Every once in a while, a video appears that serves as a sort of litmus test of one’s perspective toward police, teens, school and the use of force. The video of School Resource Officer Tyler McRae and 18-year-old high school student Tauris Sledge is one such video.

JUST IN: Body camera footage from an incident involving an SRO arresting a student at East Ridge High School has been released by the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office.

WARNING FOUL LANGUAGE: Here's a clip from the footage that's over an hour long. More: https://t.co/eP0zQopQon pic.twitter.com/n2TgxwNsM1

— WTVC NewsChannel 9 (@newschannelnine) September 22, 2022

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It’s that special time of year again in Knoxville. The time when loyal Vols fans get their bail funds ready and select the proper bottle of mustard to sneak into Neyland Stadium. Trash talking’s been heavy since Sunday morning and Rocky Top’s favored by 6.5 points.

Tomorrow, dear readers, is Florida day. The day when my beloved Vols take on the University of Florida Gators in the hallowed halls of Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. Continue reading →

In most federal district courts, your case gets (figuratively) tossed into the wheel and you pull the judge who comes up. The odds can play out a bit differently in smaller districts and outlier courthouses, where only a few judges are bold enough to tread. For the most part, you file and live with the luck of the draw.

This is one of the points I’ve raised when reformers argue for judges plucked from the ranks of public defenders (but not private criminal defense lawyers, who defend icky people) or judges of various shades of pale. The point is that you don’t end up with some homogenized federal judiciary, where the courts are some common denominator of the various perspectives, experiences and biases of federal judges. A right wing and a left wing judge don’t produce two moderate judges. They produce two judges who might give wildly different decisions on the same set of facts. Is that what will “fix” the judiciary? Continue reading →

That Trump lied about, inflated, grossly exaggserated the value of his holding and hence his claimed net worth surprised no one with any knowledge of who he was.* That New York Attorney General Tish James took three plus years to figure this out is sad. But then, James needed more than to know the obvious. She needed to gather evidence of it, to prove it, and then she could use her offices as chief civil legal officer of New York to flex her limited corporate oversight muscles. And now she has, even coming up with her own cute catch phrase.

This isn’t the Art of the Deal. It’s the Art of the Steal.** Continue reading →

It’s impossible not to notice that a lot of people, particularly young people, are suffering from anxiety and/or depression, which gives rise to the argument that we are in the midst of an epidemic of some sort of psychological epidemic, so much so that primary care physicians are now admonished to screen patients under the age of 65. Are we?

One argument proffered is that this isn’t a crisis of mental health at all, but an entirely proper reaction to what’s happening in our world. Continue reading →

A friend of mine brought up a business a while back and asked what I thought. I never heard of it, but its model was to provide women with stylists who would find clothing for customers’ specific body types and ‘tude and send them in the mail once a month. One overarching theme was that apparently no one wanted to get off the couch to do anything for themselves, from trying on clothing to test-driving a car. Would they pay to have someone chew their food for them because it was too much trouble? But I digest. Continue reading →

It’s not as if the government came up with Raymond Dearie’s name as one of two potential special masters, and almost certainly the only one of the two with any potential whatsoever to be appointed special master. But whichever genius on Team Trump told the rest of the tap room at Mar-a-Lago that he was the perfect choice is going to be forced to spend the rest of his career as Bill Barr’s virtual assistant. Trump asked for Dearie, a very serious guy, and he got him. Uh oh.

The court-appointed “special master” reviewing documents the FBI seized during the Aug. 8 search has asked the former president to disclose details about any materials he claims to have declassified before calling them his property.

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Remember when tennis hustler Bobby Riggs got his butt kicked by Billy Jean King? It was a glorious moment for women, shutting up his sexist denigration of women athletes as being unable to complete with men. Of course, King was 29 and at her peak and 55-year-old Riggs, to the extent he ever had a peak playing tennis as opposed to shooting off his mouth, was well past his. But it was groovy to watch King win in straight sets.

What it wasn’t was a claim that sports segregation was based on a fallacy, that the purported biological differences between men and women was a myth. Not only would the notion have been ridiculous, but pointless. Women could be great at sports and still be women, and Riggs’ claim, that even a tired old man could beat the best woman athlete in a sport was empty macho bravado. Continue reading →

Were there black-skinned hobbits in the mind of Tolkein and translucent mermaids in the head of Hans Christian Andersen? Who cares?

Imagine a world where everyone on Earth has roughly the same skin color. How would it happen? I don’t know, imagine! Maybe COVID-45qanon affects skin color. Maybe God snaps her fingers and we all turn chartreuse. I picture a super popular K-Pop/HipHop documentary directed by Harry Styles that starts a worldwide trend of everyone marrying someone different looking and ten generations later we’re all looking like Mariah Carey, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, or Bruno Mars, only more so. Continue reading →

From the sanitary perspective, it’s a bizarre decision lacking both sound rationale or respect for precedent. The Fifth Circuit got it wrong.

Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’ law banning major social media websites from using most forms of content moderation. The decision is at odds with a recent Eleventh Circuit ruling striking down Florida’s similar law (written by prominent conservative Trump appointee Judge Kevin Newsom). In May, the Supreme Court signaled that at least five justices believe the law to be unconstitutional, when it overturned a previous Fifth Circuit ruling lifting a trial court injunction against implementation of the Texas law.  For reasons I summarized here, I agree with the Eleventh Circuit’s approach, and believe the Texas and Florida laws violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. In this post, I argue that these laws also violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

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