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.

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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%.

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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 →

Much as I appreciate Columbia University professor turned New York Times columnist John McWhorter’s insights on culture war issues, he remains a linguist by profession. Years ago, he contended that ebonics, given the more formal title of African American Vernacular English, was a legitimate language.

As sexy as this issue was to a linguist, it was unpersuasive bordering on counterproductive to regular folk, including black folk, who still thought students, including black students, would do better learning boring, old standard English. The question wasn’t whether slang existed or people used it. Obviously, it did and they did. The question was whether that was sufficient for linguists to declare it “official,” turning street talk into the stuff of textbooks. Continue reading →

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth Tuesday, when progressive and leftist campaigns suffered losses in election races around the country, top Democratic strategists met Wednesday and Thursday to discuss how the party would regroup for the 2022 midterms.

“I don’t understand why we didn’t handily win Virginia,” one strategist sulked. “We did everything right! We told the concerned parents they were crazy racists who bought into conspiracy theories Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson peddle nightly!” Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal broke the story, that the Department of Justice was “in talks” to provide compensation to families that were separated at the border.

The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.

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A relatively new phenomenon has developed with Supreme Court Justices writing dissentals when cert is denied. For the most part, lawyers, pundits and the public kinda dig them, as they give us insight into what the justice’s views will be if and when the issue finally gets the nod for a merits ruling. As much as people hate the “shadow docket,” few make a stink about this aspect of it.

But an even more problematic aspect of the court’s shadow docket has received scant attention. These are opinions being issued by justices when the Supreme Court rejects an appeal of a case from a lower court — what are called “cert denials,” or denial of petitions for certiorari.

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Jury selection for the murder trial of the three defendants charged with the murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery did not go smoothly. Ultimately, only one black person was selected to be a juror in a county where more than 25% of the population is black.

After a grueling process that lasted two and a half weeks, a jury was selected on Wednesday in the trial of the three white men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased through a suburban Georgia neighborhood before being fatally shot by one of his pursuers in February 2020. Continue reading →

Tom Cotton, the Gray Lady’s riot-act-reading bête noire, is back with an op-ed (but at NRO this time) in support of qualified immunity – the well-known judicial doctrine that protects state employees from being sued under a federal statute, 42 USC § 1983, when they violate someone’s rights. Let’s take a dive.

Qualified immunity is essential to effective and diligent policing. It shields good police officers from bankruptcy while still subjecting individual bad actors to personal financial repercussions.

No, QI doesn’t “shield police officers from bankruptcy.” Police officers in just about any jurisdiction in America are indemnified by their employers, meaning they don’t have to pay a cent even if they’re successfully sued for things they did on the job. All QI does is stop a certain kind of federal suit – which is already financially harmless to cops – from getting to the point where the injured party could recover at all for the harm done to them. Continue reading →