Is a law good or bad? Is a particular part of a law justified or unjustified? Does a law place a new burden on people or just not remove a newly claimed burden, or even worse, not make things as easy as they might be without the law? These are relevant questions that somehow seem to elude those who have turned up the hype to 11.

 “The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” President Biden claimed Tuesday. “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War—that’s not hyperbole,” he said in the same speech. “The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol, as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.”

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John Wesley Hall found a decision out of the Southern District of Indiana that was simultaneously so obvious and so shocking as to bring a smile to even a jaded old criminal defense lawyer’s face.

The fact determination at issue in this case is one that necessarily must be determined by the Court based on its real world experience and common sense applied to the evidence. Officer Hiser cannot say whether the windows of his or Gray’s vehicles were rolled down and Gray points out persuasively. Continue reading →

Bari Weiss describes an arch-liberal dedicated public defender better than I did.

If you google “bleeding heart liberal,” Maud Maron might well turn up as the first hit. Every cause liberals are supposed to fight for, every group they are supposed to champion, every candidate they are supposed to support — well, that was Maron’s not so atypical life and career. Until recently.

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In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career.

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Fifty-one of 67 Democrats in the Texas lege hopped on two chartered planes with a case of Miller Lite to fly to Washington, D.C.  Their purpose was explicit, they were denying the Republican majority a quorum with which to enact new voting laws.

Texas Democrats fled the state on Monday in a last-ditch effort to prevent the passage of a restrictive new voting law by the Republican-controlled Legislature, heading to Washington to draw national attention to their cause. Continue reading →

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has spoken. The Court of Public Opinion has too, and it has not been as kind or principled. It’s understandable that even those who accept that the law may compel reversal refuse to accept the premise that Cosby is legally restored to the position he held before he was charged, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced and then reversed and dismissed.

It’s a lot to process, but more importantly, there are tropes to embrace to justify the belief that while he may be legally free, his guilt remains a fact and the right to hold him culpable remains an entitlement. But as with so many aspects of the Cosby case, it presents hard issues that give rise to troubling beliefs. Continue reading →

If the “Back the Blue” sign was stolen from someone else, the act of a 19-year-old unnamed woman destroying it could be a crime, and most likely is. It could have been abandoned. She could have made the sign herself, though it appeared to be a sign made by the local sheriff, so that she could perform the act of destroying it. Or someone put the sign up and she found its message so offensive that she seized it, stomped on it and crumpled it up for the illegal purpose of destroying someone else’s property.

It’s not a big crime, but it’s still a crime, a B misdemeanor in Utah. But it’s the enhancement with which she was charged that makes this otherwise petty wrong worthy of note. Continue reading →

The Battle of New York is raging again, although General Howe isn’t involved this time. Instead, it’s between the people fighting against the catastrophizing of crime and a hillbilly with a Yale law degree.

Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 11, 2021

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Fencing doesn’t get much face time, even though there’s an allure to it from the outside because of its romantic, swashbuckling image. But actual competitive fencing requires an extremely good eye and a deep understanding of the sport. It happens at lightning speed, and requires a mental focus that few possess.

So a story about fencing in GQ in anticipation of the Olympics is kind of a big deal. Except the writer demonstrates no grasp of fencing, not that he lets his woeful ignorance of the sport influence his arrogance. But far worse is that he found the hook for his fencing story in one of the epees who will represented the United States at the Olympics, Curtis McDowald. Continue reading →

It was one of those “what do you think” calls from a friend, that was really a “here’s what I think and you should too” calls. He acknowledged that Trump’s lawsuit must be bonkers because all the lawyers say so, but wasn’t he “right, really”? Wasn’t it really true that but for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, there would be no Twitter, no Facebook, no social media where most of the people can be found, and so becomes the de facto town square in a virtual town?

The discussion didn’t center on whether private corporations had a First Amendment right to speak as they chose, or not, or allow speech as they saw fit. Whether for good reason or no reason, they could shrug and trash any utterance, as they explained in their terms of service. Unfair? Arbitrary? Capricious? Where is the respect of principles of free speech, of diverse thought, of tolerance? A fair enough question, given how ham-handedly decisions appear to be made and the inability to argue your case with a sentient human being. Continue reading →

Right wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart once said “Politics flows downstream from culture.”

Sun-Tzu said in “The Art of War,” “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

With these sayings in mind and a dash of masochism in my heart, I started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run* on “Captain America,” a seminal Marvel title I was sure he’d fuck up on some level. Continue reading →