There were at least two distinct problems faced by Georgia Gwinnett College student Chike Uzuegbunam, although he did everything he could to address the first, the Orwellian requirement to obtain permission to speak freely at a specific, tiny, spot on campus where free speech was allowed.

Mr. Uzuegbunam had tried to comply with the rules at his school, Georgia Gwinnett College, a public institution in Lawrenceville, Ga., that sprawls over 260 acres. The college had designated two small patches of concrete as “free speech expression areas.”

The free speech zones were available, moreover, only on weekdays and only for four hours on most days and two on Fridays. Students could reserve them once every 30 days.

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It’s hard for young people these days. Whether it’s harder than it was for young people of past generations is an unhelpful discussion; they live now, and comparisons do little to address the problems they face now. But when I saw that 25% of people aged 18 to 24 had seriously contemplated suicide in the past 30 days, I was shocked.

Sure, dumping COVID-19 atop a future where the promises made of a decent future was understandably depressing, but suicidal ideation is a huge step past “the blues” into mental illness. The reasons for this are no doubt complex, and there are a great many factors that produced this situation. This made me wonder why The Atlantic published lawyer cum social activist Jill Filipovic’s identification of what’s to blame for such a bleak outlook on life. Continue reading →

When I need my hair cut, I go to my local barber shop. My barber, Carol, is a lovely person and decent barber. She has better and worse days, but either way, my hair gets cut. She knows how I like my hair cut, and she doesn’t charge enough, so I always give her a generous tip. She doesn’t discriminate, and is more than happy to cut women’s hair for $14 too, but I can’t remember ever seeing a woman in her shop waiting her turn for a haircut.

In the back corner of her shop is a sink, one of those sinks with a cut out in the front to place the back of your neck so someone can wash you hair. I’ve never seen anyone use the sink. I’ve never seen anyone get their hair washed at the barber shop. I wash my hair before getting it cut. Carol doesn’t need to cut some guy’s dirty hair. Gross. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Guy Hamilton-Smith.

The last time I read something that made me feel quite this flavor of incandescent was a decade ago, in law school — it was Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. In fact, as I recall, I had to stop reading it before I finished I was so enraged, and the only thing that I could do to salve my anger was to comfort myself with the knowledge that it was, in fact, a dissent.

I’d been thinking about the idea for some time of doing this — finding someplace where I can write something in between long-form articles like law review articles or extremely short-form things like tweets. So, in a way, I’m grateful to USA Today and Josh Salman for giving me the kick I needed. But I am also very angry. Angery, even. Continue reading →

His unfortunate first name notwithstanding, there is probably no one who checks more right boxes for the Democratic Socialists of America than Adolph Reed, and still they took away his rose.

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.

Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.

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Phil Ochs was scathing in his attack on what was then known as “Limousine Liberals,” the ones who gave money and held parties for the “right” causes in their Park Avenue apartments or Hamptons oceanfront home. They said the right words, voted for the right people and gushed in their support of the downtrodden, as long as they stayed a safe distance away. It later produced an acronym, NIMBY, to express the phenomenon, not in my back yard.

Yet, in one of the most progressive areas of one of the progressive cities run by one of the self-proclaimed most progressive mayors, the uber progressive people of the Upper West Side of Manhattan don’t let history or their claimed values concern them. The homeless have infested their streets and when it’s about their children walking to some private academy through the homeless, when they have to step over them to get to Whole Foods, the life they worked so hard to achieve is threatened and they’re not going to take it. Continue reading →

Happy Friday, everyone! I decided this week we’re going to make a bit of a departure from the usual material here, so today we’re going to discuss a movie: “Hudson Hawk,” the 1990s ensemble action/comedy film starring Bruce Willis.

I’m not going to even attempt to sell you on the strengths of this movie, because there are none. In fact, held against the scope of Bruce Willis’s works, “Hudson Hawk” might be the worst Bruce Willis film ever. Every great artist has an occasional flub, and in the case of “Hudson Hawk,” the flub is so spectacular you absolutely must take a couple of hours out of this weekend and view it. Continue reading →

When my son was fencing in high school, most of the people he trained with were Asian. While the kids practiced, the parents talked. One of the benefits of being a smart student and top fencer was being recruited to good schools, and yet the mother of one fencer whose son was brilliant, hard-working, a great fencer and, on top of everything else, one of the nicest kids I ever met,* remonstrated.

Her: What are the chances he’ll get in, an Asian science nerd?

Me: About the same as science nerd Jewish kid from Long Island.

She wanted her son to go to Yale. I wanted mine to go to MIT. Mine got in. Hers did not (though he did very well, nonetheless). Yale discriminates. We knew it then, and the Department of Justice says so now. Continue reading →

No doubt he means well. They always mean well when they passionately push for righteousness, even if this time it comes from the college president of the University of Southern Maine, located in the other Portland. It’s not a well-known school. It’s not highly rated. But if Glenn Cummings has anything to say about it, it will be in violation of the law.

The University of Southern Maine has asked all members of the community to sign a “Black Lives Matter Statement and Antiracism Pledge.” The pledge cites Ibram Kendi, who popularized the concept of “antiracism.” Continue reading →

For decades, the fight on the side of criminal defense lawyers has been to break the public and judicial mindset that cops don’t lie.

Why would he lie? He doesn’t know the defendant and has no reason to harbor any personal animosity toward him. Why would he lie about him?

This was the common refrain from judges as you argued that the officer’s testimony was false, at least about a critical fact such as whether the defendant consented to a search or admitted an element of a crime or the “poignant” smell of marijuana emanated from the car. There was no video. There was no recording. It was a cop’s word against a defendant’s. Why would the cop lie? Continue reading →