With the Supreme Court’s grant of cert in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, speculation has run rampant that the Court is about to reverse or significantly undermine its decisions in Roe and Casey. Whether this will happen, and should it happen will place the Court in the very institutional jeopardy that Chief Justice Roberts has gone to enormous lengths to avoid, remains to be seen.

I’m disinclined to join in the speculation, not because it isn’t possible (perhaps even likely) that the Court will do damage to the right to an abortion, but because there is nothing to be done to change it if it’s in the offing, and because there will eventually be a decision that will put the speculation to rest. I will wait and see. Why waste good outrage before you have to? Continue reading →

Here’s the scheme. Open up a business with some sort of quasi-official name, like United States Private Vaults, and install a big, very secure looking vault just like one would find in an old bank. Line the walls with numbered boxes with keys you can hand out to customers with the promise that they could put their valuable belongings into the box and never have to worry that they’ll be stolen should a burglar break into their house. Hand them a key and tell them no one else will have that key and the ability to open that box.

Then wait until the boxes are filled and then…go through the boxes and take what you want. It’s not like they can prove what was in the boxes. It’s not like they can prove what isn’t there after you’ve taken what you want. Brilliant, right? Except I can’t take credit for the scheme, because the government beat me to it. Continue reading →

If you’re reading this post, you probably love words. If you’re reading this and involved in the legal profession in any fashion, you probably love swear words. Lawyers, particularly criminal defense and family lawyers, use swear words more often than they would likely admit.

That’s why the book “Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter, Then, Now and Forever” by John McWhorter is such an interesting read. If we’re going to use these words, it would do us well to learn something about them. And who better to teach us than a guy like McWhorter, a linguist and English professor at Columbia University. Continue reading →

At the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan opens her fairly nuanced op-ed with a curious point.

All this happened after America watched the cellphone video of the extinguishing of the life of George Floyd one year ago, by an officer, Derek Chauvin, who posed through much of the tape with his hand on his thigh, the picture of brute nonchalance.

An incident so horrifying can and will stop America in its tracks, causing nationwide convulsion—protests, riots, burning of businesses. Continue reading →

Before the video was revealed, the story was simple and benign. Ronald Greene died in a car crash following his flight from police. Nothing to see here. Then there was video.

To be clear, fleeing from police is neither a good nor acceptable thing to do, even if some would argue that it’s understandable given the perception that the police will treat a black motorist disrespectfully at best or violently at worst. Nobody wants to be pulled over and killed, and regardless of the unlikelihood of that outcome, that is the prevailing perception in the current climate. Continue reading →

Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has become quite a lightning rod since he’s undertaken to fight what he contends is the neo-racism of critical race theory. Some see him as a racial bomb thrower, while others see him as doing the “dirty work” of saying what few would say given the backlash. That’s not to say that he’s not a serious person presenting serious thought. Indeed, he appeared with Mark Lamont Hill as well as Tucker Carlson.

“What do you like about being White?” I asked this question to anti- Critical Race Theory advocate Christopher Rufo. He stated that Whiteness was always only painted as negative, so I asked him to offer something different. Peep his response: pic.twitter.com/H5IkAyv2Co

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) May 26, 2021

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The Washington Post broke the story, but since WaPo lives behind its paywall, it gets no link love. New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has impaneled a special grand jury, as distinguished from the ordinary grand jury panels which deal with ordinary cases, directed specifically on something to do with Trump.

What that may be remains unclear, but the fact that Cy chose to announce that he was impaneling a grand jury, as opposed to announcing that a grand jury returned an indictment against, well, some entity, is a curious play. It comes on top of NY’s intrepid press-conference holder, Letitia James’ announcement that her office will be working with Cy’s office. Continue reading →

There is a real and significant difference between the harm done by criminals and the harm done by police. The former are called “criminals” because they commit crimes, engage in wrongful conduct and do harm. The latter are theoretically our protectors, authorized by law, armed by our choice, to prevent criminals from doing harm. Our expectations, our demands, are different and they should be. There is no comparison.

But that doesn’t meant that the harm done by criminals is neither harm nor devastating.

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Not that I haven’t fallen into this trap before. Like others, I blindly jumped on the bandwagon when the UVA rape case went public in Rolling Stone and I bit. It was a lie and I fell for it because I chose to fall for it. Not my proudest moment. Confirmation bias is a powerful drug, particularly when the risk of questioning, even taking a “wait and see” approach, is tantamount to being an apologist for the other team.

But the story out of Boise State was just the sort of thing that people believed would happen when academic ideologues pushed critical race theory, and so when the story broke, it proved their point and they grabbed it. Continue reading →

My tolerance for twitter arguments is very limited, as they tend to swiftly devolve into either ad hominem, idiocy or dive down rabbit holes. That latter is what happened in a thread I read recently involving Wesley Lowery, Ben Smith and David Menschel, which I would link in all its glory but much of it seems to have vanished. By much of it, I mean Lowery’s twits, which were the more interesting ones.

Lowery remains of the view that objectivity in reporting is a myth, and that there is no such thing as an objective report. On that, he may be generally right, as we all carry biases and they are reflected in everything from our choice of what to write about to our choice of adjectives. But the next leg of his argument is where he goes astray. Because no one is objective, journalists should reject the notion of objective reporting, admit to their biases and indulge them. Or to put it in clearer context, if a reporter can’t be perfectly objective, then why even try to be objective at all? Continue reading →