Loudoun County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., represents the contentious zeitgeist bedeviling the body politic. As I reported elsewhere last year, the Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war in which concerned parents oppose leftist indoctrination posing as curriculum.
Nothing better exemplifies the Gramscian “long march through the institutions” than the role of the American Bar Association in transforming America’s legal establishment.
An unusual U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that religious social services agencies are protected under the First Amendment, despite municipal allegations that religious views open gateways to discrimination.
President Joe Biden has for decades depicted himself as a blue-collar guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and part of his political persona is an appeal to the lunch bucket crowd—working-class voters.
SAN ANTONIO – Most people can only fantasize about getting paid tens of thousands of dollars to kick back and read the newspaper. For the controversial Mikal Watts, however, it seems to be a reality.
The non-profit National Rifle Association, founded in 1871, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” With nearly five million members, the NRA is also one of the nation’s largest and most influential organizations, promoting the safe ownership and use of firearms. Through its affiliated foundation (a tax-exempt entity formed in 1990), political advocacy arm (the Institute for Legislative Action), publications, and programs, the NRA is widely regarded as the leading champion of the rights of gun owners. The NRA’s mission is “preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” Disclosure: I am a Life Member of the NRA.
When the U.S. Department of Justice—at the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr—announced on May 7 that it was dropping all charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor’s years-long legal nightmare finally ended. The nightmare began on January 24, 2017, when hyper-partisan FBI agent Peter Strzok (subsequently fired), acting on the instructions of FBI Director James Comey (subsequently fired), improperly met with the newly-appointed National Security Advisor at the White House—without counsel and on a pretense—to conduct an “ambush” interview lacking any legitimate investigatory predicate. Comey later acknowledged that the FBI took advantage of “chaos” in the early days of the Trump administration by deciding not to coordinate with the White House Counsel or the DOJ before conducting Flynn’s interview.
The Equal Rights Amendment, a topic I’ve previously discussed in the form of a retrospective on Phyllis Schlafly, is back in the news. The occasion for this déjà vu is the newly-woke Virginia legislature’s recent ratification of the measure, which was proposed by Congress way back in 1972. The ERA pre-dates Saturday Night Fever, Charlie’s Angels, and the death of Elvis! In January, the Democratic majorities in the Old Dominion’s statehouse purported to give the ERA—long thought to be moribund—a new lease on life when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it.
Barack Ferrazzano is proud to announce Vault — an industry leader in providing law-firm research to potential job candidates — has once again recognized the Firm.
A prior post (entitled “Who Runs the Legal Academy?”) attracted some much-needed attention from other sites, including Overlawyered.com, Instapundit, and the Tom Woods Show. The governance of law schools, although not a secret, is poorly-understood and seldom discussed. This lack of transparency empowers—or at least emboldens—some of the behind-the-scenes influencers to take unreasonable positions and to pursue self-interested goals that are contrary to the ostensible objective of training students to be effective and ethical lawyers. The result is a dysfunctional legal academy.
Americans are being sold a dangerous bill of goods by those who promise that lawsuits provide a viable solution to addressing coastal erosion, rising sea levels and other challenges associated with global climate change.
My law school years (1977-80) at the University of Texas were, in hindsight, close to idyllic. I loved my first-year professors, tuition at UT was dirt cheap, Austin was a wonderful place to live, and I reveled in the “college town” ambience, which was new to me. (Prior to arriving at UT, I had never attended a college football game. During my first year—when the Longhorns went undefeated in the regular season and Earl Campbell won the Heisman Trophy–I had season tickets on the 50-yard line at UT’s gigantic Memorial Stadium, for a pittance that even a broke law student could afford.) The post-game victory spectacle—honking horns on the Drag and the Tower lit up in orange—formed indelible memories.
The Supreme Court will hear oral argument today [February 26] in one of the term’s most important—and highly publicized—cases, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31. As many readers are aware, the case involves the constitutionality of “agency shop” arrangements in public sector collective bargaining agreements, which compel non-member employees to make payments in lieu of union dues as a condition of their employment. Agency shop clauses are commonly used in public-sector labor contracts, enabling powerful unions representing teachers and other government employees to collect large sums of money from workers who never consented to such exactions (and who, for that matter, never voted in favor of union representation).
Mark Pulliam analyzes the baseless and politically-motivated prosecution of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, exploring the disturbing collusion between the news media and the special prosecutors.
On November 4, 2014, when the 51-year-old Ken Paxton was triumphantly elected Attorney General of Texas, defeating his Democrat opponent, the euphoniously named Sam Houston, by over 20 percentage points, the conservative movement in the Lone Star State had a new rising star. Paxton’s enemies were worried; the Tea Party favorite, an impressive University of Virginia law school graduate, seemed bound for the Governor’s mansion, a prospect that made the state’s centrist GOP Establishment aghast. Paxton’s political career had been nothing short of meteoric. First elected to public office in 2002 with the support of grass-roots activists and evangelicals, Paxton represented his suburban Dallas district in the Texas House of Representatives for a decade before winning a coveted promotion to the exclusive 31-member Texas Senate in 2012.
