You have no right to author a government report to your specific liking. You do have a right as a Federal employee to engage in political action off the clock without repercussions in theory, so I sure hope everyone at CDC who hates this bullshit restraint on freedom of conscience and assault on honest, fact based…

Hi, former IP litigator/legal scholar here. Your source on the law is way off. Trademark law absolutely could cover the shape of the sandwich not just the word. You can register words, pictures, designs and combinations of all of the above. In all cases, what the business is asserting is that the particular expression…

It is interesting because I think at least some of this is ending as a generational thing. At the college I teach at now, a lot of the young women are constantly wearing outfits that would have gotten them a lecture in the 80s (or more recent if they were in a more conservative part of the country).. What’s cool is it…

I don’t know if this guy had surgery or just a second diagnosis/was willing to sign a waiver in his contract. Scott Fujita had something similar and surgery allowed him to play linebacker without major complications for years. The surgery is risky, though so he might not have done it.

The thinking on all the indictments so far has been that there’s a state law analog that is unpardonable and a friendly AG like Schneiderman in NY will take it up. Like for Flynn it could be the insane plot to kidnap and rendition the Turkish cleric. Not sure I buy it entirely but it is plausible.

Yep - and then they came back to create networks all over the country while terrorizing people in El Salvador to a point where it has the highest murder rate in the world. It is almost like it is ineffective to fight the war on drugs by deporting people without doing anything to end the financial incentive to sell…

There’s some evidence that in cities like Houston and Richmond California the police, when they go through a major overhaul of the system, stop shooting black people at a disproportionate rate relative to white people. So kinda, maybe, less racist? But even where departments say all the right things it is really hard…

This article explains the whole idea pretty well. The diversity lottery is meant to equalize the odds of otherwise qualified general applicants without regard to nation of origin. This is only for people who don’t qualify under various skill based plans that we have (whose numbers are set based on economic reports but…

Neither was I generally in IP cases since there’s no real liberal/conservative cleavage in the issues. I did see a little bit in employer/employee cases, which is backed up by the data, and in my own work there’s some suggestion that in civil rights based civil suits it maters. Still, it is a marginal effect and is a…

There are victim compensation funds in many states, but they are almost always grossly underfunded and at most pay for basic medical costs rather than pain and suffering the way you can get in a civil suit. There are different compensation models around the world, but our system is pretty tied in to the idea of…

Yes, just watching My Cousin Vinny would have prepared him for several of these questions better than he apparently was prepped by Trump’s people. Between this performance, the two who just got pulled and the sneering behavior of Gorsuch it seems the assumption is they could get 50 R votes for a rock in a suit, and…

Not only was I a litigator, I study district judges. Partisanship doesn’t matter generally (I couldn’t have told you who appointed most of the judges I appeared before based on their rulings), but it does influence how a judge approaches a lot of issues in subtle ways. Like how willing are they to restrict the…

Justice Jackson for the win. We really have drifted a long way from his sort of pragmatic realism - just see the OLC’s torture memos, which omitted any reference to Jackson’s opinions in Korematsu (the loaded gun of blessing authoritarian actions in war) or Youngstown Steel (the tripartite analysis of Presidential…

As someone who spent 8 years as a big firm litigator, I’d have to admit I didn’t first chair a trial to jury. Then again some of the partners who’d been with the firm 20 years in the same department bragged about avoiding it.

A little bit of menu a, a little bit of menu b. Joining the Federalist Society (which is the first stepping stone for most of these overwhelmingly terrible picks) is a conscious choice to reject the dominant view of law schools and legal scholars for the last 60 plus years that the law should be a pragmatic tool of…

Medicaid, with its 50 years of national models and state/local carve-outs, is a huge chunk of the page total. And the tax code - which is about 10 times bigger than it would be if corporations and their lobbyists didn’t use regulations as the path to create loopholes.

Oh no worries. I just hate the broad brush that gets used these days. I know some people of true faith, and while they often frustrate me I never doubt their sincerity and I don’t know one who would make the sort of claim Moore is doing.

That’s funny because I’ve read an advice piece on another site here (adequate man I think) that said do something like a hike or bike ride on the second date to get your date’s heart rate up - which stuck me as a) manipulative as fuck and b) having a high creep factor if you handled it wrong (“Wanna go ride into the…

It isn’t about religion per se. True faith is about acknowledging doubt, truly examining it and transcending it. There’s no room for doubt in Moore’s theology - or humility, or compassion, or basic human decency.

I dunno. I think he’ll just go back to the sweet scam he had after he got kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court the first time - running his mouth claiming to raise funds for a charity that is basically Roy Moore, Inc.