As a lawyer, I would line up a thousand law professors to write or sign on to an amicus brief supporting my side in an appeal. I would do the same with cute kittens if it would help me win. You see, unlike the prawfs, my job is to prevail, and I would use whatever support I could muster to do so, and despite everything I’m going to say below, if I can bootstrap their scholarly cred to my advantage, you can bet I will.

But that’s because I’m a lawyer, and my job isn’t to do what’s best for society but what’s best for my client. What’s their job? Georgia State lawprof Eric Segall raises some sobering questions at Mike Dorf’s blog.

As the impetus for his post appeared at the witness table before a House impeachment committee hearing, Eric wasted no time putting the players in their place. Continue reading →

The headline made a promise that E.J. Dionne failed to keep.

Impeachment and the lost art of persuasion

Is persuasion a “lost art”? Is the failure to change minds about the wrongfulness, the impeachability, of Trump’s conduct a “lost are of persuasion” problem? Dionne makes his proffer.

The genius of the civil rights movement of the 1960s is that it really did bring home the nature of racial injustice in our country. The Great Recession and the agitation of Occupy Wall Street and other groups altered the way we discuss economic inequality. The feminist movement transformed the way we think about gender roles, while the movement for LGBTQ rights revolutionized our view of sexual identity. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shifted the debate about guns in fundamental ways.

Are you persuaded yet? Wait, there’s more. Continue reading →

Between 2017 and 2018, there were almost 6,000 “sexual assault” “incidents.” Sexual assault?Incidents? How horrifying and exhausting it must have been for Uber drivers to suffer such incidents. But maybe you wonder what the hell are these “incidents”?

The results on sexual assault are disturbing: nearly 6,000 incidents in 2017 and 2018 combined, ranging from “nonconsensual touching” to rape.

The basis for this claim is unclear, as the Uber safety report doesn’t quite say this, not that anyone is supposed to actually look at the report rather than just take Alexandrea J. Ravenelle’s word for it. After all, shouldn’t we believe the women?

But the language, and the peripheral ideas surrounding it, gets increasingly squishy and meaningless as it goes on. Continue reading →

DNA has been both miracle and curse to criminal law. It can prove innocence, and may be useful in proving guilt. But it comes with a great many issues as well, such as the fact that DNA likes to travel and won’t stay where we want it to stay, whether in the lab or the street. Without recognition of the problems, the miracle can prove dangerous and deceptive. Even gold standards tarnish.

What many may not realize is that DNA testing takes time, both to handle it well and avoid contamination and to just perform the analysis. It’s one of the reasons that testing isn’t as quick and easy as people imagine. But what if it could be done quickly, when the trail was still hot? It could mean an innocent didn’t spend needlessly long time in jail, or under threat of prosecution, and the perpetrator of a heinous crime could be arrested before he harmed someone else. Wouldn’t this be great? Continue reading →

The downfall of Alex Kozinski was stunning. From adored Ninth Circuit judge to pariah, even at the hands of the same people who were all too happy to bask in his reflected glory until they turned on him in outrage, Koz deserves no sympathy, as he brought it on himself, even if he might have thought his brilliance as a jurist would excuse his awfulness as a person.

When he resigned from the federal bench, the complaints about his conduct as a federal judge came to their natural end. Its outcome, at worst, would have been the end of his position as a judge, and since he was no longer a judge, there was no purpose to be served in pursuing an investigation. Or was there?

Last year, the first step in the rehabbing his reputation began when he appeared as a co-author on an appellate brief on behalf of the heirs of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, in their case claiming the Oscar Award-winning movie “The Shape of Water” stole copyrighted parts of Zindel’s “Let Me Hear You Whisper.” Now it’s reported that he’ll be returning to the Ninth Circuit in an oral argument in that case. Continue reading →

Much to the chagrin of the unduly passionate, black women just aren’t always on the right side of history. After all, how is it even possible that the terminally deluded have to do the dirty work of seizing the microphone lest they be complicit?

https://twitter.com/MaxLewisTV/status/1202364112237453313

As Robby Soave explains at Reason, even black women elected to office are subject to being silenced when they just don’t get it. Continue reading →

The New York Times thought it editorial worthy to call for Mayor Pete Buttigieg to disclose his work for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The problem is that while Buttigieg raises it to show that his start was in the private sector, and he’s got some real world chops, he won’t say which companies he consulted with or what he did for them.

In various interviews, he has said working at McKinsey taught him about the power of big data, that it taught him “street smarts,” and that it convinced him to enter public service.

The reason is that Buttigieg is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. The Times doesn’t seem to care. Continue reading →

The holiday spirit lit up Mud Lick, Alabama like the warm glow of lights from a Christmas tree. This was Sheriff Roy’s favorite time of the year. Though snow wasn’t common that deep in the South, all the residents took great care in meticulously decorating their homes and storefronts. Holiday music rang through the speakers at the local Value-Lot.

A modest Christmas tree sat in the corner of the Sheriff’s Department bullpen. Sheriff Roy bought doughnuts with red and green icing that morning, and he nibbled on one as he wrapped his Secret Santa present: a copy of Scott Adams’ “Win Bigly.”

Sheriff Templeton’s festive mood was suddenly jolted by his phone ringing. It was Deputy Miranda. Continue reading →

There will be more information coming, possibly between these words are written and the time it’s published. But there are two things that won’t change. A UPS driver, 27-year-old Frank Ordonez, and the as yet unidentified driver of a car stuck in traffic on Miramar Highway, won’t be coming home for dinner tonight.

(Taimy Alvarez / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Two armed men attempted to rob a Coral Gable jewelry store. Who they were is unknown. Why they decided that robbing a jewelry store was a good idea is similarly unknown. Contrary to the fantasy rationalizations of the unduly passionate, sometimes the reason is that there are bad dudes who do bad things for bad reasons. People are funny that way, and regardless of whom these two robbers turn out to be, what they did was tragically bad, for themselves and two other human beings who won’t make it home for dinner. Continue reading →

In an op-ed, competitive cyclist and philosophy prof Rachel McKinnon stands her ground.

Soon after my win, Donald Trump Jr. threw a Twitter tantrum about me. I’ve seen a huge uptick in the volume of hate mail I’ve received in the weeks since. I have four people who monitor my Instagram to delete hateful messages; they’ve been overwhelmed by the volume. Twitter is far worse. I’ve received death threats, but I try not to dwell on them.

McKinnon is transgender and, having won a gold medal in a race, has been the target of hatred for “cheating” by being born a man and competing as a woman. But she didn’t cheat. Not at all.

Many want me to race against men. I have news for them: I’m not allowed. I’m legally female. My birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, U.S. permanent resident card, medical records and my racing license all have an “F” on them. The Union Cycliste Internationale, USACycling, Cycling Canada, the Canadian and United States governments and the state of South Carolina all agree that I’m female. Continue reading →