Much has been made of President Biden’s efforts to diversify the federal bench, whether from the race and gender perspective or based on prior position as prosecutor. The reason why nominees for federal judgeships tended to come from a certain group was fairly obvious and banal. It wasn’t that the government wanted to topload prosecutors or white shoe lawyers, but that was who had access to senators, and senators recommended judges to presidents. You didn’t think presidents knew these people personally, did you?

To the simplistic, this was going to change everything. All we need are more women judges, more judges “of color” whatever that means, but most of all, more judges who came from the ranks of public defenders. Not criminal defense lawyers, mind you, but public defenders, because they are pure and don’t do it for filthy lucre (even though they get a paycheck, but I digress). Surely a public defender will make the sort of judge that will be merciful. Continue reading →

To read the New York Post, you can’t venture out into the streets or subway of New York City without being likely to be beaten, robbed or shoved in front of a train. Of course, the Post is the right wing tabloid of the City, so that’s what it’s expected to say. Thankfully, we also have the New York Times to provide balance and thoughtfulness to the news.

Let’s take a step back. My admittedly dry account above of the newsworthiness of the new FBI data and subsequent efforts to twist it is how the story could and should have been reported by journalists. No sensationalism. No speculation. At least some context and nuance. And what we can actually determine based on the data. Continue reading →

No doubt most of you would turn to Slate’s “Care and Feeding” column if you were in need of advice for your child. Sure, the brilliant and rational Emily Yoffe no longer gives advice as Dear Prudence, but where else would a loving parent turn if they had a difficult issue? Well, perhaps SJ can help too, offering solutions that may not have occurred to Doyin Richards. It’s worth a shot, right?

Dear Care and Feeding Simple Justice, Continue reading →

The two obvious problems with astoundingly broad omnibus laws is that they’re so big that it’s essentially impossible to know everything shoved in there, and only later do people realize that the law with the cool and lofty name includes some really awful stuff that nobody knew about. The other problem is that you can love some pieces and hate others, but since they’re all part of the same huge omnibus law rather than presented as separate matters to be considered on their individual merits, it’s all or nothing.

But did you know about the $600? Continue reading →

California has been very busy fixing the world, from mandating public school curriculum to dictating how toy and children’s stores should place products on shelves. Eugene Volokh addresses the newly enacted law from a free speech perspective.

55.7. The Legislature finds and declares both of the following:

(a) Unjustified differences in similar products that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys can be more easily identified by the consumer if similar items are displayed closer to one another in one, undivided area of the retail sales floor. Continue reading →

At The Atlantic, Yascha Monk argues that the cancellation of University of Chicago geophysics prof Dorian Abbot from being the prestigious John Carlson Lecture on climate change reflects a shift in cancel culture. This time was different.

Then the campaign to cancel Abbot’s lecture began. On Twitter, some students and professors called on the university to retract its invitation. And, sure enough, MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website evaporates the moment some loud voices on social media call for a speaker’s head. Continue reading →

If it didn’t say Maureen Dowd up top, I would swear this was a column by the designated Millennial, Michelle Goldberg. It’s got that snarky tone. It’s shallow and assumptive. It conflates reason for feelings. But this is Dowd.

Ordinarily staid and silent Supreme Court justices have become whirling dervishes of late, spinning madly to rebut the idea that Americans are beginning to regard the court as a dangerous cabal of partisan hacks. Continue reading →

Some teachers asserted that remote learning during the pandemic was going swell. You can’t argue the point if that’s what they claim, but was it real or their “truth,” that education was doing what it could to accommodate the pandemic, but it sucked and wasn’t even remotely close to actual education. But then, students are back in school, and the stories told before can’t cover the reality in the classroom.

Each fall, about five students show up to Ms. Layne’s class at Sevilla Elementary School East in Phoenix lagging far behind fourth grade-level reading skills. This year, she was stunned to find nearly half of her 25 students tested at kindergarten to first-grade reading levels. Continue reading →

There are many reasons, often unstated, why the Supreme Court decides against granting certiorari to a case. But after Senate negotiations failed to produce a reform bill that included qualified immunity,* the last hope was that the Supreme Court would take up one of the cases before it to undo its own creation of a defense that had no statutory basis and  regularly produced outcomes that ran from the bizarre to the god-awful.

But in James v. Bartelt, the Court denied cert, with a dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (See page 65 of the order list). Continue reading →

What would a place like Nextdoor—the neighborhood social media app designed to bring neighbors together—look like if it had a section for clarifications, updates, retractions, and amplifications? I took a moment to suss out how such a feature would look.

Richard Stepman of Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York would really appreciate it if neighbors stopped calling his son, Richard Junior, “Little Dicky.” While the joke was funny at last week’s block party, the name calling is getting old, and both Richards would prefer it stop. Continue reading →