While I’ve chronicled the ACLU’s very deliberate fall from grace, as it persists in reminding us about its defense of Skokie Nazis that happened a mere 44 years ago, I didn’t follow the defamation trial of Johnny Depp (or “Derp,” as a very serious Stanford law professor calls him) and Amber Heard over an op-ed published in the Washington Post.

It wasn’t until the jury found Heard liable and awarded compensatory and punitive damages that this case, one which surprised many lawyers by making it past a motion to dismiss for failing to suffice to establish defamatory statements, became interesting. Continue reading →

Dr. SJ and I were supposed to go to Paris at the end of March 2020. Things didn’t work out then, something about a pandemic. But we’re off today, Florence, Rome and Paris, for a bit. See you when we return. If we return.

Until then, please behave and be kind to each other.

Writing for the majority of six in Shinn v. Ramirez, Justice Clarence Thomas echoed a position expressed by Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist before him. Innocence is not a reason not to execute a human being.

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

Continue reading →

When C.J. Ciaramella wrote about the story of Justyna and Matt Kozbial’s building being seized for forfeiture by Highland Park, Michigan, it evoked a curious reaction. It wasn’t just the outrage about the ordinary scheme of civil in rem forfeiture, the taking of “things” the government claims was used in or derived from crime. That’s been going on for the past decade or so, even though in rem forfeiture has been going since the ’80s with few outside of the criminal defense bar caring.

As in rem forfeiture spread from putative drug dealers and mobsters to ordinary folk, people began to see why it was such a bad idea, a wrong-headed solution when it only affected people society disfavored. When it touched the lives of people who were sympathetic, the epiphany happened. Better late than never, right? Continue reading →

Ben Domenech made a joke on the twitters after the employees of Vox, a media outlet with what some might call a different political orientation than the Federalist, where Domench is in charge, unionized.

FYI @fdrlst first one of you tries to unionize I swear I’ll send you back to the salt mine.

The National Labor Relations Board ALJ found this to be an unfair labor practice, holding that a threat against unionization framed as a joke was still a threat. It was obviously a joke and a motivated administrative determination by Judge Chu, who demonstrated a peculiar sensitivity to the feelings of potential union members. Continue reading →

Unwritten rules? There is no law that says you can’t wear a hat indoors, and yet it’s considered bad form. Who decided this? Why? Why should anyone today follow this arcane etiquette when they can just do whatever they please. Power to the people!

But consider the disastrous effects when citizens grow hostile to society’s unwritten rules. Comedians are attacked onstage for telling jokes. Supreme Court decisions are leaked in an apparent effort to pressure justices to either change their vote or hold firm on their position. Regular citizens are mocked and pilloried for their decision to continue to wear masks after the COVID-19 threat has largely subsided. Continue reading →

Two phenomena have made understanding of the law, and discussion about the law, very difficult over the past decade. The first involves words which are untethered from discrete definitions such that they encompass vague senses of what they mean, maintaining their negative connotations while becoming sufficiently meaningless to encompass whatever a person chooses to impute into the word. “Rape” is the foremost example of this phenomenon.

The second is the manufacture of words and phrases that never before existed, have no cognizable definition, but create the impression of a meaningful word or concept when it provides no parameters, no hard limits, to what it means. Examples of this range from “systemic racism” on the left to “critical race theory” on the right, and “woke” on both sides. Continue reading →

Mud Lick was hotter than a sinner’s ass in church. Sheriff Roy’s AC was on the fritz.

This would not stand.

Sheriff Roy believed in certain fundamental truths he liked to think were cornerstones of his character. Among these were truth, justice, the rule of law and the God Given Right to set the internal temperature of one’s residence to one’s personal tastes. Continue reading →

It was a bold move, writing for the “dark web” publication, Quillette, when you’re a professor at a school like Princeton at a time when your campus is in upheaval following George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests, open letters and “anti-racist” demands. But tenured classics prof Joshua Katz did it anyway.

In Princeton, New Jersey, on July 4th, 2020, just two hours after my family and I sat around the festive table and read the Declaration aloud in celebration, a group of signatories now in the hundreds published a “Faculty Letter” to the president and other senior administrators at Princeton University. Continue reading →

In the wake of the baby formula shortage, former founding editor of Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers, after arguing against her feelings and needs being secondary to her baby’s, indulges in fantasy.

This is misogyny, no matter where it comes from. No one demands that fathers damage their bodies to demonstrate decent parenting.

If we could imagine a world where men had to breastfeed their babies — learning how to do it, enduring the frustration of the baby not latching on and the pain of chapped and inflamed breasts and figuring out how to continue to do it despite long hours at work, little support, nowhere to pump and not enough sleep — the formula shortage there would not be so dire. In that alternative reality, it’s hard to imagine that the industry in the United States would be dominated by just a few companies. Instead, I expect that we’d see a multitude of formula start-ups blossoming in Silicon Valley. Formula would not be stigmatized because it’s a choice men would want to have available to them.

Continue reading →