Short Take: Representing The Most Detested

Lawyers end up standing next to a wide array of clients, not because we necessarily like them, or even can tolerate them, but because we understand our duty to represent them. But that has limits.

An attorney representing President Trump in one of his dozens of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election moved to withdraw from the case on Thursday, telling a federal court that the president used him to “perpetrate a crime.”

Philadelphia-based attorney Jerome Marcus asked the court to allow him to withdraw, citing concerns over Pennsylvania’s professional conduct standards for lawyers.

Continue reading →

Shakespeare Matters (And Always Will)

Dr. SJ loves to read books. Over the past few years, she’s taken to reading the books up for book prizes, which both she and her book club expect to be the best new books coming out. They tend to have one thing in common: they are about a young woman in another country, what we used to call a third-world country, who is overwhelmed by her sad feelings about her personal struggles. They are, I’m told, tedious.

Literature once reached up, elevated us to higher truths uttered in greater prose. If Disrupt Texts has anything to say about it, these will be the only books your child ever reads. Continue reading →

Tuesday Talk*: Was Twitter Wrong To Deplatform A President?

There is no rational argument that Twitter, a private corporation, was not entirely within its legal rights to throw Trump off its site, even if a handful of unduly passionate lawyers and scarily moronic congress folk cry First Amendment. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s a publicly traded corporation. No, it doesn’t matter that some call it the virtual town square. No, it doesn’t matter that you’ve been reliably informed that Section 230 protections require it to not discriminate politically. This isn’t a discussion.

But as Eugene Volokh points out in his New York Times op-ed, that’s not where the fair concerns end. Continue reading →

The Divisiveness Defense (Update)

Is the House of Representatives’ second impeachment of Trump serious? Maybe they’re hoping the threat will push him to resign in exchange for Pence handing him that sweet pardon he can’t give himself, or the invocation of the 25th Amendment which would take the onus off Pelosi and the Dems and shift it onto Mike Pence and what’s left of the Cabinet.

There only being a few days left in the term, and the House both rushing while dilly-dallying its way to a vote, now supposedly set for Wednesday, January 13, when they could have had the deal wrapped up last Friday if it were so critical and necessary, or Monday, or Tuesday. That’s the thing about exigency. If it’s critical, do it now. If you don’t have to do it now, then it’s not critical. Continue reading →

Seaton: Deputy Tyrone’s Christmas Essay

Prefatory note: this was weird. I was at the grocery store when someone in a Sheriff’s office uniform approached me with a stack of papers. I assumed I was being served until I noticed the pages were wide ruled and written in crayon.

 “The Sheriff needs your help deciphering this,” the deputy told me before abruptly leaving. I took my time parsing through the terrible scribbling and, well, read on. You’ll see, –CLS

Dear Sheriff Roy, Continue reading →

Prof. John Eastman’s Future

There are a handful of reasons why academics have evoked the ire of students and administration, not to mention their fellow faculty members, causing the demand for their ouster. Most have been silly, legitimate if politically incorrect scholarship or pedagogy. Some have gone full-blown racist, from suggesting that white students suffer for their skin color to calling for “white genocide.” Most argue that it’s hyperbolic rhetoric, designed to bring attention to their grievance.

But what if a prof’s speech, outside the classroom, unrelated to scholarship, is both inflammatory and, how to say this nicely, crazy? Consider Oberlin’s Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition. Continue reading →

A Bridgerton Too Far

Having exhausted every show that seemed remotely interesting, Dr. SJ and I decided to watch a shonda called “Bridgerton.” It wasn’t entirely beyond the pale, as a British costume melodrama set in the early 19th Century. I loved Downton Abbey for its insight into life among the British aristocracy and those who served it.

Had I been alive then, I would have been a stablehand at best if I survived to adulthood, making me appreciate all the more that I have Georgian sterling on my formal dinner table. God bless America, the land of opportunity. But I digress. Continue reading →

Riots in Black and White

The comparisons abounded, the insurrection in Washington and the riots last summer. Wasn’t the level of violence and destruction far worse when Kenosha burned? Why were militarized and armored police standing on the Lincoln Memorial when there were barely a handful of cops protecting the Capitol? Why did cops readily fire OS gas, rubber bullets and flashbangs at crowds of mostly peaceful protesters in Portland while they stood aside open doors leading to the Rotunda?

The comparisons still abound, as arrests of some of the more prominently identifiable rioters are made at home in distant states rather than at the scene after being clubbed down, kettled into dead ends or seized en masse as part of the amorphous mob of people whose foremost crime was presence at the scene? Continue reading →

Don’t Cry For Sharen Ghatan

If you can’t manage to pull off an interview with Gayle King, who did not attend the Mike Wallace Masters Class on how rip a target to shreds, you should seriously reconsider whether law is your calling. But that comes at the end of a series of very unfortunate choices, reflected by Miya Ponsetto’s decision to have her moment under the lights.

The backstory is fairly clear. Ponsetto falsely accused a black 14-year-old of stealing her iPhone, screamed at him and tackled him as he tried to get away from this crazed 22-year-old. Whether her belief, what rational people would call a baseless assumption, that he stole her phone was based on his race, his age or something else is unclear. What is absolutely clear is that her interview, even under the withering questioning of Gayle King, was a fiasco. Continue reading →

Tainted By Trump? Leave The Judiciary Out Of It

As resignations come in, with less than two weeks left until regime change, from cabinet secretaries to social secretaries, the former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund queried when Trump judges would resign.

There are some confirmed Trump judges who, to be blunt, have no business on the bench. Too inexperienced to be entrusted to try their first case, they’re federal judges instead. It’s not merely goofy, but dangerously so. People lives and fortunes are in their unwashed hands, and being called “your honor” is no way to learn the basics of your craft. Continue reading →