IsThatLegal?

"Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also a lawyer."
-- Sparkey of "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing"
"Relentlessly sensible and often important."
-- Michael Froomkin of "discourse.net"

If you'd like to watch Judge A. Wallace Tashima's keynote address from the conference "Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered," delivered at the Japanese American National Museum on November 6, 2004, you can view it by going here and clicking on the first item listed under "Recent Programs."

Added bonus: You'll also hear Justice Stephen Breyer speaking extemporaneously in French!

A few excerpts from Judge Tashima's speech:

"How did it happen that thousands of Americans were uprooted and forcibly removed from their homes, sent into a desert exile, and detained in internment camps in their own country, without any charges being filed, without any trial being held, without the right to confront their accusers, without any hearing or judicial review, and held as prisoners by their own government for over three years? It happened, at least in part, because the federal courts, which were supposed to be the bulwark protecting the Constitution from an overzealous Executive, failed in fulfilling their mandate under Article III of the Constitution.

. . .

"There has been a revival of sorts in some extreme circles of the notion that the Japanese American internment was justified by the wartime record, and as being for the greater good and for the security of America. And, more importantly, that similar extreme measures of racially-motivated policies are similarly justified today in the so-called war against terrorism. I refer here, of course, to Michelle Malkin's recent book 'In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror.'

"It is not my purpose today to engage in a critique of Ms. Malkin's thesis, although I want to make it clear that I agree neither with its premises nor with its conclusion. . . . I mention the book only as symptomatic of the kind of thinking behind the Bush Administration's conduct of the war against terrorism.

. . .

"There is now a new and virulent strand of racism, touting the benefits of racial profiling, the wholesale 'internment' of race- and religion-based groups, and other racist policies, both as a historical matter, arguing that the WWII internment of Japanese Americans was fully justified, as well as advocating the adoption of similiar race-based policies in the current war against terrorism. That was too much, even for the Wall Street Journal, which had this to say in its October 1st edition: 'Varying the famous maxim, Ms. Malkin actually remembers the past but wants to condemn us to repeat it.'

...

"As much as it was 60 years ago, it is again up to the federal courts to protect the Constitution and the people's rights under the Constitution. For if the courts fail, as Korematsu has taught us, there is nowhere else to turn."

W.J. Hopwood, a frequent commenter here, had the following to say about hate crimes:

A crime is a crime. It reflects an intent to perform a criminal act for whatever reason. The guy beaten because he wouldn't give up his wallet is hurt just as much as one beaten for being gay. But what if the victim who wouldn't give up his wallet was also gay? Should the punishment be doubled? Is [another commenter] saying that punishment for assaulting a robbery victim only for his money should be less severe than for assaulting someone because of the victim's sexual orientation, or race, or creed, or ethnicity, or gender?

I reproduce this not because I think it's insightful, but because I know it to be a common--perhaps the most common--argument against criminal penalty enhancements for a perpetrator's motive of hatred for a crime victim's group.
Voiced in this way, the objection could not be more simple-minded and wrong. For purposes of punishment, a crime is most definitely not a crime. The fact is that the law already uncontroversially metes out different punishments for the same crime based on the motive of the person who commits it. To get the feel of this, compare these cases:

1. Murder
a. Bill intentionally administers a life-ending drug to his chronically (but not terminally) ill mother to put an end to what he perceives to be her otherwise unremediable suffering.
b. Ted intentionally administers a life-ending drug to his chronically (but not terminally) ill mother to collect his inheritance.

Let's assume that under a particular state's laws, both of these acts would constitute second-degree murder. Would anyone maintain that it's inappropriate for the law to punish Ted more harshly than Bill? Of course not. It would be entirely appropriate to punish Ted more severely for his bad motive (or, looking at it the other way, to mitigate Bill's punishment for his benign motive).

So it's perfectly clear that the criminal law quite uncontroversially punishes some offenders more harshly than others because of their motive.

Now consider another pair of cases:

2. Mail Fraud
a. Bill offers malpractice insurance to attorneys, but it's a scam. He bilks 5 attorneys out of $5000 each.
b. Ted offers long-term care insurance to elderly people afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, but it's a scam. He bilks five eighty-five-year-olds out of $5000 each.

Again, would anyone maintain that it'd be wrong for the law to treat Ted more harshly than Bill? Ted has chosen to seek out unusually vulnerable victims. Even if the dollar amount of the loss that Bill and Ted caused is the same, where is the problem with punishing Ted more severely for seeking out vulnerable victims?

So a crime is not a crime. The criminal law treats people more harshly for acting out of motives society deems especially culpable, just as it treats people more harshly for pursuing vulnerable victims. None of this, in the murder and mail fraud contexts, is controversial.

So why should it be any more controversial when the law enhances the punishment of an offender when he seeks out his victim on account of sexual orientation?

Now, one might argue that the motive of making a person suffer for being gay is no more culpable than the motive of making a person suffer for having a wallet with some cash in it. Or one might argue that society has no good reason to see gay people as more vulnerable to violence than any other group. Those are both policy-based objections to bias-motive-based sentencing enhancements. I myself think they're both wrong. But the point is that that's all they are: arguments about policy. They're a far cry from (and, of course, far less rhetorically attractive than) the usual silly arguments one hears about how "a crime is a crime."

John Allore points us to a nauseating development in the Wyoming murder prosecution of Aaron McKinney for killing Matthew Shepard in Laramie in 1998. Breaching a provision of the deal that spared him from the death penalty, McKinney (via ABC News's 20/20) is now telling a new story about killing Shepard that (very implausibly) denies any homophobic motivation.

Read the ABC News story. It's transparently bogus, a disgusting play for ratings.

UPDATE: What do I mean by "transparently bogus?" What I mean is this: There's nothing new here. The drug theory is not new. The defense contended at trial that McKinney's judgment was clouded by drug use. This claim about a "new" motivation for the crime completely ignores the fact that McKinney himself conceded at trial that a homosexual pass from the victim triggered a homicidal rage in him. (This was the lovely "homosexual panic" defense.) The very fact that the claim of "new" evidence is a claim about a new motivation for the crime defeats the notion that there's anything to this. What, did McKinney just recently develop this "new" motivation, or his awareness of it? Did the defense not have every bit as much access to McKinney's mental state at the trial in 1998 as they do now? And finally, there's nothing in the "new" claim that in any way calls into doubt the original theory that an important part of McKinney's motive was antigonism toward the victim because he was gay. If McKinney's violent rage was also exacerbated by methamphetamine use (or withdrawal), so what? That does nothing to undermine the fact--upon which McKinney himself relied at trial--that a homosexual advance was key to his violence.

So this ABC News report is--quite simply--crap. If ABC News was going to be party to a criminal defendant's breach of his promise not to go to the media again with his story, you'd think that they'd at least wait until a defendant came along whose new evidence actually amounted to something.

Judge A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit delivered the keynote address at my conference "Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered" at the Japanese American National Museum two weeks ago.

This Saturday, between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Eastern, C-SPAN will air Judge Tashima's speech as part of its "America and the Courts" series.

It's an excellent speech--a sober assessment of the current Administration's antiterrorism efforts, from the perspective of a judge who spent several years of his childhood in a WWII internment camp for Japanese Americans. This is not a speech that will warm the cockles of John Ashcroft's heart.

Oskar Schindler was a more complex and morally ambiguous man than Spielberg's depiction in "Schindler's List."

Not a big surprise, is it?

Speaking of Michelle (see below), I had to chuckle when I saw her touting the nation's Top Ten Conservative Colleges. "Wish I had known about them sooner!" says Pollyanna.

Does she really expect anyone to believe that the average person will get a better undergraduate education at Chancellor Jerry Falwell's Liberty University than s/he'll get at Oberlin College, where Malkin got her degree?

(Yes, I know: the image of Michelle Malkin as an Oberlin undergrad is pretty funny. What was her high school guidance counselor thinking?)

At reason.com, Cathy Young skewers Malkin, Coulter, and the Radical Revisionists of the Right:

The left’s obsession with America’s allegedly unique evilness, and in particular with real or imagined racism, has prompted a fully justified backlash. But that backlash can morph into an ugly and disturbing mind-set -- one that regards all efforts to confront America’s past wrongs as the province of sissy liberals and wild-eyed lefties.

As the revisionists plow ahead, sometimes one wants to ask, "Have you no sense of decency, folks, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Half of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust are now in a database searchable at Yad Vashem's website.

Placing this information online is a remarkable achievement.

There is also, inevitably, something empty about it. This is the information that the entry for my great uncle Leopold offers:

Full Record Details for Mueller Leopold

Last Name 	     	MUELLER
First Name 	     	LEOPOLD
First Name 	     	F
Date of Birth 	     	1889
Place of Permanent Residence 	     	BAD KISSINGEN,WUERZBURG UNTERFRANKEN,BAVARIA,GERMANY
Place of Death 	     	IZBICA,KRASNYSTAW,LUBLIN,POLAND
Victim's Status End WWII 	     	MISSING

There is also this Page of Testimony that my grandfather, Leopold's brother, filed with Yad Vashem:



And that's it.

Someday, there will be more.

As a former resident of Wyoming, I laughed at this image. It's not too terribly far from the truth.

Mistreating children, and meta-mistreating children, all in one livejournal photograph.

Few things I've posted here have triggered as nice a reader reaction as my recent post about not knowing (and eventually figuring out) what to say when we meet our heroes. In my case, it was meeting Glenn Tilbrook, formerly of the band Squeeze. But you all have your heroes, and maybe some of you have been lucky enough to meet them.

Here's a lovely coda to the story: Glenn Tilbrook himself had a similar experience, and sings about it, amusingly, here. (It's a video link.) Glenn sings a song about when he flubbed an interview with Randy Newman.

I suppose it's not terribly relevant to being Secretary of State, but still I hope somebody will ask Condi Rice what exactly it means to be a "Second Amendment absolutist."

. . .if the the evolutionary theory of natural selection is really true, shouldn't we be starting to see fewer flattened squirrels on our streets?

Eugene Volokh poses a hypothetical: "A wounded insurgent — not a member of a nation's armed forces or militias allied to a nation's armed forces — is no longer attacking you (naturally, it's quite permissible to kill wounded enemy soldiers who are still attacking you), but you are afraid that he might attack, might detonate some suicide bomb, or what have you. Is it a violation of the Geneva Convention to kill the person?"

Eugene's answer is "no." Phil Carter and Owen West appear to disagree.

I confess that I don't understand why our attention is only on the applicability of the Geneva Convention.

Let's say that Eugene is right: the Geneva Convention's guarantee of "adequate care" of wounded combatants does not apply to an insurgent who has violated the laws of war. Does that really solve the problem? For the fact is that the marine killed the insurgent by shooting him through the chest, rather than taking some other step to neutralize him short of killing him. Whether that was permissible would turn on the rules of engagement, wouldn't it?

I have no idea whether the rules of engagement in this particular context would countenance killing, or would demand something short of that. But that seems to me to be the a important question--more important, perhaps, than the question of whether the marine violated the Geneva Convention.

You want addictive? I got addictive.
The Livejournal Random Images Generator.
A site that goes on Livejournal.com and grabs the last 30 images that have been posted on public journal entries in users' journals and community journals.
WARNING: You are liable to see absolutely anything on this page. If you don't like that possibility, don't go there.

It occurs to me, after reading this, that my morning bagels are holey.

(Hat tip to buddy Brad.)

It is a measure, I guess, of how far behind the times I am that only yesterday did I learn of the phenomenon called "Craig's List."

Poking (as it were) around the personal ads on the Raleigh Craig's List, I came across this request for a "casual encounter."

I am such a square it's ridiculous.

Quick ... who do you think said this? No googling, please. That's cheating.

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

Major news outlets are running a story today about ceremonies in the United States to honor German war prisoners from WWII who died while in captivity in the United States and are buried here.

These ceremonies coincide with the German holiday of "Volkstrauertag" or "Remembrance Day," a day of remembrance of fallen German soldiers (of whom there are, tragically, many) and the victims of National Socialism.

I'm all for a moment to reflect on the memory of the men who died in the cause of spreading National Socialism around the globe. Only some of these POWs were supporters of the Nazis; many were young conscripts who undoubtedly cared little for Hitler's plans for world domination and racial purification. Even those among the dead who were Nazis led full human lives that included more than just their support for the Reich. It is fitting to remember these human lives.

What is not fitting, however, are the quoted comments of Lt. Col. Herbert Sladek, of Fort Benning's German Army liaison team, on the fallen Germans buried in the United States:

"They were educated in another time period, with another political guideline. In their opinion, they also fought for freedom, liberty and for their fatherland. That's why these people gave all they had -- their own lives."

You will not find a German publication or official who speaks of Vertrauerstag in this way, and with good reason. This day does not commemorate the cause for which these soldiers served, or the nobility of their efforts in support of a cause that in "their opinion" was just. They did not "also" fight for "freedom" and "liberty."

One can commemorate a fallen soldier's life without indulging the relativistic fantasy that every soldier who fights, fights for freedom.

... to Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy, whose blogging did not interfere with his getting tenure!

Ashcroft: "Who will rid me of these meddlesome judges?"

Can there be any doubt that the nature of Arafat's final illness is not being disclosed so that "the street" can come to believe that Israel killed him?

UPDATE, 11/13/04: Like I was saying.

How wonderful: overcombustion of fossil fuels causes the Arctic to thaw, which opens up access to ... new sources of fossil fuels!

If Mark Robert Walker's name were Abdul el-Oudouhn, somehow I think we'd be hearing a little more about him...

Back in '83, I went to see Marshall Crenshaw in concert. He was one of my faves at the time, and was touring in support of his second album Field Day. After the show, a friend and I went backstage waited in line to talk to him. When I got to the head of the line, I realized how silly it all was: what, after all, could I possibly have to talk about with Marshall Crenshaw? So I played the rock 'n roll maven and asked him what it had been like to work with record producer Steve Lillywhite, who was making something of a name for himself in those days. I don't remember how he replied, though I imagine he couldn't have said more than, "oh, he's great to work with." Then, after an uncomfortable silence, I said, "great show tonight," and walked away feeling like an idiot.

Last Thursday night history had a chance to repeat itself, except that the stakes were higher. An old high school friend and I drove an hour south of Los Angeles to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano to see my musical hero, Glenn Tilbrook, half of the songwriting duo that was the backbone of the band Squeeze. The audience couldn't have been more than 125 people--kind of sad, I guess, for a guy who used to fill Madison Square Garden--but it did leave me the possibility of sticking around and saying hello after the show. But I couldn't figure out what on earth I would say. The truth is that Glenn Tilbrook's songwriting and playing have brought me more joy over the last 25 years than I could possibly ever say. But I had nothing to chat with the guy about; we live in completely different worlds, and I'm just another guy who loves his music.

So, when my turn came, I offered my hand and said, "Glenn, I'm Eric. For twenty-five years I have wanted just to say 'thank you' for your music. Your music has brought me more joy than I could possibly say." He looked a bit stunned, smiled warmly, and said, "what a lovely thing to say." I said, "I guess you must know how much your music means to people," and he replied, "well it's all rather abstract, really, until somebody says something like you just said." I then offered him a concert poster to sign, which he did. My friend took our picture together. And I walked off with tears of--I don't know, gratitude? satisfaction?--in my eyes. Then I looked at the poster and noticed that instead of just signing his name, he had written, "For Eric, thank you very much for being so sweet. Glenn Tilbrook."


This time, as Glenn might have sung, the truth was my middle name.

Here is Greg Robinson's review of my conference "Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases of World War II on their 60th Anniversary," which was held this past Friday and Saturday in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum. The conference commemorated the various legal cases that grew from Japanese Americans' resistance to their internment, most of which were resolved in 1944.

The conference was among the best I have ever attended, in that it was both a learning experience and enormously inspiring.

The resisters/litigants panel was very effective, especially Fred Korematsu's presentation and that of the resisters, some of whom I had never met before. Eleanor Jackson Piel (on the right in the linked photo), former clerk to Judge Lous Goodman (whose photo is on the right in the linked picture), the sole jurist to acquit a set of Japanese American draft resisters, gave a compelling account of the circumstances he and she faced during the trial. (By chance I had a bit of time earlier that morning and headed for the JANM research room, where I found a clipping of a 1956 speech Judge Goodman delivered to the Japanese American Citizens League, in which he advised the organization to drop "Japanese" from its name--Eric was much amused).

The Saturday panels were all absorbing. Eric really whipped the lawyers into shape--they were concise and connected with the audience. The presentations on the morning panel, about the internment and draft resisters cases in their own time, taught me a lot.

At noon Judge A. Wallace Tashima gave a speech in which he did not mince words about what the Japanese American cases should be telling the administration about civil liberties in today's troubled climate. Chris Tashima, the judge's son, then followed through with a delightful film, "Day of Independence," which dramatized the power of baseball in camp life.

The afternoon panel had a stellar group of Asian American law professors who analyzed the events in a present-day context. At the risk of naming names (under the legal principle that to name one is to exclude--and hence piss off--the others) I would single out Jerry Kang and Neil Gotanda, who really showed critical legal theory at its best, and Eric Yamamoto for a rousing discourse.

The last panel was one of children of draft resisters and Supreme Court litigants. There was a lot of emotion, and people in the audience also shared some of their experiences. One of the amusing ironies coming from Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu's presentations is that their fathers' respective convictions (and thus bad "moral character" status) for challenging the evacuation of Japanese Americans was that Fred Koremasu was prevented from getting a license as a realtor but Gordon Hirabayashi was not prevented from becoming a Sociology professor! Evidently academia is not a position of trust requiring such evidence of "character"!

Here and trhoughout there was a worthy sense of the present and the immediate relevance of these events and analyses. One audience member even gave what one friend called a "St. Crispin's Day speech", urging people to get active and organize or write letters to make sure that the government does what it should to protect the civil liberties of Americans.

Incidentally, a number of audience memebers and Japanese American National Museum staffers referred to the Michelle Malkin book, and thanked me and Eric for our blogging efforts on this site. I signed some books for fans (sweet is fame!), and I saw Eric surrounded at one point by eager admirers, Eric's book in hand, asking him to sign.

The conference also testified to the power of art to convey messages. In addition to Chris Tashima's film, there was the stirring dance piece Jay Hirabayashi, with two colleagues, performed about his father. (As a Canadian, Jay included in his piece many references to the wartime experience of Japanese Canadians. I agreed with him afterwards that the audience might not know much about the experience of those in my adopted land. Later, in his panel discussion about his experience--whether in response to our chat or not I do not know--Jay gave the audience a capsule presentation on the JCs.) There was also a well-done reading of a play about Minoru Yasui written by his daughter Holly. This too had an interesting sequel for me. When I went up to congratulate the actors on their performance, Greg Watanabe, who played the lead, recognized my name from reading this blog (no doubt he pays particular attention to the exploits of people named Greg in relation to Japanese Americans!) and invited me out with the cast for a beer--I went and it was fun to talk to them!

Just back from Los Angeles. It was a lucky weekend.

After all, how often does a guy get to be photographed with not one but two of his heroes in the same weekend?

I'm in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum for a conference I've organized, "Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases of World War II on their 60th Anniversary." Here's a link to a pdf description of the conference, if you're interested.

Today we get underway at 1:30 p.m. with a panel of direct participants in the Japanese American cases of WWII.
Fred Korematsu (left) will speak, as will Lori Bannai, one of the attorneys who represented Korematsu in the 1980s in his successful effort to have his wartime conviction overturned. Gene Gressman, who was Justice Frank Murphy's law clerk in the 1943-44 Term and helped Murphy draft his justly famous Korematsu dissent, will also speak.



After a short break, Frank Emi (pictured, right) will speak. He was one of the organizers of the draft resistance movement at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming in 1944. Yosh Kuromiya, who was prosecuted for resisting the draft at Heart Mountain, and Gene Akutsu, who was prosecuted for resisting the draft at the Minidoka Relocation Center, will also speak. The final speaker will be Eleanor Jackson Piel, Esq., who in 1944 was the law clerk to federal Judge Louis Goodman of San Francisco. Goodman was the lone judge in 1944 (out of many who heard similar cases) to dismiss the charges against the internee draft resisters on the ground that prosecuting internees for resisting the draft was shocking to the conscience.



This evening conference attendees will be treated to an exclusive performance of "The Believer," a dance piece by Jay Hirabayashi, and "The Patriot," a play by Holly Yasui. Hirabayashi and Yasui are both children of men who took challenges to the government's wartime Japanese American policies to the U.S. Supreme Court. They (the fathers, that is) are pictured at left. Minoru Yasui, Holly's dad, is in the center and Gordon Hirabayashi, Jay's dad, is on the right. (Fred Korematsu is on the left.)



We have a full day tomorrow, including a brief ceremony honoring Michelle Malkin,^* but I'll write more about that later.




^*Just kidding.

Dave Kopel enters the blogosphere at the Volokh Conspiracy with an injudicious, ill-informed, and just plain nasty swipe at the administration of the Western New England College School of Law, where he gave a speech about the Second Amendment last Thursday.

He was invited by the law school's Federalist Society. It was a lunchtime speech. They served pizza. 55 students, out of an enrollment of 289, showed up for his talk.

It seems that some of the students in the Federalist Society told him that the event had been "sniped," by which they meant that a PMBR bar review meeting (also with pizza) had been inserted at the last minute by the school's administration to kill attendance at the Kopel's Second Amendment talk. Kopel was told that a Federalist Society member had overheard the PMBR representative tell someone that the school's administration had made the unusual request that he appear on short notice at a particular time, and that the time conflicted with the Second Amendment talk.

Without doing any of his own research, Kopel credits the double hearsay story from the Federalist Society as truth and then goes on to offer us something else he's heard about "4th tier" schools like WNEC:

A professor at another (mid-ranking) school once explained to me that political correctness and hostility to intellectual diversity are more intense at the lower-ranking law schools than at the higher-ranking schools. At the high end, the leftist faculty are influential in legal scholarship, and in the broader world. Accordingly, they can afford to be tolerant of a few conservative or libertarian faculty or students. But in the lower-ranking law schools, power over of the school itself is the only power the faculty have, and they are often especially rigid about attempting to suppress diverse points of view.

Finally, Kopel mentions WNEC's tuition and offers his advice that "the [WNEC] administration might offer the students a better value for the very hefty tuition if, instead of sniping Federalist events, the administration celebrated intellectual diversity, and stopped trying to distract its students from hearing non-Left points of view. Why not schedule campus programs so that students can attend both events, rather than having to miss one?"

There is so much wrong with this post that it's hard to know where to start. First, nearly twenty percent of the student body showed up for his talk. That's an incredible turnout for a lunchtime program on a legal theory topic, particularly at a school with a practically-minded student body like WNEC. It's hard to see what Kopel has to complain about. What was he expecting? That one out of every two WNEC students would build him into their busy schedules? Three out of every four? More?

Second, the "sniping" theory is transparently unlikely. The rival event that the school's administration supposedly cooked up was an informational session about bar review. Such an event would attract only a subset of third-year students. It would leave more than two thirds of the student body available to attend Kopel's talk. If this was really some sort of plan to divert interest from what Kopel sees as "Right" speech, it was an absurdly ineffective one.

Third, Kopel's elitist generalizations about life and intellectual climate at the lower-tier law schools sorely reflects the fact that his research extended to exactly one person (himself at a "mid-tier" school). I am an equal sample size; I spent my first four years in academia at the University of Wyoming College of Law and can attest that I have no idea what Kopel is talking about. I saw absolutely no evidence at UW of efforts by the faculty to suppress viewpoint diversity. I see much more of it in the slice of academia I now occupy than I did at UW.

Finally, Kopel didn't check out his story before publishing it, or ask the WNEC administrators he was maligning for any sort of explanation. I did. Here's what I learned: (a) Kopel said that WNEC does not graduate students in December. In fact it does. And those students take the bar in February, which is one reason why a fall-semester PMBR session was warranted. (b) WNEC's administrators do not do PMBR's scheduling; PMBR does. (c) PMBR chose the date and time of this event, knowing of the potential conflicts.

The Volokh Conspiracy's readership includes law students, potential employers of law students, and law school applicants. It's a shame that Western New England College School of Law had to take such an unjustified drubbing in that well-read forum.

In 1954, one of Wyoming's U.S. senators committed suicide rather than face re-election.

A very odd article about a very odd event.

Peter Friedman of Case Western Reserve's law school updates us on vote suppression efforts in Ohio. Interesting stuff.

Chief Justice Rehnquist was not back at work today, as he had predicted he'd be a week ago.

I have to assume that radiation and chemotherapy at any age--let alone at age 80--are very, very challenging. Again, I wish him the very best, and hope to see him back in the Chief's chair at center bench soon.

But I'm even more sure today than I was a week ago that his prediction of a return to the bench in a week's time was presidential politics, plain and simple.

If you know Los Angeles, and have any advice for how a person who doesn't know it well should spend an enjoyable Sunday, I'd be interested to hear it. Leave a comment.

Michael Froomkin is having some work done on his house. He reports the following:

The head painter, I’ll call him ‘Ernesto’, mentioned in imperfect English that he’d seen our Kerry-Edwards sign. Ernesto told us with quiet pride that this was going to be his first chance to vote here since immigrating from Honduras.

His first US vote ever would be cast for Kerry, Ernesto said. ‘Bush has not been good,’ he explained.

It is reported that Michelle Malkin read Froomkin's post and spontaneously combusted.