It’s unknown whether George Santayana was into schadenfreude, but if he was, he’d be laughing his butt off now. As he famously said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” And who better than a bunch of whiny history Ph.D.s would come along to prove his point.

Also in the Chronicle in May, Daniel Bessner of the University of Washington and Michael Brenes of Yale University deplore without defining “the neoliberalization of the university system.” The definition presumably is obvious to all inhabitants of the academic bubble, where “neoliberals” are disdained as respecters of market forces — supply, demand, etc. Citing a 1972 New York Times report on “an oversupply of trained historians,” they say “for nearly a half-century, historians have failed to organize to halt the disappearance of positions,” which they blame on “unnecessary neoliberal austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification” and “boot-strappism and market-Darwinism.”

I’m not so arrogant as to think I could explain this “jumble of jargon” better than George Will. Continue reading →

Here’s the kicker: most of the defendants awaiting trial or disposition shouldn’t be held in lieu of bail in the first place. For years, I’ve pointed out that judges have the power, if not the guts, to say no to the baby prosecutors who staff the arraignment parts and request “dumb” bail for defendants charged with petty offenses.

That $500 bail for the kid charged with misdemeanor weed possession may be trivial to the ADA and judge, but it’s $479 more than his mother can put together. So the kid sits, at shockingly substantial public expense that could buy him a suite in the George V, where he misses school or loses his job.

No, not all of them, as if that’s the only thing that matters, but many. All because some number popped into the baby ADA’s head and the judge, worried that his puss would appear on the front page of the New York Post as the Worst Judge in New York should the defendant go out and slaughter a busload of Catholic school students. Continue reading →

Tuesday I saw an abomination at my son’s day care. It stood in the lobby, taller than both of us, green, and covered in lights. Someone put a fucking Christmas tree up on November 12th.

Did I miss a memo? Are we no longer even putting Thanksgiving in the calendar as a holiday? Why are we going from Halloween straight to Christmas now? This is the fault of those fucking millennials, isn’t it?

Thanksgiving is an important holiday on the calendar. It’s the one time of the year when we celebrate the greatest of all things American: eating massive amounts of food, imbibing beverages of all sorts, getting into arguments with your uncle who posts stupid shit on Facebook, and eventually falling asleep on the couch watching football. Continue reading →

I have been a Magistrate Judge, a Chief District Judge and now a Senior District Judge. I have clerked at the Eighth Circuit and sat as a judge at that court by designation. I have had the pleasure of handling cases in several other district courts in the Eighth Circuit. I have appreciated more than I can explain the judicial collegiality that I have always experienced in the District of Nebraska and in the Eighth Circuit more generally. Sadly, however, I have now seen a Chief District Judge in the Southern District of Florida murder judicial collegiality. It makes me want to vomit.

Consider, please, footnote 2 to an opinion of Chief District Judge K. Michael Moore of the Southern District of Florida adopting in part and rejecting in part a report and recommendation submitted by Magistrate Judge Lisette M. Reid in a pro se case.[i] Here is the footnote: Continue reading →

One explanation for fake news flourishing on both sides of the political divide is partisanship. People seize whatever supports their tribe, cling to it for dear life, repeat it as if a mantra and await the inevitable win. While we clearly see “fake news” that supports the other team, our team’s news isn’t fake.

As we’re constantly informed, people on our team are, by definition, so very smart, so very astute, and their great superpower is their critical thinking skills, allowing them to know truth, to know better than all of humanity up to this very moment in history how to fix all of society’s intractable problems. Surely our team would never believe fake news like the other team.

Or are people just saying that, but really too lazy to think? Continue reading →

At the outset, it’s worthwhile to note that the concerns come from the top, the brass, the chief of police of a very progressive place, Burlington, Vermont. The reason this matters is that the rank and file police officer often feels that the brass doesn’t get their problems, has been off the street for far too long to be relevant, and can easily talk about theory when they aren’t dealing with violent criminals who could, in a split second, take their life.

In other words, it’s easy to talk about what cops should do when you’re sitting in the comfy big chair in a sweet corner office, but it’s a lot harder when you’re the guy staring at the knife. And it’s your spouse, your kids, who will live without you should things go south. The chief will pay a condolence call, maybe say that you were a hero at your funeral, but it will still be you in the box when they wipe the dirt from their hands and walk away from the grave.

With that caveat, Burlington, Vermont, Chief of Police Brandon del Pozo has a good point. Continue reading →

Why did a silly apology by a bunch of students playing journalists at Northwestern become a national story? The underlying story of students protesting Jeff Sessions was one thing, but it’s become commonplace for students to protest and silence despised speakers on campus, even as their natural apologists deny it still happens or rationalize that it’s just the usual nature of things, to use force to silence others invited to speak.

The protests against Sessions were not entirely insignificant but hardly earth-shattering. The Daily Northwestern’s reaction however, was not merely “new,” but a paradigm shift that no one hoped would happen. And yet, many dreaded would happen.

After the event, Ying Dai, one of the students, saw a photo of herself on his Twitter feed — sprawled painfully on the floor — and addressed him directly. Continue reading →

To call Chesa Boudin an odd choice for district attorney would be a monumental understatement. The former public defender is no doubt brilliant, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad, but he doesn’t exactly come from a family that dreamed of his some day putting people in prison.

Boudin was 14 months old when his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, members of the domestic-terror group Weather Underground, dropped him off at a baby-sitter’s Oct. 2, 1981, and helped pull off the heinous heist in Nanuet in Rockland County.

Nyack police Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown, as well as Brink’s guard Peter Paige, were killed in the robbery and its aftermath nearly four decades ago.

Continue reading →

Without explanation, as is usually the case although it would not have been surprising had there been a dissent offering some explanation, the Supreme Court denied cert in Remington Arms v. Soto. This means the Connecticut Supreme Court’s reversal of the trial court’s dismissal on the pleadings will stand, and the case will move forward to discovery.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act generally prohibits such suit. But it contains an exception for cases where the manufacturer or dealer “violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm….” It then lists examples, involving failures in record-keeping or sale to a prohibited person. The Second and Ninth Circuit had interpreted the exception in light of the examples listed, as limited to knowing violation of laws specifically directed at gun commerce.

Plaintiffs argued, and the CT Supremes agreed, that they could thus sue under the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which bans unfair competition and “unfair or deceptive acts” in advertising. The advertising in question was Bushmaster’s military theme to its advertising, “when you need to perform under pressure, Bushmaster delivers,” “Opposition, bow down,” etc. The CT Supremes held that “unfair” includes “unethical” advertising, and “unethical” includes essentially advertising for anti-social purposes, and that the ads could be interpreted as that.

Continue reading →

In the scheme of Democratic nominees, Joe Biden’s the savior of moderation, the old white “reasonable” guy. And compared to some of the more outlandish proposals to reinvent America, that’s generally true. But what about the Joe Biden who was tasked by the Obama Administration with propounding a cheap and easy lie that thrilled the woke and, more importantly, cost nothing from the public fisk? As Emily Yoffe thoroughly documents, Biden wasn’t quite so moderate then.

Though his reputation rests on his moderation, Biden’s approach to campus sexual assault is part of a pattern: He identifies an actual problem, engages in inflammatory—and sometimes false—rhetoric about it, then fashions a harsh, overreaching response that sweeps up the harmless and even the innocent.

Biden was a leading drug warrior, calling for ever-more, ever-harsher, crimes and consequences. He’s since somewhat repudiated his earlier positions, and to be fair, pretty much everyone, black, white and especially blue, held the same views, that drugs were a blight on society and had to be eradicated at all costs. And cost they did, both to fight the war and in the consequences for human beings, many of whom remain imprisoned for life plus cancer in the Rockefellian fantasy that just one more Draconian decade in prison will make drugs go away. Continue reading →