Four academics appeared as witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee conducting its impeachment hearing, three called by Democrats and one by Republicans. The three prawfs, beyond offering their normative “man on the street” factual conclusion that Trump abused his office, agreed that his misconduct was exactly the sort for which impeachment was intended.

Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard, argued that Mr. Trump’s decision to withhold a White House meeting and military assistance from Ukraine while he demanded political favors from its president was a classic impeachable abuse of power.

“The essential definition of high crimes and misdemeanors is the abuse of office,” he said. “The framers considered the office of the presidency to be a public trust.”

Unlike a certain other Harvard prawf, Feldman wasn’t part of the choir singing impeachment from the day after the election, but came to it after revelation of the MEMCOM of the July 25 telephone call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The other two, Standord’s Pam Karlan and UNC’s Michael Gerhardt agreed. Continue reading →

When Barack Obama was elected president, some said it was the end of racism. That was false, but it did put an end to one thing, the belief that a black man could not be elected president. The point wasn’t that he was elected because he was black, but that he wasn’t not elected because he was black. No longer was race a preclusive factor.

But what about gender? When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, unquestionably the most unfit, unqualified, candidate for the presidency since Andrew Jackson (and likely ever), many feminists argued that it was because she was a woman. In fairness, Clinton played the gender card, from pantsuit nation to announcing during the debates that she was the candidate for women. Unfortunately, the job was for the presidency of the United States, not the presidency of the women of the United States. Continue reading →

Former “top cop” Kamala Harris is out. For her brief and shining moment as a Democratic candidate for the presidency, she was Senator Harris, snarky, hip and a champion of all things progressive, because she spent her life fighting for reform. Or so she claimed.

“Kamala Harris has spent her career fighting for reforms in the criminal justice system and pushing the envelope to keep everyone safer by bringing fairness and accountability,” Lily Adams, a spokesperson for Harris, told me.

Others, like Lara Bazelon, disagreed.

Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.

Continue reading →

To its enormous credit, the Fifth Circuit managed to dispose of the case in a three-page opinion, which is about 173 pages below the norm since computers replaced quills. But their brevity is blunted by the likelihood that had they tried to write anything longer, the secret author of the per curiam decision would have collapsed in a tearful paroxysm. Judges hate that.

The legality of a traffic stop is examined under the two-pronged analysis in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). United States v. Brigham, 382 F.3d 500, 506 (5th Cir. 2003) (en banc). This appeal focuses solely on the first Terry prong—whether the officer’s decision to conduct a stop was justified at its inception.

Every case has to start somewhere, so when it involves a motion to suppress based upon a warrantless stop, Terry would be the natural starting point. Continue reading →

What if the New York City Council, finding a few moments in between enacting a regulation criminalizing the failure to use preferred pronouns and protecting black, but only black, employees’ hair style choices, enacted a regulation that prohibited abortion for any woman who couldn’t do 100 push-ups. And a non-uterus-challenged but physically-limited person sued for violation xir constitutional rights when denied an abortion.

An outrageous constitutional violation, most would cry, and with good cause. The case was granted certiorari and the City Council plotzed. In reaction, they repealed the offending regulation, and sent a letter off to the Court that they’d seen the error of their ways, fixed it, and there was nothing more to see here. As for the plaintiffs in the case, they offered free abortions, even though years had since passed and gestation, being what it is, made the gracious offer less than utilitarian. Continue reading →

Is it just one person, one monumentally stupid person, or is this the view of the California Bar Association?

Roseville attorney Joanna Mendoza may be winding down her law practice but she still finds herself at the heart of a legal debate.

Mendoza serves on a state bar committee charged with recommending ideas for increasing the availability of legal services to all Californians, not just those who can afford lawyers. Some of the group’s proposals so far—fee-sharing, allowing nonlawyers to own law firms, using artificial intelligence—have proven controversial. A recent public comment period on the options drew almost 2,900 responses, many of them critical.

Mendoza is passionately concerned about the lack of “access to justice” for people who are too poor to retain a lawyer, or just don’t want to spend their money on a lawyer. Continue reading →

It was only a few years ago when public defender Tina Peng publicly said what everyone knew, that she was failing her clients. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, or wasn’t a good lawyer, but that it was impossible to provide effective assistance of counsel given the numbers. Too many defendants. Too few lawyers. Not enough time to do a job beyond being a warm body standing next to an unknown person in a courtroom while they pled their life away.

One might have reasonably thought this fundamental problem had magically been resolved, given what’s been happening over the past couple of years. Public defenders have become the heroes of their own stories on social media, calling each other (but mostly themselves) badass, obsessed with using their time to respect the gender identity of defendants in lockup rather than use their three minutes to glean salient information to respond to the probable cause at arraignment. Continue reading →

Damon Young makes a pretty good argument for the revitalization of “woke,” a word that I admittedly use in a derogatory manner as reflecting people with impulse control issues and an excess of passion where a modicum of reason should be. I have to admit, he caught me off guard with his opening graf.

It was quaint, really. That feeling I had in the months after the 2016 presidential election, where I convinced myself I’d do everything possible in the next four years to prevent Donald Trump from becoming normalized.

Realizing, just a few years later, that it was “quaint,” introduced a bit of charm into what might otherwise be childish and churlish. It has nothing to do with one’s views of Trump, per se, as one can find him a vulgar, amoral ignoramus and still not “convince” oneself to dedicate the next four years of one’s life to fighting his every word, movement, “normalization.” Continue reading →

You have to give Kristen Etter credit, as she did two things of significance. The second was that she pulled it off, she went back to a conviction that happened decades before and found the smoking gun that changed everything. The first was that she sat down with Troy Mansfield and, despite there being nothing much to discuss beyond his horribly sad, but entirely credible, assertion of innocence, decided to try to help.

Troy Mansfield had barely sat down in his new lawyer’s office before his voice started cracking with emotion.

The married father of two grown sons choked back tears as he told Austin attorney Kristin Etter how he had spent two decades living with a scarlet letter for a sin he didn’t commit. He’d been cast out of homes, thrown out of his boys’ basketball games and even rejected at churches.

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When you graduate from law school you get two letters next to your name for the three years of effort and debt. Those letters are J.D., and in theory they stand for “Juris Doctor.” Sometimes, those letters stand for “Justa Dickhead.”

Submitted for your humble consideration is such a motherfucker by the name of J. Wade Smith, an attorney from Lake Charles, Louisiana, working mighty hard to make those of us who call ourselves lawyers look mighty shitty.

J. Wade has a neighbor named Elizabeth Richards. Ms. Richards either has kids or lets kids play in her yard. On November 10, two children were kicking a football in Ms. Richards’ yard. One kick sent the football “dead center” into the “designer metal fence” surrounding J. Wade’s property. Continue reading →