This blog post could have been called “Why you don’t need a lawyer to answer your questions about legal issues in the news.” Mostly it’s about former TV pundit Peter Arenella’s scathing assessment of legal punditry published in 1998 in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. His piece, written 26 years ago, has renewed relevance

After I wrote this blog post, I realized it’s really about how laws evolve. Citations and sources for much of the material in this blog post are in this book. *  *  * During the 1788 debates about whether to add a Bill of Rights, some people worried that including a Bill of Rights would

Welcome to this week’s blog post, where I will (1) discuss the criminal liability for behaving like a gold-plated bucket of slime and (2) offer a few mind-bending legal puzzles. Two weeks ago, here, I laid out the facts as we know them in Trump’s Falsifying Business Records / Hush Money criminal case and offered

This post will build on last week’s post, where I laid out the facts as we know them and offered explainers on the law. If you missed it, start here. The Theory of the Case Good advocates organize their cases around a theme or focal point called the theory of the case. Because there are

It’s Trump’s first criminal trial, but not his first trial: a jury found him liable for sexual assault, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 felonies, and the State of New York won a $355 million civil fraud verdict against him, and more. But now we come to the first criminal proceeding against Trump himself. Any legal