Free Republic

New ads running in legal journals are warning lawyers: “Don’t lose your law license because of Trump.” After the 2020 election, legal watchdogs, outraged at some of their colleagues, filed scores of ethics complaints against lawyers who used their skills in questionable ways to help former President Donald J. Trump stay in power. And in the past few years, the groups have had some notable successes, securing judgments that have led to pro-Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani having their law licenses deactivated. Now, one of these groups — the 65 Project — is taking a more...

Then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, he invented a new form of what 19th-early 20th centuries Tammany boss George Washington Plunkett famously called “Honest Graft.” It was simple. Until 1977, Congress had to approve any settlement of a civil suit against the Federal government over $100,000. This preserved the Constitutional requirement that Congress control the government’s purse. But in that year, seeking relief from the burgeoning volume of suits to review, Congress removed the cap, handing the Justice Department a permanent blank check to pay settlements unilaterally, in any amount, out of an account known as the Judgment...

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday big-footed the brigadier general overseeing the war court at Guantanamo Bay and revoked the plea deals she had struck with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh-Mohammed and two co-conspirators, which took the death penalty off the table. We support Austin’s move, but what does tough-as-nails former prosecutor Kamala Harris, the anointed Democratic presidential nominee, think about this issue? It would be nice to know, should the press ever dare to ask her a question. There are a couple of reasons to wonder. The first is her brother-in-law Tony West’s role as a "key campaign adviser" to...

Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee has a track record of pushing for illegal aliens to practice law in California. According to a report by John Binder for Breitbart News, Harris was a leading advocate for allowing illegal alien invaders to become licensed lawyers in the state of California. It should be noted California is affectively sanctuary state illegal aliens are allowed to reside and move across the state with virtual impunity Vice President Kamala Harris, now running for the Democratic nomination for president, was once a top champion for allowing illegal aliens to become licensed attorneys in the...

Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on...

When last we left Hunter Biden and his legal team, they were busy being scorched by U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi in the California criminal tax case pending against Biden (and currently set to go to trial in September). As I noted in our reporting on the matter: But there's an even bigger problem with the motion than that: Biden's lawyers contended in the motion that Weiss only brought charges against Biden after he was appointed as Special Counsel. Which, as Scarsi very pointedly notes in his order, is false (emphasis mine): "The Court orders Mr. Biden’s counsel to...

When Donald Trump issued a ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries just a week into his presidency, Democratic attorneys general were caught off guard. They hadn’t expected the policy, long promised by Trump on the campaign trail, to materialize so quickly. Over the course of a few days, they scrambled to sue to stop the executive order, setting off four years of intense hostility between top Democratic lawyers and a Republican White House. Now, Democratic attorneys around the country are already gearing up for the possibility of a second Trump administration by beginning to map out an aggressive legal...

Four years after a protest over the murder of George Floyd, attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the City of Fort Lauderdale and Fort Lauderdale Police Department. The lawsuit alleges the civil rights of protesters were violated when police, without warning, dispersed tear gas into the crowd...

“I'm going to predict that the first thing Trump does is fire his lawyers, which he should have done before the trial rather than after the trial," Dershowitz said on "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." His lawyers did not do a good job. And what worries me, as an appellate lawyer, is that they didn't do a good job preserving the record for appeal. They focused exclusively on the trial, which is what many trial lawyers erroneously do," Dershowitz said. "But you can't win an appeal if the lawyers below didn't create a record for appeal. And they didn't...

Four surgeons were taking a coffee break and were discussing their work. The first one said, "I think accountants are the easiest to operate on. Everything inside is numbered." "I think librarians are the easiest," said the second surgeon. "When you open them up all their organs are alphabetically ordered." The third surgeon said, "I prefer to operate on electricians. All their organs are color coded." The fourth one said, "I like to operate on lawyers. They're heartless, spineless, gutless, and their head and their behind are interchangeable."

Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyers are playing hardball with the woman accusing him of sexually abusing her while they served in the NYPD together decades ago. Adams’ attorneys claimed in a court document filed Tuesday that plaintiff Lorna Beach-Mathura and her legal team have been dragging their feet in complying with their requests for evidence in the case. “Plaintiff failed to properly respond to defendants’ discovery requests by the deadline prescribed by the CPLR [New York Consolidated Laws, Civil Practice Law and Rules],” Adams co-counsel Alex Spiro and city assistant corporation counsel Maxwell Leighton wrote in the Manhattan Supreme Court filing.

We all get to vote, but the ability to make legislation is no longer in the hands of the people we elect,’ Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger said. As the administrative state implements more regulations on Americans, a team of legal veterans has come together to fight the expansion of unelected government agency power. Sometimes, they even win. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which consists of a team of 27 lawyers and support staff, including former judges, had four of the cases they litigated go before the Supreme Court in 2023. One case was decided in their favor, the...

In the months since I was terminated for expressing opinions, I have learned that my experience is all too common in Big Law. I am a Navy SEAL and Iraq war veteran who transitioned back into civilian life as a lawyer. Recent experience has taught me that people with my beliefs and values are viewed as parochial, at best, and in any case are not welcomed by many of those who are considered “leaders” in the legal profession. One of the things I realized soon after I started practicing law is that there are very few practicing attorneys who are...

The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday. The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020. The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts. Washington is the second state to not require the...

Megyn Kelly begins the show by revealing exclusive key text messages between lawyer Ashleigh Merchant and witness Terrance Bradley that shine new light on the Fani Willis - Nathan Wade relationship and affair, the way Bradley tried to get out of answering questions about his text messages on the stand, and more. Then Phil Holloway, founder of Holloway Law Group, joins to discuss the breaking news that the Georgia State Senate’s subpoena issued to Merchant for her texts

The “highly toxic agricultural chemical” is federally allowed to be used on oats and other grains imported to the US, according to the EWG. When applied to oat and grain crops, chlormequat alters a plant’s growth, preventing it from bending over and thus making it easier to harvest, per the EWG. Roundup for Breakfast, Part 2: In New Tests, Weed Killer Found in All Kids’ Cereals Sampled A second round of tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group found the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer in every sample of popular oat-based cereal and other oat-based food marketed to...

A Seattle area bar association is apologizing after publishing an article calling for a genocide of Jews in its newsletter. The King County Bar Association Board of Trustees apologized after printing an article from one of its members and former director, Dua Abudiab, entitled From The River To The Sea, a phrase that calls for the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of its residents. Abudiab’s antisemitic screed was printed on the front page of the King County Bar Bulletin above the fold. Abudiab equated claims of "white nationalism" occupying North America to justify Palestinian claims to Israel despite...

Donald Trump's lawyers intend to appeal his staggering $83.3 million defamation lawsuit loss to E. Jean Carroll by arguing there was an 'insane' conflict of interest at the heart of the case. The former president's legal team are set to appeal on the grounds there was a conflict of interest between Carroll's lawyer and the judge presiding over her case. Trump's firebrand attorney Alina Habba claimed she was unaware that Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan - who are not related - worked together in the early 1990s, with the judge serving as her 'mentor', reports the New...

In a rigorous and important study that should surprise no one, University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller has found that of over 3,200 amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in cases filed and decided between 2018 and 2022 by lawyers at the nation’s largest law firms, 64% favor liberal causes. The pronounced tilt by America’s elite lawyers toward the political left is a well-known phenomenon. As someone who practiced in “Big Law” for over a decade, I and many of my colleagues came to view that tilt as a given. Studies have since shown that the...

Cliff Kincaid wrote an article for Renew America, titled. 'The communist plot against Trump.' In it, he goes into the special counsel, Jack Smith’s wife, Katie Chevigny. Chevigny is a Biden donor who put together a sympathetic documentary on Michelle Obama. The real story he says, is not Katie Chevigny, but her parents. Kincaid wrote a 12-page special report on them, "The Communists, Globalists, Terrorists, and Fellow Travelers Trying to Jail President Trump". Chevigny’s parents were well-connected to the communist and terrorist movements that backed Barack Hussein Obama. Kincaid says they’re trying to destroy Trump. Her father was a leftist...