Despite only being about 2% of the population, Jews were some of the first and strongest supporters of civil rights for black people. Remember the Freedom Riders? And yet, a link has been established between the oppressed people of Gaza and the oppressed black people, enough so that the pastors of black churches have issued a threat to President Biden.

As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month, a coalition of Black faith leaders is pressuring the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire — a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it. Continue reading →

After the jury awarded a total of $83.3 million, atop the $5.5 million awarded after the first trial that the defendant found unworthy of his appearance or testimony, Trump’s immediate response was that the award was “ridiculous” and he would appeal. Like any defendant, Trump has the right to an appeal to the Second Circuit, and if he’s demonstrated anything about his knowledge of law, it’s how to delay proceedings.

But what happens to this judgment in the meantime?

Mr. Trump can pay the $83.3 million to the court, which will hold the money while the appeal is pending. This is what he did last year when a jury ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $5.5 million in a related case. Continue reading →

Prefatory note: Everything in this post is true. It may seem preposterous to my Yankee friends but I swear I’m not making any of this up.

On January 11, I got one of the wildest voicemails and texts I’ve ever seen.

It was from my kids’ school system. They were closing schools due to high winds potentially affecting bus travel. I would later find out the bus drivers essentially revolted after a school bus in Tennessee overturned from high wind gusts. Still, they’re closing school for wind.

This would not be the most ludicrous thing to happen to me in the past two weeks. Continue reading →

Frankly, I haven’t a clue whether David French’s characterization of the Republican Party before Trump is accurate or idiosyncratic. It’s not that I dispute what he has to say, but just don’t know as it was never my party and, aside from its presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and John McCain, offered nothing to suggest that I would ever consider supporting it. But David did, and this is what he thought he was supporting.

If you had asked me to describe the Republican Party, I would have answered something like this: At our best, we are a party that possesses a distinct conservative ideology and a commitment to character. Continue reading →

The tit-for-tat messaging has become a ubiquitous tool of divisive politics. They did it to us so we’re going to do it to them and see how they like it. Hah! Sure, it’s infantile and invokes the logical fallacy of tu quoque, but it plays well with the perpetually outraged. It’s one thing to use this weapon for disputes that don’t involve constitutional rights, and another thing entirely to do what Tennessee is trying to do, trade off the right to vote with the right to keep and bear arms.

Tennessee, which imposes notoriously demanding requirements on residents with felony records seeking restoration of their voting rights, recently added a new wrinkle: Before supplicants who have not managed to obtain a pardon are allowed to vote again, they have to successfully seek restoration of their gun rights, a task that is complicated by the interaction between state and federal law. Given the difficulty of obtaining relief from the federal gun ban for people convicted of crimes punishable by more than a year of incarceration, this requirement would be prohibitive in practice.

Continue reading →

Not to question the wisdom of imposing a sentence of 100 hours of community service to be used telling people about the dangers of demon weed, plus two years probation, but by any measure, it was a remarkably lenient sentence for stabbing a man to death. And, not to speculate, had the killer been a man and the victim been a woman, it has all the makings of another Brock Turner case.

And the rationale for such leniency was a second hit on a bong.

Spejcher testified that she asked him for a hit from the bong. He prepared it for her and she inhaled. All she felt, she told the court, was ‘burning and coughing’. Continue reading →

My old buddy and fellow curmudgeon, Mark Herrmann, ponders whether there is any tactical benefit to the antics on display at the two current civil trials against Donald Trump. This is not the way most clients behave, or are instructed to behave by their lawyers, if they have any desire to obtain the best possible outcome.

Lawyers know that judges matter, so lawyers handle judges with kid gloves. Lawyers laugh at judges’ jokes. Lawyers tell their witnesses to obey the judge’s instructions: “Don’t fight with the judge. Do whatever the judge says. If the judge asks you a question, don’t evade; answer it directly. The jury will be watching; you cannot win a fight with the judge.” Continue reading →

The holding was that state legislatures had the authority to punish and remove “faithless electors,” the people who were putatively “elected” to the electoral college to fulfill the will of the people of a state by casting their ballot for the candidate chosen by their state’s voters. In 2016, there was a push to get electors to be something other than conduits for the voters, but to vote for the “right” candidate.

The cases that led to the decision involved electors in 2016 who had voted contrary to their pledge. Recognizing that Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, would not be elected president, these electors worked to rally enough Republican and Democratic electors to vote for a Republican candidate other than Donald Trump, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Continue reading →

The medical profession has not been immune from criticism about its treatment of patients based on race. Not being a physician, I have no personal knowledge of whether this is accurate. None of the physicians with whom I’m friends tell me they see it, but the stats suggest that medical outcomes differ significantly by race, so it’s hard to believe that judgment calls don’t play some role. And not a good role.

As a result, medical schools have emphasized DEI, some to the point of it being more important than medical knowledge and skills, which isn’t likely to do any patient, regardless of race, much good. If your doc respectfully uses your pronouns as you suffer with pain, no one is saved. And that metamorphosis is now coming to hospitals, like Milford Regional Medical Center in Massachusetts, which has established a policy of refusing to treat patients whose tone offends them. Continue reading →

Even though there are some monumental pressing problems facing American society at large, and Congress in particular, there is nothing wrong with any individual congressman proposing a law that addresses his personal peccadillo. After all, there is really never a good time to raise some truly petty issue, so now is as good as any. So who can blame California Rep. Ted Lieu for proposing the Glue Trap Prohibition Act of 2024 (“GTPA”) now, as wars are being fought, government is facing imminent shutdown and student debt is being shifted from borrowers to taxpayers?

But that doesn’t make it a good law. It doesn’t even make it a law within Congress’ ambit. It is one weird law, prohibiting both the sale and use of glue traps. If you somehow avoided your three felonies a day, this could swiftly up the ante. Continue reading →