Being neither for nor against Charlie Kirk, only because I never followed Kirk and knew nothing about him or his positions, I had nothing to contribute after his assassination beyond the fact that no one should be harmed, no less killed, for their political views. It’s beyond ironic, then, that 20-year combat veteran turned Tennessee public employee was fired hours after making a comment in reply to a friend’s Facebook post.

Was Charlie Kirk a white supremacist? It’s irrelevant. Would you have written this reply? It’s irrelevant. Do you think Monica Meeks’ reply was terrible? It’s irrelevant. Monica Meeks has a right to express her opinion, right or wrong, offensive or not. And yet, she was fired from her job with the State of Tennessee. Continue reading →

For many of us, the reaction to an image of a transgender female (a biological male, as the Fifth Circuit notes, lest anyone be confused) washing her hands at the sink in a woman’s rest room would be a shrug. Regardless of our feelings about the new rules for transgender people, this just isn’t worthy of much outrage. For Travis County District Attorney, José Garza, it’s worthy of an investigation toward a felony prosecution. The Fifth Circuit agrees.

In May 2023, Evans attended a debate in the Texas House of Representatives at the Texas Capitol about gender reassignment treatment for children. When she visited the women’s restroom, Evans encountered a transgender (biologically male) politician whom she later confronted. After returning to her seat in the Capitol gallery, one of Evans’s seatmates showed her that someone from their group had posted a photo of the politician washing their hands in the women’s restroom on Facebook. Evans tweeted the photo with a caption indicating she believed the politician should not have used the women’s restroom. Continue reading →

After oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, there is essentially no doubt that the Supreme Court will rule in Trump’s favor, that the president has the authority to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission even though the statute creating the positions limits the president’s power to removal for cause. In other words, Humphrey’s Executor, the case upon which Congress relied since 1935 in crafting boards and agencies made up of putative non-partisan subject matter experts whose terms would extend from one regime to another, is history.

The question is no longer will it happen, but what reversal of Humphrey’s Executor will do to the functioning of a nation that has been built to be run, at least to some significant extent, by bureaucracy. Once Congress realized that it could dodge the hard work of legislating by creating a board, commission or agency with a vague mandate that was intended to be controlled by people with the knowledge and experience that Congress lacked, it spent almost a century doing so. For many, government by unaccountable bureaucracy wasn’t the democratic dream, with less expertise than agenda and little motive to limit the reach of its fiefdom, or accept the premise that its work was done. Continue reading →

Back in the early days of SJ, during the throes of #Reinvent Law and A2J, access to justice, two beliefs meshed into the fantastical belief that because lawyers were too expensive and inaccessible to much of the public, putting statutes and caselaw online would enable non-lawyers, regular people if you will, to gain sufficient legal information to knowledgeably conduct their affairs and engage with the law. This belief gave rise to such sites as the Cornell Legal Information Institute as well as a handful of free websites publishing court decisions.

While I was not against the concept of putting law online, I argued that this notion was not merely wrong, but dangerously nuts. The nice folks at Cornell LII were not pleased with me. More than a decade later, there is little doubt that it was just a sweet fantasy, and that people are not only ignorant of law, but proud and certain of their ignorance. I pointed this out with regard to people’s beliefs as to the legality and propriety of the United States murdering people on the high seas and ICE’s flagrant violation of constitutional rights in its zeal to get every “illegal” at all costs.  The reactions were, well, sadly unsurprising. Continue reading →

Oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter will be heard on Monday before the Supreme Court, addressing the question of whether the president has the authority to fire and appoint members of what Congress crafted to be “independent agencies” such as the National Labor Relations Board.

Wags will argue that since the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, and these bureaucracies exist under the executive branch, of course he does. Sarah Isgur puts a bit more flesh on the bones, but essentially agrees, putting it in the context of the Supreme Court using Slaughter as an opportunity to retune the relationship between Congress and the presidency. Continue reading →

TITLE CARD: JUST THE NIGHTLY NEWS
important sounding music

VO: And now, just the nightly news. Good evening, this is Los Angeles. Your host is Kent Halsey.

Camera up on Kent Halsey in the main newsroom

HALSEY: Good evening, this is Los Angeles and this is your nightly news. In our top story a raccoon broke into a Virginia ABC liquor store and had its fair share of peanut butter whisky, vodka and moonshine. The animal then rampaged towards the men’s bathroom before passing out from intoxication, where store owners found it the following morning. Continue reading →

Whether they were called progressives, woke or social justice warriors, they reflected an illiberal extreme that could not mesh with what were once-liberal values, tolerance, respect for differing views and the defense of rights, even when it meant fighting for the rights of your adversaries. It wasn’t that liberals wouldn’t let them into the big tent, but that they refused to be in a big tent with heretics, people who failed to meet their ideological purity test.

Conservatives find themselves in the same situation with the “groypers.”

Legitimate differences and debates exist among authentic conservatives. Although conservatives certainly reject socialism, there is no canonical conservative position on, for example, how much regulation of markets is desirable. Some conservatives lean heavily in the direction of strict libertarianism; others allow more room for government interventions in the economy. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Larry Swearingen was his own worst enemy. He had repeatedly been in trouble with the law; there are reports that he was violent toward women. He may have denied knowing the murder victim, Melissa Trotter, to the police, despite their being friends (possibly with benefits). When imprisoned, he dictated a letter that claimed to be authored by someone else who had knowledge of the crime in a strange attempt to divert suspicion from himself. Those prevarications don’t make him guilty. Yet despite more than one robust line of evidence indicating that he was innocent, the State of Texas executed him in August of 2019. Continue reading →

To say that a student in a wheel chair needs a ramp to enter a building is easy to understand. Or that blind students need textbooks in Braille. Few would question either the need to accommodate such students’ disabilities, or that their disability doesn’t mean they can’t be smart students with successful futures ahead of them.

But when it comes to more amorphous disabilities, from ADHD to anxiety, both the needs and the accommodations become more fuzzy. Unsurprisingly, this has given rise to smart students from well-to-do families gaming the system to enjoy accommodations such as extra time on tests and distraction-free test environments. And you’ll never guess where these students end up going to college. Continue reading →

Charity isn’t a substitute for government funded medical research or a social safety net, but charities are critical to as the government can’t fulfill all needs even under the best of circumstances. Today is Giving Tuesday, and if you’re so inclined, please give to the charity of your choice.

If you can, please give to the Fragile X Research Foundation, Fraxa, which will double every donation with matching funds. Thank you.