Harvard Law lecturer Ian Samuel’s call to pack the court following Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement hasn’t met with resounding applause from people who aren’t blindly in denial of reality.

Most of the replies to me when I argue for court-packing are: “What if the Republicans retaliate, tit-for-tat?” From a game-theoretic perspective, the Republicans have already moved first (blocking Garland). Now the question is, should the *left* retaliate? Or just get played?

— Ian Samuel (@isamuel) July 5, 2018

Unfortunately, such emotional reactions as “just get played” work better when one doesn’t think too hard about it. Not only did Ian shoot his wad too early, given that the threat of court-packing when the White House and Congress are held by the other team isn’t a stroke of tactical brilliance, but even if he’d kept his idea to himself until such time as there was some remote possibility of it happening, it would merely give rise to a spiral of each side adding more justices to own the Court. Continue reading →

As Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh issued a memo in 1989 exempting government lawyers from state ethical codes. The subsequent outrage wasn’t so much about prosecutors engaging in unethical conduct, but Thornburgh’s position that they were beyond it. Congress subsequently “fixed” the problem by passing 28 U.S.C. § 530B, requiring compliance with state ethics codes.

This happened well before the ABA embraced social justice as its lodestar for attorney ethics by adding Rule 8.4(g) to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which has nothing to do with the practice of law and everything to do with political correctness. While the new rule is of little significance, given that states have largely rejected it, it remains a guiding star to woke of the legal academy, like Santa Clara lawprof Diane Klein.

At Dorf on Law, Klein raises the call for new lawyers from the Department of Justice to prosecute denaturalization cases. The gravamen of the initiative is to prosecute naturalized United States citizens who obtained their citizenship by fraud. Continue reading →

Few make a point with biting satire as well as Appellate Squawk, for which she’s already suffered the slings and arrows of her passionately insipid colleagues. But despite the misguided feelz of this once-brave corps of public defenders, since watered down by the invented conflicts that put lawyers at war with their own clients who were inadequately sensitive of the lawyers’ needs, as if public defense was for the sake of the lawyers, the Legal Aid Society held to its mission.

No more.

A recent communiqué from HR casually let fall that we’re now a “social justice organization” dedicated to the interests of “the most vulnerable.”

Some public defenders, particularly the young ones and the ones seeking to whip up their own popularity, have become fairly loud advocates of social justice. But the job of a public defender is to represent the indigent defendant. This includes the guilty as well as innocent, the nice as well as the vicious, the good, the bad and the ugly. Continue reading →

One of the problems with “faith-based” charities is that they’re faith based, as demonstrated by the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission’s rulings that the Downtown Hope Center, which provides shelter for homeless and battered women, engaged in discrimination.

According to commission records, Samantha Amanda Coyle, age 52 as per Coyle’s legal records identifying Coyle as Timothy Paul Coyle, filed a “public accommodation” discrimination complaint on Feb. 1 against the Downtown Hope Center located at 240 E. 3rd Ave regarding Coyle’s unsuccessful attempts to access the facility on Jan. 28 at night and on Jan. 29 prior to 5:45 p.m. when the shelter opens for admission.

Coyle’s complaint charges that Coyle was discriminated against based on “sex” and “gender identity” as per the Anchorage Municipal Code Section 5.20.050. Coyle states, “I am female and transgender and thus I belong to a protected class,” on the official complaint.

The response was Coyle was drunk. Continue reading →

With the president promising to announce his nominee for the Supreme Court mere days from now, Linda Greenhouse has taken to the papers to reiterate why the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch was the worst ever, and why there is no excuse for the next nominee to not answer the one, the only, question that matters.

With the future of the court — indeed, of the Constitution as we know it — now at stake, it’s urgent for the senators and the public to understand that Mr. Gorsuch’s stonewalling of the Judiciary Committee was not consistent with historical practice and should not be viewed as a norm. Rather, it should be called out for what it was: a derogation of the democratic principle at the heart of Article III of the Constitution, the judiciary article that places the confirmation of life-tenured judicial nominees in the hands of the people’s representatives. Until recently, the modern confirmation process has assumed at least a modicum of substantive engagement between those representatives and the nominee.

She has a point, that Justice Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings weren’t exactly chatty. Then again, she ignores the tenor of the times, given that progressives were still outraged that Gorsuch “stole” the chair from Judge Merrick Garland, even though he was hanging in Denver at the time and had nothing to say about the denial of confirmation hearings in Washington. It also didn’t help that Democratic senators were haranguing Gorsuch over the “frozen truck driver” case, posed as man against corporations rather than law. Continue reading →

It usually surprises people that “serve and protect” on the side of a police cruiser is just a marketing ploy, not a duty. But if you are educated in the Detroit public schools, it might not matter as you can’t read what it says on the side of the RMP because the educational conditions are so atrocious, overcrowding, lack of teachers, vermin and worse, that schools fail to provide the opportunity of literacy.

An outrage? Absolutely, particularly given the fact that education isn’t some vague gimme, but something paid for through taxes. Unlike the myriad cries of newfound “rights,” like the right to health care, it hardly seems like a stretch to expect a right to something the government takes money to provide. Then again, it’s not as if the cops are free.

The question was posed in Gary B. v. Snyder before Judge Stephen J. Murphy III in the Eastern District of Michigan. Notably, the question was not a “right to literacy,” which is an outcome and beyond anything the government can guarantee, but rather the right to access to literacy, the opportunity to learn to read. In almost every discussion of rights these days, this critical distinction is missed. And there is little doubt that kids in Detroit were being denied the opportunity, regardless of what they might make of it. Continue reading →

Other nations celebrate national holidays without rancor, as did we until something snapped. How did it become horrible and exhausting to take pride in one’s country, to celebrate its founding and singular dedication to freedom beyond every other nation that’s ever existed?*

First, a little history. The original Constitution of 1787 was, for all its genius, a deeply self-contradictory document — a charter by and for a free people who enslaved hundreds of thousands of others. In 1776, America’s founders declared that human equality was not only a self-evident truth, but a fundamental premise of their new nation; barely a decade later, they officially rejected that premise, writing inequality and subjugation directly into the Constitution.**

There was no “original Constitution,” but the Articles of Confederation. It was hardly genius, but a stop-gap measure that failed miserably because it failed to provide for a federal government capable of binding together the 13 colonies and fulfilling its function. And the language relied upon came not from the Articles of Confederation, nor even the later-ratified Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence, that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  Continue reading →

When Hillary Clinton ran for the presidency, one accusation thrown at her was that, as a lawyer, she defended a rapist. “She was a rapist lawyer!” shrieked the fools. Even worse, she wasn’t doing so as a public defender, compelled by her position to take on such a horrible client, but she chose to do so. What did it prove about Hillary? That she was a lawyer.

The New York Times published a news story, a distinction that’s growing less meaningful by the minute, about the lawyer who would be so scummy, so awful, as to defend “Infowars” Alex Jones. Who would be such a disgusting horrifying lawyer?

Lawyers for Neo-Nazi to Defend Alex Jones in Sandy Hook Case

The lawyers have names: Marc Randazza and his associate, Jay Wolman. If Marco’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s been written about here numerous times. He’s my friend. He’s my lawyer. He’s also Andrew Anglin’s lawyer. He’s represented the “sort of” people the New York Times would deign to call “good people.” He’s represented people the Times crowd despises. Just like Hillary representing a rapist. Just like me representing murderers and drug dealers. This is what lawyers do, represent the people in need of representation. Continue reading →

David Brooks points out some curious statistics about a growing division between Millennial men and women.

In 2016, female voters under 30 years old voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump 63 percent to 31 percent. Males in the same age cohort gave Clinton a much smaller edge, voting for her 46 percent to 42 percent. That’s a 17-point gender gap.

Since the election, the gap in leanings has gotten even bigger, as white male millennials have shifted to the G.O.P. A recent Pew survey of midterm party preference suggests that women under 35 tilt Democratic by an astounding 68 percent to 24 Republican. Men under 35 now tilt Republican 50 percent to 47 percent Democratic.

Continue reading →

The story doesn’t appear to be particularly complicated, even if there may be variations of it hidden behind Facebook and Twitter posts. Ellie Johnson was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, and did what students have done for a very long time.

An 18-year-old woman told Bloomington police Sunday that she was raped after a party Friday night.

The woman told police she and the man were messaging back-and-forth on a dating site before they decided to go to some parties together.

She said the two of them drank vodka throughout the night and were drunk when they returned to his apartment and had sex. She said she was too drunk to consent to sex.

Continue reading →