The phenomenon of “citizen journalists” has had a curious history since social media allowed anyone to claim the protections of the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press. Some, like Carlos Miller, with his blog Photography is not a Crime, spawned movements to protect the constitutional right to video police. Others wore the mantle in the expectation that they could use it to falsely attack with abandon and then hide behind the claim of being a journalist exposing baseless conspiracies.

In Laredo, Texas, Priscilla Villarreal was a bit of both, revealing actual news on her Facebook page, LaGordiloca, with harsh criticism of law enforcement and prosecution. Unsurprisingly, this gained her a significant following as well as some people who didn’t like her very much. Continue reading →

I dipped my toe in controversy yesterday, not because I have any particular feelings about basketball, in general, or the Nets, in particular. It was because I, being Jewish, could say something that a non-Jew would have been ripped to shreds as a hater for saying. Yes, it was about a basketball player named Kyrie who rode the Kanye (Ye?) West’s antisemitism train into suspension, and possibly the end of his career.

Here’s the weird thing. I have never, to my knowledge, watched Kyrie Irving play basketball. I assume he plays well or he wouldn’t be in the NBA, but beyond that, he means nothing to me. To be honest, I’m not exactly an aficionado of Ye either and wouldn’t be able to name a song of his or, until I googled it, tell you what his sneakers looked like. But I digress. Continue reading →

Ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Friday Funny, I hope you’re as excited as I am for tomorrow. The biggest football game of the year will take place on November 5 in Athens, Georgia. That’s where the #2 ranked University of Tennessee Volunteers are going to hand the defending National Champions, the Georgia Bulldogs, their first loss and cement the Vols’ shot at the SEC Championship game in Atlanta.

When I last spoke of football on Rocky Top, I’ll admit I was apprehensive about Florida. Sure, the Vols got revenge from last year on Pitt, but I wasn’t sure we had the gear in us to beat the Gators. Continue reading →

Despite the efforts of “amicus” Eugene Volokh to use the Doe v. MIT Title IX case to push his war against pseudonymous litigation, the First Circuit held that there were four “paradigms” that compelled the district courts to allow a plaintiff to sue as a John Doe.

Volokh pursued the generic right of the public to know who was using the courts to sue to try to force an innocent male accused, whose identity had been protected under FERPA during the campus sex tribunal, to expose his name and the false accusations against him for which he was wrongfully found responsible because of the denial of due process and the institutional bias against males. Continue reading →

There’s a curiosity about rap music, rappers adopting names to make themselves sound tough, like a thug, to establish street cred. What made this curious to me was that there were people who were “tough,” who had street cred, not because they made up rhymes to music but because they were violent and used violence to pursue their ends. In criminal defense, we knew the people who rappers pretended to be. They were tough on the streets, not for show.

Did some rappers act in ways that aligned with their image? Of course. Particularly with some of the early rappers, they were very often the “thugs” they said they were. Indeed, some of the beloved elder rappers today were not the sort of people you wants to come across in a dark alley when they were young street kids trying to establish themselves as tough motherfuckers. Continue reading →

Lawyers are good at many things. Okay, not many, but spinning baseless arguments into rational sounding positions designed to prevail in the face of ignorance is one of our strengths. That was the position in which Judge Carlton Reeves found himself when the case before him argued that the felon in possession statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), was unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bruen.

As courts have realized, after Bruen, adjudicating the issue presents certain difficulties.1 Bruen instructs courts to under‐ take a comprehensive review of history to determine if Second Amendment restrictions are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” 142 S. Ct. at 2130. In fact, Justice Alito commends the majority for its “exhaustive historical survey.” Id. at 2157 (Alito, J., concurring).

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“You should sand and repaint the deck, honey,” Dr. S. tells me one day last week. “It really shouldn’t take more than a day to do.”

Before I continue, dear readers, let me rattle off a list of things I think I’m pretty good at:

Arguing before a judge or jury
Debating
Pushing through large amounts of paperwork
Sleight of Hand
Hypnosis
Theatrical Pickpocketing Continue reading →

In the aftermath of oral argument in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative actions cases before the Supreme Court, it seems fairly clear from the nature and tenor of questions from the bench that six justices are not in favor of sustaining affirmative action as currently used.

The Supreme Court on Monday appeared ready to rule that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, based on questioning over five hours of vigorous and sometimes testy arguments, a move that would overrule decades of precedents. Continue reading →

It would come as no surprise that the Supreme Court of the State of Washington held that racism has no place in our legal system. Indeed, who would argue otherwise? But like most platitudinous proclamations, the devil is in the details, and the details of a very ordinary trial make that very clear and deeply problematic.

In this case, Janelle Henderson, a Black woman, and Alicia Thompson, a white woman, were involved in a motor vehicle collision. Thompson admitted fault for the collision but made no offer to compensate Henderson for her injuries. Henderson claimed that her preexisting condition was seriously exacerbated by the collision and sued for damages.

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Picture a group of people who believe that they know right from wrong taking books from a library and throwing them onto a bonfire to burn them. There will still be plenty of volumes remaining when they’re done, as the books can be found in libraries and private hands elsewhere, but the ones within their reach are burned. They have not, and cannot, eradicate the offending book from the face of the earth, but they have burned books.

Is this not book burning? Obviously it is, and the fact that this performative act of condemnation didn’t result in the books’ total destruction doesn’t make the act of burning books any less a book burning. Perhaps they’re right, that the books are bad, evil even, and conveys ideas that are horrible and, at least in their minds, should not exist. Perhaps it’s not so much the ideas in the books, but the author who is so despised that his books should never see daylight. Does this make book burning any better? Continue reading →