Some kids are smarter than others. Some kids work harder to learn than others. Some kids have the benefit of parents who read to them, make them study, help them to learn and instill in their children the value of education and knowledge. And schools have long used a grading system to distinguish between those who achieve competence, those who achieve mastery and those who don’t. The former rise to the top of their class. The latter become judges find other ways to fulfill their dreams.

Is that fair to the kids who fail? Continue reading →

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has been fairly interesting for lawyers, particularly given the decision to put the defendant on the stand given that the trial had been going quite well for the defense and there is nothing more risky than having a defendant testify. No matter how well prepped, how sincere, how innocent (or guilty), it’s a crap shoot. One never knows what will come out of a defendant’s mouth under the stress of courtroom testimony. Even the best defendant can implode on the stand.

But the notion of a public trial includes not only the defendant’s interest in not being railroaded behind closed doors, but that the public has faith in the legal system reaching a fair verdict by hearing with its own ears, seeing with its own eyes, the testimony proffered, the arguments made, the instructions given, so that the public understands how a verdict was reached. How’s that going? Continue reading →

When you stick a needle in your eye, the immediate need is to stop the blood and eyeball goo from gushing out.* But once you’ve stopped the bleeding, you need to give some thought to not sticking a needle in your eye anymore. The problem isn’t that needles are sharp, or needles can pierce eyes, or eyes are filled with goo. The problem is that you stuck a needle in your eye.

Rikers Island is an eyeball after the needle’s been stuck in it. Former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman recounts the goo. Continue reading →

Most of us drive on roads and over bridges, regardless of whether we’re right, left or somewhere in between. We ride on subways and trains. We fly on airplanes. We purchase products manufactured elsewhere that magically turn up at our local store or at our door. Most of us, regardless of our race, gender, religion or ethnicity, need functional infrastructure for our world to happen, and a huge piece of that infrastructure involves transportation.

So what does our Secretary of Transportation have to say about it? Continue reading →

If anything is a sign of the times, it’s that the announcement by Pano Kanelos, the putative founding president, of a new university was made on Bari Weiss’ substack.

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows. Continue reading →

Tasers are one of those weapons with the perpetually unhelpful good news/bad news outcome. Sure, the officer didn’t draw his handgun and put a bullet into the guy’s center mass, which is never good news. But cops often treat Tasers, because they won’t necessarily kill, so casually that they are used when force isn’t justified, often for convenience rather than necessity. And then there’s the problem that sometimes they do kill, even as Axon, formerly known as Taser International until they had to change their name to shed the taint of early Taser abuse, blames it on contrived causes that aren’t its fault.

Two Wilson, Oklahoma, officers were convicted of second degree murder for tasering a guy to death. His crime was resisting their commands to let them arrest him after running around naked in the street. Continue reading →

It’s not just the hubris of believing that because you’re a cop, whatever you do is acceptable no matter how unlawful, vicious or downright stupid, but that the non-cop world ought to somehow know that you’re a cop and just take it.

But as the “Good Guy Curve” makes clear, if some random criminal fires a round at Jaleel Stallings, and Jaleel Stallings, being a good guy, defends himself by returning fire, it’s not a crime. Even if it turns out that the initial shooter in an unmarked van has a shield in his pocket. Even if he’s a cop. It was five days after George Floyd was killed, and an unmarked white van of cops were told to go out and “fuck ’em up.” So they did. Continue reading →

The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a national mental health emergency.

This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and represents an acceleration of trends observed prior to 2020. Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10-24.

Continue reading →

There were five propositions on the back of the ballot in New York. If you didn’t know about them, you might not have turned the ballot over and voted. Apparently 11% of voters didn’t, although it’s unclear whether they didn’t know or chose not to vote. Two of the propositions related to issues that have generated extreme outrage elsewhere, in the red sort of states where some focus their cries of voter suppression, like Georgia and Florida. As New York is safely blue (except when it isn’t, as was learned in Nassau County), few seemed to take notice.

For months Democrats have been arguing that it’s too hard to get a ballot in America, so Congress must step in to keep the electorate from being suppressed. New Yorkers apparently don’t agree, since they soundly rejected two big ideas that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation via their other voting bill, H.R.1. The first is same-day voter registration. New York’s constitution says updates to the voter rolls “shall be completed at least ten days before each election.” A ballot measure to delete that provision failed, as of the latest numbers, 58% to 42%.

Continue reading →

My old pal Carolyn Elefant is the guru of solo practice. She wrote an excellent book on the issue, Solo by Choice, and has been a stalwart of the blawgosphere at My Shingle. A decade ago, after law imploded following the 2007-08 recession that turned law school into death valley, and simultaneously gave us a bunch of lawyers, academics and marketeers who sought to take advantage of this “new” thing, the internet, to reinvent the practice of law, Carolyn found her niche arguing that life didn’t end when biglaw didn’t make a job offer, but that there was a future, a good future, in starting one’s own practice and hanging out a shingle. Get it? Continue reading →