There are nine. There were seven seats. Four showed. Why? Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh and Barrett were present for the State of the Union address. As tradition dictates, they sat there stoic, hands folded in their laps, faces frozen, showing no reaction to the one hour and 47 minute speech. There was no reason for the four to be there.

Now would be a good time to put an end to the charade that the annual State of the Union address is a solemn occasion of civic ceremony. Although there have been moments in which the speech has seemed to serve such a function, it has always been primarily a vehicle of presidential and partisan boosterism.

Members of Congress and the Supreme Court have long been dragooned into playing along with the ruse. They should not continue to do so. They should stay home and let the president deliver his speech to a half-empty room of his most partisan supporters.

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There is no doubt that Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon harbors unduly kind feelings toward her patron, President Trump. Her bizarre prior rulings in the documents case, reversed by the Eleventh Circuit, leave no doubt. But that doesn’t mean she’s necessarily wrong.

A Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing President Trump’s mishandling of reams of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was her latest effort in the past several months to keep the public from seeing Mr. Smith’s sprawling report — one of the most significant parts of his twin prosecutions of Mr. Trump that has yet to see the light of the day.

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There’s no reason to explain why Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump was, as Ed Whelan called it, “stupid and vile.” The left lunatic Wall Street Journal characterized his rant as “arguably the worst moment of his Presidency,” which is hard to say given how many moments vie for the title.

But as Trump’s now favorite justice explained in his dissent, there are other statutes that permit a president to impose tariffs, and Trump immediately seized upon Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. § 2132) to impose a universal tariff of 10%, upped the next day to the maximum 15%, which can last 150 days, after which he will require congressional approval. While it’s true that § 122 is a mechanism for the imposition of ad valorem taxes, that does not mean that the statute authorized Trump to impose them at will. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, in a far off land of make believe, there were two roommates: a hippopotamus named Hoopy Doopy and a unicorn named Gumdrop.

Hoopy Doopy was from a quiet neighborhood and liked to do things most hippos enjoy: eat snacks, lay in the sun, swim and watch professional wrestling.

Gumdrop, on the other hand, was from a place he often referred to as “The Dark Side of the Tracks.” He didn’t know who his mother and father were, and often sought solace in the ministrations of a French ferret named Pierre, who regularly sold him a magical powder he swore would make Gumdrop more sociable. Continue reading →

With so many issues arising during the same week, from the unfurling of the Trump mugshot banner on the Department of Justice building to more murders on the high seas to the $10 billion in United States taxpayer funds being given without any lawful authority to the Trump vanity board, of which Trump will be chairman for life and eschewed by every democracy in the world, to repainting the fleet of airplanes in Trump’s favored palate to getting his stacked board to give final approval the enormous White House ballroom even though there are no final plans to the unauthorized war threatened against Iran to putatively stop its nuclear program that doesn’t exist because Trump already “obliterated” it, it’s understandable that this bit failed to make a banner headline on the front page.

At any other time, under any other president, it would have. And despite the plethora of daily outrages, it’s still worthy of recognition. Continue reading →

District of New Jersey Judge Michael E. Farbiarz directed the government to do something novel: Provide a list of every court order in the district since December 5th the government violated. The very notion of this would have been unimaginable, if not unappreciated, a year ago. But here we are.

In a response last week, Jordan Fox, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, filed an 11-page declaration describing 52 separate violations across 547 cases, describing them as accidental.

She wrote that detainees were transferred 17 times despite court orders prohibiting them from being moved. The moves took place “inadvertently due to logistical delays,” she wrote.

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I asked an AI chatbot to write a 500-word post about lawyers and AI for Simple Justice. This is what it wrote.

The Magic Box and the Lazy Lawyer

There is a certain type of lawyer who has always been looking for a shortcut. In the old days, they’d swipe a brief from a colleague, change the names, and hope the judge didn’t notice the different font on page twelve. Today, they have AI. They think they’ve found a magic box that does the “lawyering” for them so they can get back to their real passion: billing for work they didn’t actually do. Continue reading →

Bradley Heppner likely could have afforded to retain any lawyer of his choosing, having allegedly defrauded investors out of $150 million. But he chose a somewhat different path. Whether it was because he believed himself to be better, or more motivated, than a lawyer, or was just a hands-on kinda guy, who knows. but he took to Anthropic’s AI bot, Claude, to research and develop his defense, producing about 31 documents on the subject.

When the government executed a search warrant, guess who ended up with the 31 docs? SDNY  Judge Jed Rakoff held that they were not privileged.

It is well established that the attorney-client privilege attaches to, and protects from disclosure, “communications (1) between a client and his or her attorney (2) that are intended to be, and in fact were, kept confidential (3) for the purpose of obtaining or providing legal advice.” Courts construe the attorney-client privilege narrowly because it operates as an exception to the rule that “all relevant proof is essential” for a complete record and for “confidence in the fair administration of justice.” Continue reading →

Google Glass was a bust. It didn’t help that people wearing them were being beat up by people who didn’t want to be recorded by people wearing those butt-ugly things, even if they were going to Reinvent Law. How, exactly, they were going to be transformative was never clear, but the legal tech fans were sure they would because reasons. And then they unceremoniously disappeared because nobody wanted them.

A new miracle has found its way onto the scene with one distinct difference from the dreaded Google Glass.

Last summer, Tom Wong was working at the Chubby Crab, his family’s seafood boil restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, when a regular approached the counter. She ordered a combo — steamed clams instead of sausage, please — and ate it at a table near the door, muttering to herself in between bites. Continue reading →

It’s impossible not to have Artificial Intelligence, AI, touch your world anymore. How much so may be up in the air, but like it or not, tech’s fear of missing out has caused it to embrace AI, wanted or not. To a large extent, it’s background noise for many of us, with Google AI offering insipid, often irrelevant, replies to queries. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s having hallulus. Either way, it’s not a life or death matter, and so relying on it isn’t the end of the world.

Unless, of course, you’re a lawyer using AI to do your research or write your papers, in which case you’ve cheated your client out of competent representation in favor of easy money. Or a newspaper editor who wants quick, inexpensive, easily digestible stories, without regard to substance or accuracy. So what if the result is mediocre at best. Mediocrity is close enough for some, and better than many can produce by themselves. Continue reading →