As some of the cooler heads have pointed out, the practical effect of New York’s new and improved abortion regime is basically nil.  But ideologically it has a lot of oompf. How so?  New York “liberalized” its abortion law in 1970, three years before the SCOTUS weighed in saying that the constitutional due process “right to privacy” was “broad” enough to encompass, you know, abortion.  How did New York do that?  Not by saying that…

We wrote this almost 4 years ago.  Never published it.  This seemed to be an appropriate moment:   I haven’t weighed in on this for a number of reasons; but like a lot of high profile cases it has a larger significance because so many people are aware of it and have opinions. I’m not familiar with the evidence and don’t really want to go down that road, but I’ve formed some opinions based…

What’s the connection?  Perhaps some astute reader will figure it out and comment. We quote: The tonsillectomy epidemic also fell on my own family according to generation.  My father, born in Norway just after the turn of the century, escaped the procedure entirely, as did most of his generation.  I was not so lucky.  In the late 1930’s my family lived in Bellows Falls, Vermont, and at the age of five I underwent my…

One of the consequences of the prevalence of former prosecutors being judges (and “prevalence” is putting it mildly – almost all judges were prosecutors at one point or another) is that the prosecutor mindset comes to dominate the judiciary. Yes, there’s a mindset.  We freely admit we don’t have it, and have often remarked that we could never have been a prosecutor. It is the prosecutor mindset that places a higher value on “finality” than…

We thought we should briefly revisit our earlier post regarding People v. Tiger, a very unfortunate case from the New York Court of Appeals.  And we may revisit that case again, for other reasons.  But we have a particular reason in mind this morning. One of the things a judge explicitly tells a criminal defendant when they are pleading guilty is that there is no difference between the conviction that results from a guilty plea…

Just thought we might cut to the chase on the whole Trump-y thing.  Here’s the dynamic now that the House of Representatives has changed hands but the Senate has not: The “Mueller probe”, which is not a spacecraft or an uncomfortable medical procedure but rather an anomalous creature of the deep state to officially punish – and more importantly to officially discredit – those it doesn’t like, will finish up with a published report that…