Audrey Sterling may not have been able to dribble or shoot, but she enjoyed the prestige and privilege of being an NBA wife, basking in the reflected glory of her husband, former player and now lead assistant coach of the Toronto Raptors, Adrian Griffin. Until she didn’t, when the couple divorced in 2015.

While Griffin’s star continued to rise as his combination of skill as a coach and ability to work with players made him as sure a bet for a head coaching position as could be, Sterling no longer was part of that world, and she was pissed. But what could she do to improve her circumstances, or at least bring her ex-husband down in jealousy and revenge? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In the mid 1970s Britain experienced a wave of bombings that some attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or related organizations. However, only after multiple appeals were a number of wrongfully convicted individuals exonerated. The miscarriages of justice were the result of coerced confessions, faulty forensics, failure to disclose various kinds of exculpatory evidence (including alibis and evidence of Ms. Ward’s mental instability), and other official misconduct. Continue reading →

The house was in a quiet neighborhood and was well priced. Roy Thorne was in the market to buy, and real estate agent Eric Brown was in the business to show. And “elderly” neighbors  across the street were in the business of keeping their eyes out for burglars.

Someone was arrested a week earlier after breaking into the house, the statement said. The neighbor thought Mr. Brown’s car, a black Hyundai Genesis, looked like a black Mercedes-Benz sedan that had been parked in the driveway at the time of the previous arrest, according to a recording of the call provided by the police.

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It’s hard to comprehend why anyone who could get the vaccine would not. That may be because I’m a lawyer, and know only what I’ve read about its efficacy even though my family and I have made the decision to be fully vaccinated. It’s hard to explain why so many people in health care have chosen not to, although I’ve been told they have a far greater fear of unknown side effects than most. Some will chalk it up to right wing ideology, but that’s inaccurate and serves only to validate the intolerance of the left.

There are an array of reasons why people decide against getting vaccinated. There are the conspiracy theory nuts and there are people who have weighed the costs and benefits and chosen against it. And there are some for whom the practical barriers remain a reason, although like blaming MAGA nuts, it’s exaggerated as a universal excuse for the marginalized cohort just as Trumpkin lunacy is exaggerated to blame the wingnuts. Continue reading →

There are some exceptionally worthwhile lessons to be learned from participating in competitive sports. One, for example, is that there are winners and losers, and if you want to be the winner, you have to work harder than the next person. Another is that no matter how hard you work, you won’t always win. Take losing as gracefully as winning, as they’re both part of the deal. These are lessons that will serve a person well in their life as well as their sport.

But if you participate in a sport that isn’t destined to land you in a million dollar contract, then you compete for the joy of the sport. Some people thrive on the stress of top-level competition and some burn out from it. Some days you’re up for the challenge and some days you just don’t have it in you. Continue reading →

Senator Bill Proxmire used to give out the Golden Fleece Award for government pissing away money on absurdly expensive, completely pointless and massively failed projects. Whether he was right or wrong in any given award, what he accomplished was making public what Congress buried in long bills that purportedly served worthy purposes and how federal agencies used their putative mandates for purposes never imagined.

Biden came into office promising “bold and transformative” initiatives. They were a bit costly, upping Senator Everett Dirksen’s “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” into the trillions. But if you want to reimagine everything, it won’t come cheap. So how did that work out? Continue reading →

Are you expecting a visit from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, or any of the other members of “The Squad” in your immediate future? Does the thought of dealing with air-headed idiots make you squirm in your seat?

Fear not, dear reader. I have taken it upon myself to create a letter you too can share with the Squad member coming to your hometown letting them know you’re not happy with their presence. There’s a bit of material here, so feel free to copy and paste at your convenience!

Dear (insert Squad member here—use their title as well, let’s be courteous!): Continue reading →

Saying what FDR would have done is a lot like saying what would Jesus have done, both because nobody knows and because it can’t be proven false since neither FDR nor Jesus is around to say otherwise. But after four years of a rogue presidency where courts were denigrated for not serving their master, where law and the Constitution were routinely ignored, either out of basic ignorance or a more Nixonian arrogance, Biden’s White House counsel and the courts had no doubt that the CDC did not have the authority to issue an eviction moratorium.

In the face of an expired moratorium, a recessed Congress, Rep. Cori Bush embarrassing the administration by sleeping on the Capital steps and a formerly-respected Harvard law professor who spent the past four years disgracing himself with absurd legalish claims, but who now manufactured a nonsensical theory to distinguish a new moratorium from the clearly illegal one worthy of Rudy Giuliani’s and the Krakens, Biden and the White House shut their eyes tight and dove off the ledge. Continue reading →

As progressives continue to lament the likelihood that the Supreme Court will not serve their cause of reinventing the Constitution via lawfare to accomplish what they have proven unable to do because Congress is paralyzed and people in America don’t want to live in their woke Utopia, a new front has opened on the Great Awokening.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution took effect 50 years ago this summer, extending the right to vote to all Americans age 18 and older. It was the fourth amendment in the span of a decade, three of which expanded voting rights — a burst of democratic reform nearly unequaled in the nation’s history. Continue reading →

When last surveyed, the results were pretty clear. Hispanics didn’t care to be called Latinx.

More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

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