For a while now, Eugene Volokh has been pushing for transparency in federal court proceedings, following his law review article, The Law of Pseudonymous Litigation. As Eugene recognizes, the strong presumption toward transparency means something very different in the age of Google than it did when identities of litigants were largely unknown in the past.

For many litigants these days, one of the most important questions is: Can I keep my name,
and its connection to the case and its facts, off the Internet? In the past, of course, some litigants wanted to keep their names out of the newspapers, and some still do. But the Internet, and the availability of court records on the Internet, has sharply magnified this concern.

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It was a carefully crafted FOIA request, limited in scope and entirely within the requirements of law.

Professor Johnson submitted a straightforward FOIA request on October 27 for the emails of the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon. The request was limited to emails she exchanged with 14 people and an advocacy group, Know Your IX.

The request was directed to Lhamon, the bureaucrat-activist who crafted the Title IX Dear Colleague Letter of 2014 that launched a thousand lawsuits and destroyed even more lives with its grossly subconstitutional process designed to expel male students, whether guilty or not, from colleges and universities lest any accuser be doubted. Continue reading →

If nobody reported on a Proud Boy rally, would that have been better? Like it or not, it’s news, and Jonathan Choe, a reporter for ABC affiliate KOMO in Seattle reported. For his efforts, he was fired. As it turned out, he reported “wrong.”

Let me start off by saying I am not a neo-Nazi, fascist, or white supremacist. Those are just some of the names I have been called over the past few days for my recent coverage of a protest in Olympia, WA. It was advertised as a “rally for America.”

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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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