It went viral first. So viral that governors were interrogated about it and a president relied upon it. And why not? it was a great story if the point was to demonstrate how rigid, insane and dangerous the post-Dobbs laws would be. I mean, who would condemn a 10-year-old to give birth to her rapist’s baby because she was three days beyond the 6 week limit? Horrendous.
But was it true? Not “her truth” kinda true, but factually true in the old school reality sort of way. Continue reading
When I first saw and twitted about the Dallas newspaper story, it was because it was a funny story, a pregnant woman in the HOV lane claiming that her fetus was her second person in the car.Come on, it’s hilarious, right? But as funny as it may be, it’s also a legitimate issue, even if driving in the carpool lane isn’t the biggest legal deal around.
There’s a point here, one that lawyers who will be left to clean up the mess left behind by the Dobbs majority and the great many aspiring midwits in state government seizing the opportunity to convert their simple-minded dreams into fevered reality fail to grasp. Law is hard. Good law is extremely hard. Bad law is not merely a social disaster and failure, but gives rise to myriad new and heretofore unconsidered problems. Continue reading
The right side seems to be fairly easy to line up. There’s the young turk, Ron DeSantis, or the old, vulgar, amoral, deceitful, ignoramus. But on the other side, the incumbent isn’t getting any younger, a point not missed by many Democratic voters.
Mr. Biden has said repeatedly that he intends to run for re-election in 2024. At 79, he is already the oldest president in American history, and concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list for Democratic voters who want the party to find an alternative.
Mind you, they don’t think he’s doing a great job as president either. Continue reading
For a while now, Eugene Volokh has been engaged in a battle against the use of pseudonymous litigation, the John or Jane Does that seem to do an awful lot of litigating these days. His point is that the courts are open to the public, that the true identities of the parties allows the public and media to know, investigate and question who is trying to use the courts to accomplish dubious ends.
It’s not so much that Eugene doesn’t have a point about the overuse of pseudonymous litigation, but that in certain categorical instances, Title IX campus sex suits for example, the purpose of the suit is inherently defeated when the true identities of the parties are known since the law requires that the identities remain confidential before reaching the litigation stage, and so litigating the denial of due process would cause its own great damage to the plaintiff independent of the damage already suffered. Continue reading
It wasn’t long ago that Josh Blackman came up with the idea that, to avoid court packing, Chief Justice John Roberts should sacrifice himself for the Court.
But there is one possible solution that does not require collective action. Of course, my proposal here is my proposal for all problems afflicting the Supreme Court. A resignation in time could save nine. Hear me out.
Is a charge of $1.75 for extra dipping sauce for fries too much? If so, don’t get it. If so, don’t patronize the establishment at all. If so, complain about it all you want to friends, neighbors and your tribe on the insta. Do a TikTok if you must, but don’t do this.
Customers trash Bel Fries in NYC after being told there was a $1.25 charge for extra dipping sauce pic.twitter.com/WXO40h21Kg
— No Jumper (@nojumper) July 8, 2022
The snark could have been almost witty by contrasting the claim of a “right” to a peaceful dinner with a right to an abortion, except for one detail. It wasn’t Justice Brett Kavanaugh who claimed a dinner “right,” but a spokesman for Morton’s Steak House. Contrary to popular belief, the Morton’s guy was neither the justice’s official spokesmodel nor legally qualified to assert whether dinner at a corporate steak house was a legal “right.”
Was it merely fortuitous that a group of protesters happened to be at Morton’s the evening Kavanaugh was there to dine? That’s hard to say, given that there’s a bounty for food service workers to give ready protesters a half hour to show up. Regardless, the question remains whether protesting people in official government positions at dinner, or their home, or anywhere else like their children’s schools, as opposed to their governmental office where they perform the governmental function with which others take issue, is a norm that should not be violated. Continue reading
Madison Cornbread was a petite, pretty young 22-year-old woman who had the world in front of her. Though life in Driftwood County was rather dull for someone her age, soon she planned to start classes at the University of Alabama. She’d been saving up through various odd jobs, including babysitting.
Things were starting to go her way. She’d been out the night before at the Grassy Knoll Pub celebrating with friends, met a cute guy, and went back to his place. Now, at about ten in the morning, Madison drove towards her parents’ home where she planned to clean up before getting to the day’s needed events. Continue reading
In a few years, lawyers, judges and scholars will look back at opinions written over the past few years and think one of a few things. Are they watching the budding of a new appreciation of gender identity and the rise of courts twisting their decisions to reflect the personal pronoun choices of litigants play out in legal decisions. Are they watching dinosaurs try to cling to the old ways of objective gender identity or use of pronouns and refusing to twist the language of decisions around the personal “dignity” of litigants?
Or are they watching judges who want to neither acquiesce nor offend and don’t know what the proper reaction should be, and therefore go on at silly length about their reasons for falling on one side of the other of a cultural divide, made necessary so they don’t appear to be playing woke or anti-woke jurists and so their writing isn’t incoherent nonsense gibberish laden by fanciful wording that gives readers a headaches and exposes opinions to confusion and pointless inconsistency? Oh wait, it’s not pointless. It recognizes the “individual dignity” of a litigant’s expectation that the court honor his/her/their/xir/its pronoun du jour, as in In the Interest of C.G. Continue reading
While the law, at least for the moment and somewhat theoretically, only compels a university to act when the conduct at issue is “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive,” that doesn’t mean the school cannot appreciate the delicate feelings of an extremely sensitive student.
Here are the facts. On April 1, the University of Idaho College of Law (“University” or “Idaho Law”) held a “moment of community” in response to an anti-LGBTQ+ slur left anonymously on a classroom whiteboard. Event attendees included plaintiffs Peter Perlot, Mark Miller, and Ryan Alexander, who at the time were law students and members of the Idaho Law chapter of the Christian Legal Society (“CLS”), and Professor Richard Seamon, the CLS faculty advisor. Continue reading