At Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett writes of a letter sent to the American Association of Law Schools to express the disappointment of conservative and libertarian academics with their being no room at the Inn for them. It’s orthodoxy v. heterodoxy, and orthodoxy has its hands on the wheel of the truck.

The letter is a marvel of academic moderation, beginning with deep appreciation that the leaders of AALS didn’t spit in their face as they showed them the door. It finally comes to its point:

At this meeting we urged, inter alia, the creation of a Political Diversity Task Force on viewpoint diversity similar to the Racial Diversity Task Force created in 1999 or the three task forces created to deal with issues of globalization.

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We fear that the Executive Committee does not take our concerns seriously and intends to take no action to address them. We urge the EC to alter this attitude. Both scholarship and teaching suffer when law schools are echo chambers in which only one side of current debates is given a voice.

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Let’s say I wasn’t a lawyer, but I really wanted to be. I couldn’t go to law school, couldn’t afford to squander three years of my life or the tuition. But I cared deeply about helping people and felt I could be a really good lawyer. So instead of passing the bar, being admitted to practice law, I hung out a shingle saying I was a lawyer and started representing people.

Say I did a pretty good job of it. When courts started requiring a bar number of papers, I made one up because, obviously, I didn’t actually have one. I paid taxes on the monies I earned. I contributed to the welfare of the community, where everyone thought I was a lawyer. I did pro bono. Everyone thought I was a great guy and a great lawyer. The only thing I wasn’t was an actual lawyer.

One day, somebody figured out that I was many things, but not a lawyer. Was I a bad guy or a good guy? Did I not deserve credit for all I had done, all I contributed? There is a law that says a person can’t be a lawyer without being admitted to the bar. I violated it, but no one was harmed. So what’s the big deal?

Activist Jeanette Vizguerra is hiding in the basement of the Unitarian Church in Denver from ICE agents who want to arrest her. She tells her story as if she’s the victim. Continue reading →

Among the expectations of the Trump regime is that it would disrupt politics as usual, whether because it didn’t know traditions, understand how they developed and why they existed, or as a deliberate means of changing the usual mechanisms of Washington to break free of a cycle of failure. But this?

No one expected the White House Press Secretary to send the New York Times, CNN and others packing.

It’s tempting to take Friday’s petty decision by the Trump White House to bar certain news organizations from a briefing — something no administration of either party has ever done — as a backhanded compliment to the reporters whose honest work provoked the president’s latest foot-stamping tantrum.

There’s certainly a whiff of self-righteousness in there, that they were barred because they were too honest about an administration that wanted a press corp that would only do its bidding, blindly accept its word and spew it out unchallenged.

But for this rationale to work, it required that those news media who weren’t kicked out fit the rationale. The TV networks? The AP*? The Washington Post? They’re not Breitbart. Yet they weren’t banned. Continue reading →

People love analogies, no matter how inapt. It saves them from any need to think, delegating the responsibility to someone else to do it for them. And this total absence of thought thrives at The Puddle, where Stephen Embry analogizes the future of law to the quartz watch crisis.

I love watches. I probably have two dozen—some so old I have to wind them. Some are solar-powered. Most are battery-operated. I even have four different smart watches.

That’s akin to saying you love pastries and have an old box of twinkies. No watch aficionado proudly admits to having battery-operated watches because that would reveal him as a clueless poseur.

But Embry is safe at the Puddle, because no reader there will realize this, their either not yet having made enough money practicing law to buy a watch, or, they did, having immediately bought the shiniest disposable watch available. Some fool had to do it, so why not them? Continue reading →

Perhaps Ed Whelan just found out what it feels like to be a transgender high school kid. After all, when something bad happens that touches you personally, it distorts your sense of reason and compels you to search desperately for a rationale that justifies your desired outcome. It can happen to the best of us, and maybe it happened to Ed.

This one hits close to home: Keith Boyer, a police officer in my hometown of Whittier, California, was shot to death on Monday at an intersection near my childhood home. Police have identified Michael Christopher Mejia as the suspect in Boyer’s killing.

It’s tragic when someone is murdered. For some, a cop’s murder matters more than another person’s murder. That reflects their values, their politics, as a cop is just another human being whose day job involves wearing a badge. People explain away their special devotion to police through rhetorical means, that cops are symbols of society, or at special risk, or our protectors and saviors.

Each of these is dubious and debatable, but there’s no reason to argue about whether Boyer’s death is a tragedy. It is. The variation on the theme of who’s the most victim-y victim is nothing more than right-side perspective versus left.  Continue reading →

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration will be issuing new “guidance” on the treatment of transgender students under Title IX.

The Trump administration will issue new guidelines on how public schools treat transgender students, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said at a news briefing on Tuesday, indicating that the matter should be left up to states.

The announcement suggests the Justice Department will rescind a policy enacted by the Obama administration designed to protect transgender students from discrimination and harassment, which said students could use facilities that match their gender identity, from restrooms to dorms.

This comes as no surprise, having discussed at length the means by which the Obama Departments of Justice and Education wound their way from a law that prohibited sex discrimination, enacted in 1972, to the euphemistically named “guidance,” meaning not law, not even regulations, but a letter sent out by a bureaucrat completely changing everything, even though it’s putatively unenforceable. It’s just, you know, “guidance.”

And that’s where the problem lies. Continue reading →

For a brief and shining moment, it was a microaggression to call America the land of opportunity, the melting pot, the various traditional phrases that expressed our immigrant heritage and how from many, we became one. E pluribus unum. So awful.

But the focus has now shifted off of such silliness to recognized reality that Americans want their borders back. To that end, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has issued battle plans to put into effect the promises made on the campaign trail. Ironically, this has been going on for a while now, although few were aware of it because they were too obsessed with their feelings to see.

As MSNBC’s Christopher Hayes offered, our immigration enforcement strength has been ramping up for a while, with few paying attention. Continue reading →

These three things can be true at the same time:

1. Milo Yiannopoulos is a glib, disgusting, provocateur.
2. Milo Yiannopoulos provided a valuable counterpoint to the forces of political correctness.
3. Milo Yiannopoulos overplayed his hand, went outside the realm of political correctness, into the realm of promoting criminal conduct, and deserves everything that happened to him.

Yesterday was not a good day for Milo.

On Monday, the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference rescinded their invitation for him to speak this week. Simon & Schuster said it was canceling publication of “Dangerous” after standing by him through weeks of criticism of the deal. And Breitbart itself was reportedly reconsidering his role amid calls online for it to sever ties with him.

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Robert Capers is the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, former home to Loretta Lynch and the once-lovely and genteel Idlewild Airport. Lynch has now gone into the history books as a former Attorney General. Idlewild is now a dump called JFK Airport. There was nothing lovely about the place following the Friday Fiasco of Trump’s travel ban.

According to the Harry Siegel of the Daily News, Capers was home that Friday when he received a call from the White House. No, not the big guy. Not even the other big guy. The little guy. This guy, 31-year-old Stephen Miller, who may be the most unpleasant face to ever greet a Sunday morning.

Siegel describes the call thus:

In the chaotic hours after President Trump signed on a Friday afternoon the sloppily written executive order meant to fulfill his Muslim ban campaign promise, Stephen Miller called the home of Robert Capers to dictate to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District how he should defend that order at a Saturday emergency federal court hearing.

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Editing is a wondrous thing. When writing, it’s almost impossible to see your own typos, your mismatched verb tenses, your truly horrible choice of words and your sentences that die a brutal and painful death. Someone else will immediately see the problems and, poof, they’re fixed. It’s a miracle.

But those are technical problems. Book publishers have an entirely different problem these days, and it’s not just with Huck Finn.

Before a book is published and released to the public, it’s passed through the hands (and eyes) of many people: an author’s friends and family, an agent and, of course, an editor.

These days, though, a book may get an additional check from an unusual source: a sensitivity reader, a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content. These readers give feedback based on self-ascribed areas of expertise such as “dealing with terminal illness,” “racial dynamics in Muslim communities within families” or “transgender issues.”

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