how little I knew. Continue reading →

In a brutally vague advisory opinion for the purpose of concealing pretty much everything meaningful about what happened, a judge raised a question that has both been asked and answered a million times before (thinking of the Prince of Darkness, former legal aid lawyer cum Justice “Hardass’ Harold Rothwax of “Guilty” fame), and yet is new again under a shifting progressive regime.

The judge soon learned that, in a recorded conversation between defense counsel and the defendant, the attorney had referred to the age, race, political affiliation, and gender of the court’s judges, and suggested that the court ‘should look a little bit more like the people that are in front of them.’ The attorney also suggested that the defendant would not receive a fair trial from the court’s judges, who are a different race and gender from the defendant. Finally, the attorney used a pejorative term, drawing on racial and gender stereotypes, to refer to the complainant.

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Whether university legacy admissions are as big a deal as some make of it is beside the point. At best, it’s a tie-breaker for equally admissible students. Contrary to the widely shared assumption, it doesn’t mean colleges will admit the drooling idiot children of its alumni. But still, it’s hard to justify giving any weight to a legacy when deciding whether a student should be admitted. So when the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional for race to be considered in admissions, the backlash was that if they couldn’t have affirmative action, they shouldn’t have legacy admission.

California turned the argument into law. Continue reading →

But for Trump, it seems impossible that anyone at MSNBC would find Andrew Weissmann tolerable, no less one of their “go to” federal prosecutors for all things legal, no matter how utterly ignorant he and his cohort may be about state criminal law and civil law. These are the very same prosecutors who gave us incarceration nation, who were complicit in putting tens of thousands of black men in prison, some of whom were even guilty, and happily skirted the Constitution when it served their flavor of justice.

And yet, Weissmann is an omnipresent persona on the MSNBC tube because he hates Trump and will say whatever it takes to show how everything bad in the legal universe leads back to Trump. And he does so with gravitas because of his ascribed credibility. He was a federal prosecutor. He was general counsel of the FBI. He was part of Mueller’s team. He’s a prof at NYU law school. He wrote a book deciphering the Trump indictments. And no one, but no one, challenges anything he says. Indeed, their gushing thanks for his legal brilliance would be embarrassing to anyone with a modicum of humility. But that’s not Weissmann. Continue reading →

Rarely does something happen, like a fly on a head, that makes a vice presidential debate matter. Sure, Lloyd Bentsen took Dan Quayle to the woodshed with his “I knew Jack Kennedy” retort, but did it change the outcome of the election? Dukakis got crushed in his own right, and Bentsen’s memorable line may have been perfect, but it couldn’t un-Willie Horton the vote.

Tonight, J.D. Vance will debate Tim Walz. Vance, a Yale-trained lawyer who has more than a few debates under his belt, will debate Coach Walz, whose “aw shucks” dad vibe has pretty much encapsulated the start and finish of his campaign contribution as second to Kamala Harris. Of course, with Harris at a spry 59 years of age, it’s unlikely that she’ll be unable to complete her term such that Walz will end up as president in her stead. Thus, who really cares one way or the other? Vice president is, for the most part, a non-job, a spare, a warm body just in case. Continue reading →

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Penn prawf Jeffrey Robinson promotes his new book, Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape. What is he talking about when he speaks of “failures of justice”?

Most murderers and rapists escape justice, a horrifying fact that has gone largely unexamined until now. This groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, describing the interests at stake, and providing real-world examples.

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Granted, Mayor Eric Adams is the first mayor of New York City to be indicted in office, but that’s hardly the same as saying that some of his predecessors weren’t dirty up to their eyeballs. So says Clyde Haberman (Maggie’s dad), who has the “lived experience” to legitimately make the case, as he ponders why American’s largest (and, dare I say it, greatest) city struggles to elect a mayor of quality.

But the New York Times has called for Eric Adams to resign.

This is the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted. The charges against Mr. Adams are serious, including allegations that he misappropriated more than $10 million in public funds for his 2021 campaign. The mayor will have his day in court and is entitled to make a vigorous defense, but that does not mean he must force New York City to wait for him to prove his innocence under the law. To serve the city that elected him, Mr. Adams should immediately resign and turn City Hall over to someone untainted by criminal charges and endless investigations.

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Sheriff Roy Templeton was in fourth grade again. The irony was not lost on Mud Lick’s top cop, who spent many a day dealing with adults who behaved like fourth graders.

Today was different. The Sheriff had been summoned to Bear Bryant Elementary School at the request of Ms. Furstenburger, Roy Junior’s fourth grade teacher. Apparently the boy’d been up to some mischief and the Sheriff had been summoned to deal with his son’s behavior.

If only Arlene weren’t at her bridge club, the Sheriff thought. I’ve got that new revised treatise from Jordan Peterson on ‘Atlas Shrugged’ waiting on me back at the station. Continue reading →

To read about it on social media is to be deluged with the belief that Missouri put to death an innocent man.  The reason, they contend, is that finality matters more than innocence. As long as a defendant received the mechanics of due process, the fact of actual innocence made no difference. And while that is, indeed, the state of the law, it wasn’t quite the state of Williams’ case.

I’m not certain that he was innocent. There was no mic drop moment that proved he had nothing to do with the murder, and there was certainly some evidence to support the conviction. He pawned the victim’s laptop, the victim’s property was found in a car that his grandfather let him drive, and his girlfriend and a jailhouse informant told the police that he had confessed to the crime.

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