There may be some reason beyond the sphere of my knowledge, but I’ve never understood what’s so hard about turning off the motor of a vehicle if you aren’t imminently planning to drive away. And knowing that idling trucks spew some ugly, smelly fumes into the air that some of us like to breath, I’m not particularly sympathetic. When NYC passed an ordinance prohibiting trucks from idling for more than three minutes, it seemed like a beneficial law, reducing air pollution and putting no serious burden on the driver.

But enforcing such a law is another matter.

A white-paneled truck sat motionless and idling in Midtown on a recent morning, its driver wrapped up in his phone and oblivious to what was happening outside… Continue reading →

We’ve been down this road before. Many times. Too many times. We’ve been down it about the words that became untethered from well-established and meaningful definitions like “rape”  or “violence.” We’ve been down it with cool new phrases that were birthed by the left, seized upon by others, then denied by the left, like “social justice warrior” and “woke.” And we’ve gone down it again with characterizations of identitarianism as “critical race theory,” and we’re there again with “cancel culture.”

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A husband doesn’t control his wife. A man doesn’t control a woman. She is a free, independent human being, capable of, and entitled to, her own ideas, expressions and actions. But when your husband happens to be a Supreme Court justice, particularly one whose views tend toward outlier, what the hell were you thinking?

The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy. Continue reading →

There are three things that can be reliably said about the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. First, she survived it. Second, she handled herself well, if imperfectly, in the face of ridiculous, ignorant and offensive attacks from some Republican senators. Third, she will be confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Is that not enough? Continue reading →

We’re finishing out my unofficial Con Artist History Month with a name with which many of you won’t be familiar, and a bad dude at that. That’s one thing that we tend to forget about con men—they do bad things. Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein sold drugs and illegal liquor. “Titanic” Thompson killed several men who welched on bets with him.

And Kerry Ketchum, by his own admissions in court, was a con man. He swindled so many people out of their money and possessions by the time we start our story in 1987 Ketchum (Yes that is his real name) is on the lam with arrest warrants in multiple states. Continue reading →

Whether one agrees with Aaron Sibarium that the law has been lost, there has been little doubt in my mind that the ABA was captured by legal academics and their progressive lawyer allies when it came up with Model Rule 8.4(g). I’ve made that pretty clear over the past few years.

And yet some states, like Pennsylvania, adopted their variation on the theme of Rule 8.4(g) despite the fact that it’s a flagrant effort to create a lawyer speech code to put one’s license to practice law in jeopardy for holding the wrong views, for expressing the wrong ideas. Continue reading →

If the prosecutor informed you that your client was guilty, would you shrug and respond, “Well, if you say so, then that must be true”? What if he said he had “no doubt”? Would you then advise your client to cop a plea, because if the prosecutor had “no doubt,” surely that meant he was guilty, right? No, not right. Not a chance.

Is it any different when the target is someone despicable?

One of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable, according to a copy of his resignation letter.

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There is a schism between the understanding of lawyers engaged in the prosecution and defense of criminal charges and the public in general that is easily exploited by dishonest demagogues on an issue like the appropriate sentence for possession of child pornography. Even very conservative, very prosecutorial, Andy McCarthy knows it’s bullshit, and risked his right wing cred to say so out loud.

No, this isn’t a debate, not because reasonable minds can’t differ, but because those who believe there’s something here to argue are either using it to demagogue (Hawley and Cruz, representing their respective Yale and Harvard law school’s finest) or are so lacking in the understanding of our legal system that they lack the capacity to understand why it’s complete crap. And there’s little point in trying to explain, as if it’s possible to do so to people wholly lacking the foundation to understand, things to people who don’t want to understand. So, believe whatever you want. You can’t be helped and change nothing. Continue reading →

Senator Josh Hawley has a beef with Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson’s prior experience when it comes to defendants convicted of child pornography, ranging from her time in law school to working as a federal appellate defender,* to her time as a District Judge and her work with the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

For starters, as far as I know, there has only been one bona fide criminal defense lawyer on SCOTUS, and that was the Honorable Thurgood Marshall.** The fact is that trench lawyers rarely make it to the appellate circuit level, let alone SCOTUS. Continue reading →

After Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez took to the twitters to first destroy Jon Kaiman’s career with frivolous accusations, and later twist Kobe Bryant’s death into an excuse to smear the beloved basketball star, her editors decided that she just might be too batshit crazy biased to be trusted to report on stories where she had already burned her credibility, proven her flagrant prejudice and embarassed the paper.

They took her off the sexual-assault story beat, so she sued for sex and victim discrimination because there was no cause of action to sue her employer for removing biased and untrustworthy reporters. In response, WaPo moved to dismiss under the District of Columbia anti-SLAPP law. Continue reading →