As jurors were deliberating in the suit by Sarah Palin against the New York Times, SDNY Judge Jed Rakoff informed the parties of his intention to grant the Times’ Rule 50 motion on the basis that the evidence was legally insufficient to establish “actual malice, as required by Times v. Sullivan and its progeny.

But the judge didn’t grant the motion, as many media outlets incorrectly announced, and stated he would let the jury deliberate and reach a verdict so that the Second Circuit would have both his ruling and the jury verdict, in case the circuit decided he was wrong. Continue reading →

When it was announced that Spielberg would remake one of the most beloved movies and plays ever, West Side Story, my first thought was why? The new version, of course, would be more politically correct, apparently under the belief that it was unfair and demeaning to Puerto Ricans. For reasons that were unclear, this new version would correct the casting, the story, the songs, for their sake, as the original failed to serve to show them as they, today, would prefer to be shown.

West Side Story bombed. It’s been a massive box office failure. Huge failure. And not, apparently, because it wasn’t well done, even if it still failed to be as woke as some demanded. Was the problem that Maria wasn’t as Hispanic as she should have been or that nobody needed a woke remake of West Side Story? Why can’t beloved old shows, whether movies, plays, television, be left alone? Do we really need a new, serious, remake of Fresh Prince of Bel Air? Continue reading →

There has been an ongoing war between criminal law reformers and the media. Not with far right media, which has never been their metric of acceptable journalism, but with their loss of trust and fate with the outlets they thought were their allies, like the New York Times.

It’s not that the Times isn’t far more accommodating of their ideology than other, lesser, outlets, but that they still write stories that include occasional facts, positions, news, that does not shamelessly promote only their desired views. Why can’t all media outlets be like Slate, they demand to know, as they cancel their New York Times subscription in protest? Continue reading →

So what if it’s on the brink of bankruptcy, has lost the faith of the vast majority of America’s lawyers and is held captive by a small coterie of fringe social justice warriors who are using it to pursue their ideological agenda to the harm of the legal profession. It’s the American Bar Association, and so it continues to hold the one small bit of power given when it was the old, stodgy, legacy organization that could be “trusted” to maintain the standard of the profession: Accrediting law schools.

At its midyear meeting, now being held virtually because few of its members can afford to travel, Resolution 300 was just approved by a vote of 347 to 17, which amends the curriculum requirements to include the following: Continue reading →

How far does DNA travel? It’s one thing to recognize that, as a matter of science, it finds its way where it wants, but it’s another thing entirely when the police take the DNA collected from a rape victim, plug it into their DNA crime database and find that the rape victim is now a suspect in a crime. Yet that’s what happened in Frisco.

The police crime lab “attempts to identify crime suspects” by searching a law enforcement database that includes DNA collected from sexual assault victims, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday. Continue reading →

Years ago, I testified before a New York State commission about what should be permissible in judicial elections. I argued that judges should be able to campaign on whatever positions they chose, which had been considered unseemly and inappropriate since judges were supposed to be impartial. Why put your bias on display?

My argument was twofold, that the sanitized campaigning was fairly silly, with judicial candidates allowed to run on their resume, which law school they attended and the jobs they held, which was essentially meaningless information to voters. I remember saying, “if one candidate went to Harvard Law School and another went to Brooklyn, does Harvard win?” A judge on the bench replied, “Not in New York,” to which we all had a good laugh. Continue reading →

I didn’t have much to do on February 13th, 2007. Dr. SJ, on the other hand, was busy, so to get me to stop annoying her, she told me, “start a blog.” So I did. It’s 15 years later and the blawg is still here, even though the blawgosphere has mostly come and gone in the meantime.

I’ve made a great many friends, and more than a few enemies. I’ve watched blogs come and go. I’ve seen Facebook, Twitter and podcasts replace actual thought as reflected in writings, and the need for validation replace the challenge of critical thought. Lawyers have been replaced by culture warriors, and reason has given way to emotion. And yet, here I am, still sitting down at the computer in the mornings typing out blawg posts about whatever strikes me as worth writing about. Continue reading →

As a professor and associate dean for faculty research at Tulane Law School, Ann Lipton brought some legit bona fides to her scholarship. Like all prawfs, her law review article, Capital Discrimination, was posted to SSRN, short for social science research network, and accepted for publication in the Houston Law Review. The article presented an interesting spin on business disputes when one party was male and the other female.

The law of business associations does not recognize gender.  The rights and responsibilities imposed by states on business owners, directors, and officers do not vary based on whether the actors are male or female, and there is no explicit recognition of the influence of gender in the doctrine.

Continue reading →

Some of the more progressive reformers on my radar throw out “wage theft” as the countervailing argument to shoplifting. Why, they argue, does petty theft garner national attention when wage theft, which involves far greater amounts of money, gets almost no attention?

The answer seems fairly obvious, as one is discrete and has visuals, and we are very much a visual society moved by images, and the other is some amorphous claim, sometimes mischaracterized as theft when there is a reasonable dispute about what wages are due. Continue reading →

The Great Flip happened. It’s out there for all to see and it’s radiculopathy ridiculous. Rand Paul calling for a blockade of the Super Bowl while an old twit by AOC about how protests are meant to make people uncomfortable is making the rounds again.

Rand Paul calls on truckers to blockade the Super Bowl and DC: “I’m all for it. Civil disobedience .. is a time-honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.” pic.twitter.com/zvCBTe9wkg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 12, 2022

Continue reading →