Eugene Volokh writes about the tentative ruling in the action by former-rep Katie Hill against the Daily Mail and Red State for publishing the nude pics of her. When it happened, Hill was simultaneously the victim of revenge porn and a woman in power taking power asymmetry advantage of her subordinate. Darn those conflicting demands, not that it had any impact on those who would capitalize on the matter to push their own agenda.

Hill could have stayed and fought. Instead, she quit and sued. She chose poorly. Continue reading →

It was only last November that third-term New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was a hero, winning an Emmy for his daily television show, publishing a book about how he masterfully managed the pandemic. delightfully called “leadership lessons.” Andy could not be flying higher, and somewhere, Mario was smiling that his smarter son was doing well.

And here we are, mere months later, with his own team demanding his resignation. Continue reading →

My old pal, BMAZ, tried to infuse a bit of perspective into the extremely hyperfocused obsessive parsing of the prosecutions stemming from the January 6th insurrection.

People in our comments are out of their minds. The entire matter is 65 days old. And y’all are whining about the hanging rope not being strung up yet. All the minute by minute microanalysis from news reports and release pleadings is NOT evidence. The last big conspiracy case I was involved in had somewhere near 100+ defendants. It took the govt nearly somewhere around two years to bring it in. Continue reading →

I keep a notebook with me during the week. If a thought strikes me as worth writing down, I do it as soon as it comes to me (with reasonable safety precautions taken, of course).

These may seem deep, asinine, or just vanilla level HuffPo takes. You decide.

Everyone says money can’t buy happiness, but having money makes it easier to not worry about money. Continue reading →

It’s not the first time this happened. And it’s not the first time this happened at a good law school. It happened in 1997 at the University of Texas when prawf Lino Graglia argued that black and Mexican law students weren’t competitive with white students. It caused outrage, but ended with a defense of his academic freedom to say so, with the ACLU behind him.

Then there was Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, who began by raising the controversial if correct contention bourgeois values were beneficial, who then followed it up by claiming black students were rarely in the top half of the class. That cost her a job.

Now Georgetown law prof Sandra Sellers on a recorded Zoom call with David Batson said it. Continue reading →

As the podcast has been taken down, I can’t listen to it (even if I were inclined to) to determine whether it was as bad (read “traumatic”) as claimed. In its place is the apologia.

This is Dr Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network.

The podcast on structural racism based on the discussion between Dr Ed Livingston and Dr Mitch Katz has been withdrawn. Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA. Racism and structural racism exist in the U.S. and in healthcare. After careful consideration, I determined that the harms caused by the podcast outweighed any reason for the podcast to remain available on the JAMA Network. I once again apologize for the harms caused by this podcast and the tweet about the podcast. We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.

Continue reading →

The Supreme Court denied cert in a particularly bad decision by the Sixth Circuit, granting qualified immunity to Cleveland cops who arrested, tackled and punched Shase Howse on the porch of his home.

One summer night in 2016, Howse was walking home from a convenience store. Along the way, Howse says an unidentified Cleveland Police officer approached and asked whether he had any weapons. Howse said no. The John Doe officer then patted him down and searched his pockets. After finding no contraband, the officer told Howse that he could leave.

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Rhode Island’s junior senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, was a United States Attorney and state attorney general, so it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s got a modest functional knowledge of separation of powers. That means he’s not doing stuff because he doesn’t know better, but because it’s deliberately designed to undermine our constitutional structure.

There was the golden oldie, the five-senator amicus brief to the Supreme Court in NYS Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. City of New York, where they “warned” the Court at the conclusion to do as they demanded or else. Continue reading →

That snarkiest of justices, John Roberts, called The Brethren “advice columnists” in his first and only solo dissent in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski. The 8-1 opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that a claim for nominal damages was sufficient to keep the case and controversy alive even after the defendant pulled the plug on the rules at issue.

 “Plaintiff used contentious religious language that, when directed to a crowd, has a tendency to incite hostility,” the college’s lawyers wrote.

But the college soon abandoned its defense of its speech code. Its revised policy, which allowed students to speak anywhere on campus, made the case moot, its lawyers argued in court.

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On the one hand, it’s ironic that the guy who was given the opportunity to beat back the Tara Reade accusations would deny that opportunity to male students, who are powerless in the face of their University Title IX Administrators’ cavalier callousness. There’s also the sexual harassment accusations against Andy Cuomo, but nobody likes him today anyway, so the hypocrisy of his defending himself can be dismissed. Hey, intellectual consistency is the hobgoblin of unwoke minds. If only nonsensical excuses could be monetized, the woke would be RICH!!!

But on the other other, this comes as no surprise. Biden said he would undo the minimal due process protections imposed by the DeVos Department of Education rules as a candidate, so his announcing his plan to do so as president is exactly what was expected. The order contains all the benign words expected in an Executive Order, to “go good things and stop bad things.” And that’s all Joe has to say about it for now. Continue reading →