Of course you wouldn’t mold your serious views based upon what some actress or director believes, because they may be authorities about acting or directing, but obviously have no authority when it comes to thing like, oh, law. But law professors? While they may lack a certain practical knowledge of law, surely they are reliable sources of deep legal thought, and you can rely upon their signature when an amicus brief is proffered to a court that this is what they, in their highly intelligent, deeply considered, opinion is the law.

Right. Right?!?

The number of amicus briefs submitted by academics has increased dramatically over the past several decades. In principle, such scholars’ briefs should help courts resolve difficult cases by sharing relevant expertise. Judges are necessarily generalists. Scholars in a particular field, on the other hand, may have genuine expertise about the specific issues at hand in a given case that could assist the judges in making a decision. Continue reading →

“We should get season passes for Dollywood this year,” my wife tells me one afternoon. “If we go twice we’ve essentially justified using them.”

“Sounds lovely,” I said, “Let’s do it.” I thought at most we might get a discussion out of it, and maybe we’d even make plans to go some point later in the year. My daughter loves roller coasters and my son’s a huge fan of the park’s midway area so a Dollywood visit is almost a certainty when we’re deciding what to do during the year.

But season passes were different. Season passes meant we got free parking, food discounts and a slew of other benefits. It meant we were some of THOSE people who did fun things like go to damn amusement parks twice a week. Continue reading →

At the Academy Awards, a winning activist actress had her say.

In 1978 the English actress Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her role in the film “Julia” and used the occasion to denounce “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews everywhere.”

Later in the ceremony, the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky used his own turn onstage to offer a memorable rebuttal: “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave,” he said to applause, “that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Continue reading →

It was a longshot, but somehow 72-year-old Sylvia Gonzalez managed to pull it off. She was elected to the city council of Castle Hill, Texas on a platform of going after the city manager. That did not make her popular with the mayor, who decided to do something about it.

Gonzalez started a petition for the ouster of the city manager. After a council meeting, she collected her papers and put them in a binder. Included was the petition, which the mayor, Edward Trevino, asked for and which she immediately found and gave to him. Big deal? Big enough, as it turned out. Continue reading →

Rarely will there be a federal court opinion addressing the free speech rights of a first grader, mostly because most parents are sufficiently aware of the damage involving a child in a suit will cause and that the cost, whether financial or psychological, will end up being detrimental. But  subsequent circumstances compelled B.B.’s mother, Chelsea, to sue, only to learn that Central District of California Judge David Carter preferred the harm imposed by Capistrano Unified School District on an innocent and well-intended first grader to the pain suffered by a classmate’s mother.

A cleaned up recitation of the facts by Eugene Volokh, Continue reading →

During oral argument in Murthy v. Missouri, a few of the justices, whose prior experience with the government informed their perspective, raised that the government regularly sticks its nose into the  propriety of content in order to persuade media to say, or not say, things the government prefers, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan, both former White House lawyers, said interactions between administration officials and news outlets provided a valuable analogy. Efforts by officials to influence coverage are, they said, part of a valuable dialogue that is not prohibited by the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a similar point. Continue reading →

Actor Joe Gatt, of Game of Thrones and Star Trek Into Darkness fame, almost lost everything he worked for because of some unhinged prosecutor named Angela Brunson. Gatt worked his butt off to become relevant, and then that psycho allowed some fangirl to convince Brunson that Gatt did something illegal:

The reality is that LT created fantasy conversations between her and Gatt and lied to her friends that she was having a sexting affair with a famous actor. Amazingly, the LA police did not use the evidence on her phone or computer to press charges, but relied on photos of screenshots of the alleged texts and photographs of Gatt. Continue reading →

The crux of Michelle Goldberg’s column is that Congress has no business conducting an inquiry into United Auto Workers local 2325, better known as the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), the union that represents New York City public defenders. And she has a point, particularly when it appears likely that the House Committee on Education and the Work Force under chairwoman Republican Representative Virginia Foxx seems more concerned with using the issue to bust the union “monopoly.” That was never the point, even if Foxx sees an opportunity to attack unions.

But without realizing it, the Times’ millennial pixie gives up the game in her opening paragraph. Indeed, in her opening sentence. Continue reading →

My wife has been on my case for a while now to go through my book cases, desk and the piles of things around the room that I’ve accumulated over more than 40 years of lawyering. I am not a hoarder by any means, but I do have a tendency to see the future potential of something that I don’t need at the moment, but may well need someday. So I find a place for it.

After 40 years, that ends up being a great many things that I might have needed someday, but for many saved items, that day never came. Yesterday, at Dr. SJ’s extreme urging, I pulled books from their shelves and put them in a pile. It was not a small pile.* Continue reading →

The following may or may not be based on a true story. You be the judge—CLS

DEAR DIARY,

Zaslav wants me to do this diary thing for the upcoming documentary they’re going to do for me on HBO Max, Max, VICE or whatever the hell it’s called now. I can’t stand this place anymore or these people and I want to leave so bad. But I’m being paid a stupid amount of money to work here with people who I hate and who hate me, so what does one do? Continue reading →