It was one hell of a ride, from a bankrupt law firm and fending off disciplinary complaints to being a media darling. All it took was a sordid client available to take down a sordid president, and the boldness to play show pony to the hilt. It’s not that serious people took Michael Avenatti seriously, but that the desperate and disaffected would seize upon any hero they could find. For reasons they neglected to consider, lawyers tended not to be as easily swayed by his bluster as MSNBC pundits.

But Avenatti is now being blamed, to some extent, for undermining the significance of Christine Blasey Ford’s “credible” accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. Has he lost his luster? Did he overplay his hand. Is this the end of the Avenatti show?

The spotlight-stealing lawyer, who also represented Stormy Daniels, is responsible for drawing the media’s attention to Julie Swetnick, an alleged victim of Kavanaugh who told an inconsistent and unpersuasive story. Swetnick’s wild accusation provided cover for fence-sitting senators to overlook the more plausible allegation leveled by psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, and to declare that Kavanaugh was being subjected to false smears. Continue reading →

Maine Senator Susan Collins explained her reason for voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a 45 minute speech. Some will find her reasons sufficient, perhaps even persuasive. Some will not. But then, there are some for whom reasons have nothing to do with it. This matters.

One can discuss and debate with people who are working in the same world of facts and logic as others. One cannot engage in any productive discussion with a person whose grasp of the world is constrained by their irrational beliefs, as they can’t see any world except the one stuck in their delusion. Or as Alexis Grenell describes it, her “stupid uterus.”

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

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1. Beach week on the shores of Lake Erie was (and is) unthinkable.
2. Our quarterback went to Cornell, and everyone knows that only assholes attend that backwater.
3. We were forced to guzzle bottles of beer rather than kegs.
4. Because the males in our high school were only horny, we never understood that misogyny cannot be fully embraced without reading the sacred texts.
5. Unfortunately, our jocks were nice.
6. We didn’t have a guy like Mr. Judge, even though we had a fellow who danced the jerk to the National Anthem.
7. We settled things with fists rather than ice cubes.
8. We were so poorly educated that we thought the “Ivy League” was a description of jock itch.
9. We never learned to chant “Hoya Saxa” because Polish was the lingua franca of our school.
10. Due to my public school education, I failed to fully grasp the fact that flatulence existed at the Founding.

All the best,
RGK

With Kavanaugh set to be confirmed, despite the certainty that he, like the president who nominated him, will bring death and destruction upon us, wild stories began to emerge. This comes on top of the efforts of pundits like Linda Greenhouse deriding the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a bunch of partisan hacks in reaction to rulings that fail to meet her progressive desires, and in anticipation of the impact of Justice Neil Gorsuch and soon-to-be justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The most curious attack, which has swiftly entered myth stage, is that these justices are illegitimate because they reflect “minority rule.” The primary contention is that Trump, having failed to “win” the popular vote, a fundamental contortion of our electoral system, is an illegitimate president, and that Kavanaugh, expected to be confirmed by senators representing a minority based upon their state’s population or vote totals, will thus be doubly illegitimate.

Why does it matter? Because the theory is that they reflect a radical conservative view that strays from the “mainstream of American political life.” This myth has already found its way into a New York Times op-ed. Continue reading →

The arguments have been made, and made again, repeating truths and falsehoods as necessary, and usually ending in the same place.

The core problem behind all of this is a complete breakdown in the legitimacy of our public institutions. The Supreme Court is no longer a place where justices dispassionately rule on the Constitution. It’s a place where they cast predictable party-line votes. Therefore, senators no longer deliberate on nominees. They cast predictable party-line votes. The members of the public no longer reason with one another. They fall into predictable party-line formation and then invent post-hoc, bad-faith rationalizations to give cover to their ideologically driven positions (Drank too much! Bad temperament! Bad yearbook entry!).

The sky has been falling for quite a while now, even if it’s never actually fallen, and so the unduly passionate are certain that Kavanaugh is a hill worth dying on. Spare me the arguments why he is, as they only go in circles and that’s not the point. Whether he’s terrible for a litany of reasons or wonderful for the same reasons, the warriors in this battle have included my tribe, criminal defense lawyers, and revealed the lie. Continue reading →

As a high school student, I got a job as a “warm body.” That was the job title, legit. It was at the Rutgers University Tandem Van de Graaf Accelerator, a nuclear reactor of sorts, the law required there be someone there to mind it at all times. I got the lobster shift. My job duties were threefold: be there. Stay awake. Keep the liquid nitrogen canisters full so it didn’t melt down.

It was a great job, really. if you’ve never played with liquid nitrogen, you should. For a dumb high school kid, it was great fun. The rest of my time was spent hitting a tennis ball against the nuclear pile, reading magazines and watching TV. They gave me a radiation badge to find out after the fact whether I would glow in the dark. And they paid me to do this.

California has a new law requiring corporate boards to fill their quota of women. Maybe they have binders. Maybe they’ll find them from the phone book. But the law will require women on the board, and so women they will find the requisite numbers and put them on the board. Their qualifications are less than what was expected of me in high school. They need only have the correct genitalia, unless merely identifying as a woman will do, in which case they won’t even need that. Continue reading →

When my daughter* was in college, she showed me a paper she wrote for a required course about the auras surrounding people she knew and what they meant. It was, in my humble fatherly view, the best thing she’d ever written. We laughed and laughed about it, because it was brilliant and complete, utter bullshit. She knew it, but fed back to her prof the nonsense the prof wanted to hear.

The online magazine Quillete, derided as the intellectual dark web’s favorite heresy broker, broke a story about a scam perpetrated by some disaffected scholars who decided to validate the experiment first performed by NYU physics prof Alan Sokal.

Twenty years ago, Alan Sokal called postmodernism “fashionable nonsense.” Today, postmodernism isn’t a fashion—it’s our culture. A large proportion of the students at elite universities are now inducted into this cult of hate, ignorance, and pseudo-philosophy. Postmodernism is the unquestioned dogma of the literary intellectual class and the art establishment. It has taken over most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, and is even making inroads in STEM fields. It threatens to melt all of our intellectual traditions into the same oozing mush of political slogans and empty verbiage.

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There’s been much written about the Fifth Circuit’s en banc ruling in Alvarez v. Brownsville, condemning the holding that there is no right to be provided Brady material before taking a plea. The usual suspects raise the usual reasons.

How can that be? After all, plea bargaining is not some ancillary feature to the criminal-justice system. In many ways, it is the modern criminal-justice system. More than 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved through plea agreements in the state and federal systems. Jury trials, for all their ubiquity in American films and television shows, are now the exception instead of the rule. The result is a bureaucratized method of dispensing punishment, one that sometimes evades key protections for Americans’ constitutional rights.

The answer to the “how can that be” question is long and complex, and requires one to say things one’s not supposed to say. Or there’s the mythical version, for those who refuse to hear the things one’s not supposed to say. Continue reading →

As a tactical matter, it was smart of Liz Georges to begin by explaining why she wasn’t some graduate of the Twitter School of Law, but a person with credentials, worthy of credit.

The year after I graduated from one of the top law schools in the country I went to clerk for a Federal District Court Judge. I tell you this up front because I want you to understand that what I am about to tell you is not an uninformed statement.

But this is the only smart thing she did, and despite her somewhat vague establishment of credibility, what follows makes clear that whatever cred she might otherwise have enjoyed has been squandered on a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises. Continue reading →

It was a senior, Jacqueline L. Kellogg, who came up with the scheme, and what a scheme it was. The students had already been protesting over the confirmation hearing and demanded that Harvard toss its formerly beloved adjunct. But what could they do to more affirmatively go after the nemesis, their devil of the moment? Kellogg came up with the solution:

Jacqueline L. Kellogg ’19 — who said she has filed a complaint against Kavanaugh with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution — came up with the idea several days ago. She began urging fellow students to follow suit over the weekend, at one point sending an email to a group of students at the College and the Law School that offered specific instructions on how to bring a formal complaint to ODR.

A formal complaint? Was there a formal complaint for being hated because he was . . . hated? Continue reading →