What would Jesus say? Maybe Harvard Constitutional Law prof Laurence Tribe will tell us some day, but for the moment, he’s channeling his inner Hamilton which, miraculously, leads him to the place he so desperately wants to be. Yes, the same Larry Tribe who disclosed client confidences and then lied to cover it up. Not that the rumors of his pending liaison with Louise Mensch have produced physical evidence of any love child. Yet.

This time, Tribe has managed to get an op-ed in the Washington Post, a perk of being a Harvard lawprof, informing the groundlings that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t want Kavanaugh’s nomination to go forward. I didn’t even realize they knew who Brett Kavanaugh was, but then, I don’t teach con law at Harvard either.

The framers built the Constitution on the premise that men aren’t angels, and they did not trust a president’s nominees to the Supreme Court to be impartial in determining whether he should stay in office. At the Constitutional Convention, Virginia’s George Mason thought judges “surely” ought not preside over the impeachment trials of presidents to whom they owed their jobs; Connecticut’s Roger Sherman agreed. So the framers came up with a solution: They assigned the impeachment power to the House and the power to try impeachments to the Senate.

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Derek Daly uttered a racist slur in the 1980s.

In a story published Wednesday night, WISH-TV said Daly, a freelance racing analyst, had confirmed he was the source of the slur in an anecdote Lamey shared from 33 years ago, leading the station to dissolve its 17-year relationship with Daly.

For the record, there is no contextual defense to Daly’s using the “n-word” back then. It was just as unacceptable then as now. Why it took so long for this to happen is another question, but that Derek Daly said it, and should never have said it, is beyond question.

But what of his son, Conor? Continue reading →

Is it sexist to see a common thread among third-wave feminists in that they feel a desire to scold others? Even when they compliment someone, they have to scold. And so Jill Filipovic, who has a permanent seat on the Feminist Rules Committee, can’t quite bring herself to show appreciation toward Stormy Daniels without Gertruding her disapproval.

Let’s take a moment for Stormy Daniels.

How this sentence got past the NY Times editors is beyond me. Take a moment to . . . think about, express appreciation to, condemn, what? Four paragraphs later, Filipovic gets to her moment for Stormy.

Which is why there is so much power in the fact that Ms. Daniels does not believe her job or her involvement with Mr. Trump or the payoff is her shame to carry. She wants him held accountable, and the justice system is actually stepping in. She is refusing to slink away, despite being paid to do exactly that in a pattern we’ve seen too many times from influential men seeking to maintain their dominance and avoid responsibility.

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At Chronicle of Higher Ed, a child-prof explains his purpose.

I love giving A’s to students, maybe even more than they love receiving them. In my religion courses over the years, I’ve acquired a reputation as an “easy” teacher, and I love that, too.

In this age of grade inflation, student entitlements, skyrocketing tuitions, and rampant anti-intellectualism, my wallowing in the pleasures of giving out A’s as if they were $100 bills might seem like ammunition for the enemies of higher education and the professorial life. In the face of that charge, I have only one response: I’m tenured.

Apparently, Emory University gives out tenure like Gary Laderman gives out A’s. It’s not necessarily that he doesn’t know his subject, religion. It’s not that he isn’t a brilliant teacher, for all I know. It’s that he’s decided he doesn’t care for the method of assessing mastery in his courses, so he has chosen not to play the grade game, so A’s all around. Continue reading →

Ken @Popehat White, who is anticipated to have an op-ed in every major newspaper in America by the end of the weekend, writes at WaPo about the president’s condemnation of “flipping” to distinguish the good reasons to hate rats, and the not-so-good reasons.

America’s criminal justice system routinely coerces defendants to cooperate and incentivizes them to lie to please prosecutors. But most victims aren’t presidential confidants accused of bank fraud. The vast majority of people who confront the choice between cooperation and a longer sentence are poor and uneducated. When it comes to jailing our fellow Americans, we have champagne tastes, but when it comes to defending them, a store-brand-soda budget.

The president’s erstwhile personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, flipped on his benefactor. Had Cohen not managed to worm his way into Trump’s sphere, he might have had a brilliant future doing 18b pleas at arraignment and, perhaps, the occasional real estate closing. He wasn’t “poor and  uneducated,” which is something of the nature of the people who end up in the dock, not because the system is inherently unfair to the poor and uneducated, but because those tend to be some of the attributes of people who commit crimes, people who get caught. Continue reading →

The “incident” happened “on or about October 20, 2017.” The victim was friends with the perp and his family for more than 30 years. There is no information as to whether she was particularly callipygian, but at 55 years of age, might not be at her prime. And the perp of this heinous sex attack?

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for eight years under President Obama, was arrested in Brooklyn on Friday morning and charged with groping a woman in his apartment in October 2017, the police said.

Before the vicious attack occurred, the “survivor” was deeply involved in the #metoo movement as an artist creating #metoo art. But it wasn’t until her life was turned upside down by her victimization that she was able to add “victim” to her resume. Continue reading →

At the end of its post, The College Fix makes a brutal point that compels repeating:

Had Yovino reported the incident to Sacred Heart administrators rather than police, the male students – both punished by the university after they were charged – would have likely been branded as rapists for the rest of their lives.

It was fortuitous that Nikki Yovino chose to falsely accuse two male Sacred Heart students of raping her to police rather than some Title IX admin at Sacred Heart University. Yovino lied, and it was a nasty, ugly lie. Had she lied only to her college, nobody would have cared. Nobody would have ever questioned her claim. But she lied to the police instead, until she finally admitted it was a lie,  Continue reading →

It’s no crime to be poor. Why then are poor people held in jail because of it? Maurice Walker was held for six days because he couldn’t pay the $160 required by a bail schedule for being a pedestrian under the influence of alcohol. The City of Calhoun, Georgia, used a bail schedule imposed by its municipal court which based release on the amount of the fine plus costs. It made inadequate accommodation for whether the person in custody had the wherewithal to pay.*

The use of bail schedules has its putative virtues. It’s clear, easily applied, gets people out of jail quickly and applies equally to everyone. It also has its issues, foremost of which is that it bears no cognizable connection to the individual in jail. Why does he need bail at all? Does he have the ability to pay bail? The offense of arrest may be the same, but the person arrested isn’t. If you can’t pay the bail, you sit for no better reason than you can’t pay the bail.

In the first round of litigation in the district court, an injunction issued creating a three-tier system. An arrestee could be released by paying bail according to a Standing Bail Order, or be brought before a judge within 48 hours, or, if only charged with a local violation, released on unsecured bail. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the scheme as insufficiently specific. Continue reading →

We often use “jaywalking” as part of the joke, an offense so trivial as to serve as the perfect juxtaposition for police excesses. But Hui Jie Jin is alleged to have jaywalked, and Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Phillip Corvello didn’t get the joke at all. Turns out he was all intersectional, and wasn’t about to let Jin get away with it.

A deaf 76-year-old woman accused an Alameda County Sheriff’s Office deputy of excessive force during an alleged jaywalking incident last year, claiming the deputy “violently threw” her to the ground and handcuffed her to an ambulance while she was unconscious.

It wasn’t merely her jaywalking that gave rise to Corvello’s outrage. It was her failure to do as he commanded, a cardinal sin. Continue reading →

As night follows day, Trump twitted something moronic at ten minutes after one in the morning:

NO COLLUSION – RIGGED WITCH HUNT!

It was too early in the morning to exert the effort to twit in relatively full sentences and there was little need to do so. The message was as simple as it was stupid, and it either worked for those so mindlessly obsessed with supporting him or not. Trump may not grasp much, but he gets this. Continue reading →