It’s not the first time this happened. And it’s not the first time this happened at a good law school. It happened in 1997 at the University of Texas when prawf Lino Graglia argued that black and Mexican law students weren’t competitive with white students. It caused outrage, but ended with a defense of his academic freedom to say so, with the ACLU behind him.

Then there was Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, who began by raising the controversial if correct contention bourgeois values were beneficial, who then followed it up by claiming black students were rarely in the top half of the class. That cost her a job.

Now Georgetown law prof Sandra Sellers on a recorded Zoom call with David Batson said it. Continue reading →

As the podcast has been taken down, I can’t listen to it (even if I were inclined to) to determine whether it was as bad (read “traumatic”) as claimed. In its place is the apologia.

This is Dr Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network.

The podcast on structural racism based on the discussion between Dr Ed Livingston and Dr Mitch Katz has been withdrawn. Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA. Racism and structural racism exist in the U.S. and in healthcare. After careful consideration, I determined that the harms caused by the podcast outweighed any reason for the podcast to remain available on the JAMA Network. I once again apologize for the harms caused by this podcast and the tweet about the podcast. We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.

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The Supreme Court denied cert in a particularly bad decision by the Sixth Circuit, granting qualified immunity to Cleveland cops who arrested, tackled and punched Shase Howse on the porch of his home.

One summer night in 2016, Howse was walking home from a convenience store. Along the way, Howse says an unidentified Cleveland Police officer approached and asked whether he had any weapons. Howse said no. The John Doe officer then patted him down and searched his pockets. After finding no contraband, the officer told Howse that he could leave.

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Rhode Island’s junior senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, was a United States Attorney and state attorney general, so it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s got a modest functional knowledge of separation of powers. That means he’s not doing stuff because he doesn’t know better, but because it’s deliberately designed to undermine our constitutional structure.

There was the golden oldie, the five-senator amicus brief to the Supreme Court in NYS Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. City of New York, where they “warned” the Court at the conclusion to do as they demanded or else. Continue reading →

That snarkiest of justices, John Roberts, called The Brethren “advice columnists” in his first and only solo dissent in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski. The 8-1 opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that a claim for nominal damages was sufficient to keep the case and controversy alive even after the defendant pulled the plug on the rules at issue.

 “Plaintiff used contentious religious language that, when directed to a crowd, has a tendency to incite hostility,” the college’s lawyers wrote.

But the college soon abandoned its defense of its speech code. Its revised policy, which allowed students to speak anywhere on campus, made the case moot, its lawyers argued in court.

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On the one hand, it’s ironic that the guy who was given the opportunity to beat back the Tara Reade accusations would deny that opportunity to male students, who are powerless in the face of their University Title IX Administrators’ cavalier callousness. There’s also the sexual harassment accusations against Andy Cuomo, but nobody likes him today anyway, so the hypocrisy of his defending himself can be dismissed. Hey, intellectual consistency is the hobgoblin of unwoke minds. If only nonsensical excuses could be monetized, the woke would be RICH!!!

But on the other other, this comes as no surprise. Biden said he would undo the minimal due process protections imposed by the DeVos Department of Education rules as a candidate, so his announcing his plan to do so as president is exactly what was expected. The order contains all the benign words expected in an Executive Order, to “go good things and stop bad things.” And that’s all Joe has to say about it for now. Continue reading →

Following the outrageous killing of Elijah McClain, protesters engaged in what was described as an “occupation-style protest” by sitting down and surrounding the Aurora, Colorado police station.

The July 3 protest in Aurora, Colorado, seemed, at least on the surface, like just another of the hundreds of racial justice protests that have swept the nation this year. Demonstrators sat outside a police station chanting and playing music. Although they said they wouldn’t leave until their demands were met, the protesters were cleared out by police around 4:30 a.m.

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University of Alabama lawprof Russell Gold opened the abstract to his new law review article with a very provocative assertion: Criminal procedure is systemically racist and classist. He sums up his argument succinctly:

This Article argues that comparing criminal procedure to civil procedure on a broad scale provides new and valuable insight into the systemic racism and classism woven into the fabric of U.S. law. Criminal defendants are disproportionately poor people of color, while civil defendants are often wealthy corporations whose executives are largely White; those wealthy civil defendants play an outsized role in developing civil procedure. One might expect to see greater procedural protections before criminal defendants are deprived of their liberty than for civil defendants before they are deprived of their money. But the reality cuts decidedly the other way.

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There has been a spike in random violent attacks against Asian people, and it’s a problem. It’s a problem because people are being harmed. It’s a problem because the fantasy propagated by social justice precludes even the LA Times from telling a factual story.

Last March, 34-year-old Bawi Cung was grocery shopping at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, when a man grabbed a knife from a nearby rack.

Cung was slashed on his face, his 3-year-old was stabbed in the back, and his 6-year-old was stabbed in the face. Continue reading →

For years, I’ve used religious allusions when describing the various flavors of progressive ideology. Praying at the altar of woke. Adhering to the orthodoxy of the high priestesses. It may be secular, in that there’s no particular deity at stake, but it has otherwise had the attributes of a religion. Blind faith in an ideology and intolerance for non-believers. John McWhorter has been pounding on this point. Even Andrew Sullivan explains its “win” in religious terms.

Belief in something bigger, better, than ourselves has long been a staple of the human condition. Whether it’s Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed, people need something to believe in to make their existence meaningful. Is woke any different? Continue reading →