Politics

Last week I summarized Peter Arenella’s 1998 piece, The Perils of Legal Punditry. Among other things, Arenella argues that much of legal punditry is “Hot air that passes for legal commentary.” If you missed it, start here. I suggested that people don’t need lawyers to decode the news. I turned off my comments and added […]

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

An updated version of this blog post is here. Part I: Understanding Intolerance and Extremism In September 2024, I visited Chile for the national independence festivities and a reunion for my husband and his siblings. I learned that an 84-year-old in-law, who is one of the sweetest people I know, admired Augusto Pinochet. She was

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

Something unusual happened last week in the comments to my blog post. I logged in on Sunday to find more than 90 comments on my blog, some of them quite heated. I didn’t have the time to read them or moderate a heated discussion. I therefore disabled the comments. Initially, I removed about 25 comments.

The announcement that NBC / MSNBC hired former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor prompted an “open revolt” by MSNBC “stars,” who went directly to their TV and social media audiences to denounce the hiring because (among other things) McDaniel supported Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. In response to the revolt, the network executives

I am trying to change the focus of my blog. Instead of responding to the latest outrage (or debunking the latest conspiracy theory) I plan to go deeper into legal history to offer a better understanding of what is happening today. Last week I wrote about the Right to Vote. I left off when the

First, some business. I have finished the series about misinformation and outrage in what I have been calling the MSNBC-CNN-Left-Leaning-Social-Media outrage ecosystem. Since last week, I linked the parts together, added a few sections, and revamped the conclusion. The series begins here. *  *  * And now, for this week’s topic: The Right to Vote

The Misinformation-Outrage Cycle This is Part 6. It’s generally best to follow the advice given to Alice and the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.” But if you must read out of order, here are all the links: Part 1: There are

The Misinformation-Outrage Cycle This is Part 6. It’s generally best to follow the advice given to Alice and the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.” But if you must read out of order, here are all the links: Part 1: There are

“The more I think about it,” Heather Cox Richardson said this week, “the more it seems the main story of the past decade has been Russian disinformation to undermine U.S. democracy.” This was a notable comment because Richardson follows all the major political stories from the perspective of a political historian, and she has been

In the 1980s and earlier, the Republicans hated the former Soviet Union because, in the former Soviet Union, the government owned all the nation’s resources and industries. The Republicans believe all (or almost all) resources and industries should be privatized. When the Soviet Union broke up, the Russian Federation was established as a constitutional republic,