Concern for the environment has long been important around Casa de SJ. We’ve recycled from the beginning, cleaned litter from roadsides and do most of our driving in a Prius, as we have for most of the 21st Century. It’s not because it’s a good-looking pod car. We have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And while we’re not climate scientists, we are fully prepared to rely on and believe those who are that global warming is real and a critical danger to humanity.

So why, then, do climate activists make me want to do unspeakable things to their arms? Continue reading →

It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while* here: Why is it people prefer misery? They catastrophize everything. They absurdly exaggerate everything bad. They inductively reason that one outlier instance of something tragic means it’s endemic. They whip up a word salad about some banal thing that’s been happening forever and, while perhaps unpleasant, never caused any actual damage that’s going to destroy humanity before the end of the week. Why? It’s not merely a matter of neglect but an active choice. You want everything to be the worst thing ever and the end of humanity.

Jane Coaston calls it “doomerism.” Continue reading →

In a series of “I was wrong about” op-eds, New York Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote about her being wrong to condemn Al Franken in an essay all about why she wasn’t really wrong. Another columnist, never-Trump conservative Bret Stephens had his own mea culpa essay.

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”

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Hi everyone! I hope you’re having a great start to your Friday. This week I learned about something rather interesting concerning a company called CoreCivic. In case you’re not familiar with them, CoreCivic is one of the largest private prison companies in the nation. They run a facility in my home state called the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center.

Trousdale is, to put it nicely, a shithole. It isn’t properly staffed, the inmates have free run of the entire facility, and one ended up dead because the Subway Sandwich Shop trained hacks couldn’t be bothered to actually conduct regular cell or pod inspections. Continue reading →

Is the Senate anti-democratic? Is the electoral college some absurd arcane contraption, the existence of which not only defies the notion of majority rules but invites gamesmanship, if not a coup should we have a president so unworthy as to consider such a thing? Well, yes. There are reasons why these things exist, why the system was crafted the way it was in order to create any union, no less a more perfect one, because without the Senate, without the electoral college, would there be a United States of America at all?

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 16 senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, released the text of a new bill intended to make it harder to overturn the results of a presidential election. A direct response to Donald Trump’s multipronged attempt to stay in power, the bill is meant to keep a future candidate for president, including a losing incumbent, from following the same playbook.

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Should the bar exam be eliminated? There is a lot packed into that question about the efficacy of the bar exam, whether it serves to assure a minimum level of competence for admitted lawyers or whether it’s a waste of time, a barrier to keep the number of lawyers down and/or a rite of passage. But is it discriminatory?

The recommendation to eliminate the admissions testing requirement comes amidst cascading charges that reliance on the Law School Admission Test hurts minority applicants. The proposition is sharply contested by many friends of diversity….  Some find  it stigmatizing to be told they can’t do as well on the test as White applicants. But given that the case against the test appears to have persuaded the wordily named Council of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the LSAT does indeed represent an unfair barrier to entry to the legal profession. Continue reading →

I vaguely recall thinking that maybe, just maybe, the New York Times uber-millennial progressive columnist was growing up, only to have my hope dashed on the rocks of simplicity the next week. And yet, ever the optimist, here it comes again and maybe, just maybe, this time it will be real.

I called on Franken to resign from the Senate, not because I thought his alleged actions were irredeemable, but because I thought Democrats should free themselves of the burden of defending him.

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It’s understandable that someone who graduated from college last year would believe that “legal sex” required affirmative consent. After all, it’s become the rule on college campuses, and they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into it by programs, plays, seminars, discussion groups, marches and powerpoint presentations.

So when Emma Camp “explains” what constitutes “legal sex,” she can hardly be blamed for believing it, even if she’s not a lawyer and knows absolutely nothing about law.* After all, this is what’s been beaten into her head over the last ten minutes when she’s been adulting. Continue reading →

Money talks, but what does it say?

In Arizona, Democrats have intervened on behalf of Kari Lake, a candidate for governor who has fanned lies about the 2020 election and demanded the imprisonment of the Democratic front-runner. In Pennsylvania, Democrats ran ads boosting Doug Mastriano, a Christian theocrat who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection before running for governor.

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A few days ago, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern put out a call on twitter to academics to find out how they would teach law going forward in light of the current Supreme Court state of Affairs. He posed his inquiry in a relatively fair and neutral way.

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