Why does the U.S. Supreme Court have so much power? This question came from a reader in Europe: I don’t understand how a Supreme Court can be as influential as it is in the U.S. Especially in these years, it seems very dangerous to put so much faith in 9 lifetime and politically appointed judges.

Welcome back to Everything You Ever Wanted To Know (and presumably more than you’ll ever need to know) about Criminal Law and Procedure. Last week, in Part 1, the Basics, I covered: What is a crime and how do we decide which behavior to criminalize? Types of Crimes When Rape Was a Property Crime Financial

Everything You Always Wanted To Know* about Criminal Law and Procedure. and presumably more than you’ll ever need to know I’ll be covering a lot of material, so take out your notebooks. Warning: This stuff is so interesting that you may start asking how to apply to law school. At the end there will be

All About Appeals This one is all about criminal appeals. It also includes insights into the life of a criminal appellate defense lawyer. I suspect that I’ve been getting questions lately on social media about appeals because of the news that Trump will be appealing his criminal convictions in the hush money case, but I

This will be about Crown v. Peter Zenger, so you know it will be fun. What? You’ve never heard of Peter Zenger? Well, read on. William Cosby served as the British colonial governor of New York from 1732 to 1735. New Yorkers despised him. He was described as “spiteful,” “greedy,” “jealous,” “dull,” and “haughty.” When New

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

The Ninth Amendment and The Law (and Politics) of Reproductive Rights If you thought legal and constitutional history was boring, you’re in for a surprise.  During the 1788 debates about whether to add a Bill of Rights, some people worried that including a Bill of Rights would give rise to the dangerous implication that the

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