A few days ago, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern put out a call on twitter to academics to find out how they would teach law going forward in light of the current Supreme Court state of Affairs. He posed his inquiry in a relatively fair and neutral way.

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Aaron Sibarium took a huge risk by raising an important point in the context of a scenario so deeply emotional that the expectation of calm, reasoned consideration of his point was nearly impossible. And indeed, many were outraged and mustered their best snark challenges to the particulars for lack of grasping the concept. As the example raised was the police failure at Uvalde, this outcome was not only understandable, but wholly unsurprising. Nonetheless, the point raised was still important.

But when cops in Texas have pulled the trigger under similar circumstances, they’ve ended up in court. In at least three cases since 2014, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided against police officers who made split-second decisions to shoot armed suspects—one of whom appeared to be headed for a Texas high school. The court, which has jurisdiction over the Lone Star State, denied several officers’ requests for qualified immunity, a legal defense that protects police from civil lawsuits. Continue reading →

The backstory, in itself, is one of those peculiar tales of the times, where certain words and phrases take on magical meaning untethered from whatever is really going on. It may be bad or it may not, but it’s hard to tell from the Second Circuit’s recitation of the facts in Torcivia v. Suffolk County.

Father, who had imbibed a few, and 17-year-old daughter were having a fight over her guinea pig at one in the morning. So she called the cops. There was no claim the the father hit her, but that he was being angry and saying mean things to her. So the cops came ready to take dad down. Was the daughter afraid of being harmed? Was the father a danger? Or was something else happening here, which the police called a “domestic dispute” because it was his daughter and in the home. Continue reading →

Happy Friday, everyone! In case you’re not wrapped up in the world of pseudo-intellectual news, Jordan Peterson of “12 Rules for Life” and “Beyond Order” fame was recently banned from Twitter. His crime? The practice of “Deadnaming,” or calling trans actor Elliot Page by the name with which he was given at birth. [Ed. Note: Elliot Page used to be Ellen Page, who no longer exists, so never use that name. Thank you.]

Peterson has since embraced a philosophy of anti-wokeism that’s made him a darling of conservative media. The Daily Wire, a right-wing news site, actually signed a deal with Peterson to host a new series featuring him and host all of the Canadian professor’s content. Continue reading →

It’s entirely unsurprising that Roxane Gay writes about the plight of WNBA player Brittney Griner, even if it’s extremely unlikely that Gay’s gone anywhere near a sporting event in her life unless it involved free vegan pizza. Yet, Gay not only shows a concern for Griner, but does so in the requisite “whataboutism” of why the rest of us don’t care as much as Gay says we should.

When unspeakable tragedies occur, people often call for unity. They’ll say, “We are Boston Strong” or “Je suis Charlie” or “We are [insert wherever or whomever the unthinkable has happened to].” It’s a laudable instinct to claim solidarity with those who have suffered, to imagine we truly understand the ways we are all connected, to proclaim that what affects one of us affects all of us.

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There’s a letter. And the letter is signed with initials. And the initials belong to more than 200 congressional staffers, according to CNN, telling their “bosses,” the Democrats whom the voters elected to Congress, what they, the staffers, demand.

In a rare move, more than 200 congressional staffers have sent a letter to Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, demanding they close the deal on a climate and clean energy package and warning that failure could doom younger generations. Continue reading →

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 →