Emeritus Harvard criminal law prof Alan Dershowitz has become a marginalized academic over the past few years, but upped his game when he undertook to play a neutral constitutional scholar on behalf of Team Trump in the impeachment “trial” in the Senate.

Part of that defense, in Dershowitz’s words, is that “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Those comments were immediately criticized — including by a number of law professors at Harvard University, where Dershowitz is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus — as meaning that a president can do virtually anything, as long as he or she believes it’s in the public interest. Continue reading →

The constitutionally dubious compromise solution to taking guns out of the hands of people whom family members or police deem dangerous, red flag laws, has claimed a backfire victim.

The law allows immediate family members, household members or law enforcement officers to file a petition requesting for someone’s guns to be seized on that basis that they’re a danger to themselves or others. If a judge agrees, that person’s guns may be taken away for a year.

Colorado has a red flag law, so Susan Holmes tried to use it against Colorado State University Cpl. Phillip Morris, who killed her son, Jeremy. Morris was cleared of wrongdoing in the killing. Continue reading →

Johnny Depp was an abused husband. So why did so many women rush to Amber Heard’s side when she claimed to be the abused spouse? Heard called Depp a “monster” who beat and choked her. How could that not be true?

The US actress alleged Depp, 55, left her fearing for her life after he choked her and ripped chunks out of her hair in more than a dozen violent altercations.

The details emerged yesterday as Heard, 32, asked a judge to dismiss a $50 million defamation lawsuit filed by Depp over an article she wrote in The Washington Post in December claiming to be a victim of domestic violence.

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People are always fascinated by high profile defendants, and assume that criminal defense lawyers who represent these defendants must be making bank. They want us to tell them the inside story, the titillating tale of how the famous have fallen. They always promise to keep it between “us,” as if we have some burning desire to reveal secrets for their amusement.

But the one assumption that never seems to go away is that the lawyers must be making a fortune representing a high profile defendant, especially when that person was fabulously wealthy. Elizabeth Holmes’ lawyers can explain why it just doesn’t work that way.

It’s been a minute since Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to found her so-called revolutionary blood-testing company, Theranos. Remember how she was supposed to be able to diagnose thousands of diseases and conditions with one drop of blood? It turned out it was all a fraud, her method didn’t work, and she was sending blood out to traditional labs for testing and not telling patients. That all imploded and her downfall was as swift as her ascension to the billion-dollar company valuation. Once the toast of Silicon Valley, these days she’s mired in lawsuits in multiple states and if reports are to be believed, cannot afford her attorneys.

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Not everyone is aware that the #MeToo “movement” didn’t arise organically. I had been told it was coming well before it happened, that there was a deliberate plan to circumvent the difficulties presented by the legal system, even the Title IX campus sex tribunals, because they required two things that proponents found too hard to address: Evidence and the possibility that their accusations might be tested.

When it started “happening,” meaning that it wasn’t just some crazy conspiracy theory but had metastasized into reality, I wrote about it. For the sake of time frame, this was before Alyssa Milano grabbed onto Tarana Burke’s 2006 coinage of Me Too. This wasn’t an accident, but a decision to elevate unproven accusation into indisputable “truth.” It was a decision that the cost of the “few” false accusations and ruination of innocents was unfortunate, but necessary, collateral damage. Continue reading →

At least they warned us.

https://twitter.com/decolonize_this/status/1222218010267734017

It wasn’t much of a warning, but it was as articulate as they could muster and certainly appeared to make their point. Continue reading →

I recently stumbled on a book with a rather horrendous title. The book is “I Wish My Kids Had Cancer: A Family Surviving The Autism Epidemic.” Michael Alan, the book’s author, apparently has two children with autism and the tome “intimately, honestly, and powerfully, addresses the emotional, social, financial, political and medical aspects of a family fighting for their very existence.”

The title is tone deaf. The premise is idiotic. This twelve-year-old book’s been bashed so many times that addressing it further would be like beating a dead horse until the corpse squeaks. I am not concerned with the book or its substance, however.

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Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring offered a curious quote upon his state’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, a mere 48 years after Congress enacted it and sent it into the wild for the states to do as they will.

For nearly 150 years, the Constitution did not acknowledge the existence of women. Now, 231 years since our country was founded and on the centennial anniversary of the nineteenth amendment, the American people have shown that they are as committed as ever to true equality by adopting the Equal Rights Amendment.

If the American people are committed to “true equality,” then the ERA wouldn’t be needed any more than a constitutional amendment is needed to give us a right to breathe air. But for a guy giving elapsed years, Herring missed the one that matters here, and Congress included in its preamble to the 28th Amendment that it had to be ratified within seven years, subsequently extended for an additional three years before the initial deadline elapsed. Continue reading →

When the nightly news showed the B-roll of Harvey Weinstein entering 100 Centre Street for trial, I cringed. There he was, enfeebled.

Maybe this once-robust man, whether sex-hound or rapist, needed to use the walker. It was said that back surgery required it. That could well be true. But it emitted the odor of trying way too hard to create an impression of a old, decrepit guy, too harmless to commit the crime with which he was charged, too pathetic to not evoke the sympathy of the jury. Continue reading →

The buzz was huge.Until the backlash.

“American Dirt,” a novel by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing to the United States to escape cartel violence, came out last week and seemed poised to become one of the year’s biggest books. It made its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover and for combined print and e-book fiction this week. But the book has also encountered a backlash, with Latinx writers and community members criticizing Cummins’s depiction of the migrant experience and accusing her of appropriating it for profit.

To be fair, the New York Times can’t help itself from using “Latinx,” since they hope to turn the 2% of Hispanics that favor the word into subscribers when they get out of college and pay off their student loans, or Bernie gets elected president, whichever comes first. Continue reading →