Free Republic

Randall Robinson, an activist and Harvard-educated lawyer whose past activities include founding the TransAfrica organization, encouraging black Americans to sue for reparations, and then loudly emigrating in protest from the U.S. to the Caribean island of St. Kitts, now claims that black Hurricane victims are "eating corpses to survive." A quick scan of major news networks and a Google search on the phrase "hurricane victims eating corpses to survive" uncovers absolutely no support for this outrageous claim. While that's hardly the final word when it comes to proof, it's more evidence than Robinson offers for his bizarre claim. Ordinarily, I...

Just after the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was not very successful in garnering support in the Senate for American membership in the League of Nations. Opposition was led by Republican Sen. William Borah of Idaho. Years later Borah was asked why he thought the League was such a bad idea. "I didn't," he answered. "I was against it because it was Wilson's idea." So far the opposition on the left to President Bush's nominee as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts Jr., has mustered no more intellectual firepower than that.

Senator Schumer is planning to use his seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen a battle he has already lost. "I voted against Judge Roberts for the D.C. Court because he didn't answer questions fully and openly when he appeared before the committee," Mr. Schumer said on Tuesday, referring to President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court. But despite being rebuked by his colleagues for pressing inappropriate questions on Mr. Roberts when he was a federal appeals court nominee, Mr. Schumer has signaled he is going to revisit the same line of questioning. "It is vital that Judge Roberts...

Justice O'Connor is retiring. Speculation on her replacement began long ago.

It was a carefully staged Norman Rockwell scene. The street was lined with American flags; a high school band played "God Bless America." Then, under the watchful gaze of Wal-Mart's chief operating officer, Maryland's governor vetoed a bill that would have obliged large businesses to spend more on employee health care. The news here isn't that some politicians wrap their deference to corporate interests in the flag. The news, instead, is that Maryland's State Legislature passed a pro-worker bill in the first place. In fact, the bill passed by a veto-proof majority in the Maryland Senate, and fell just short...

Kevin Drum, writing in a blog for Washington Monthly in response to an argument from Juan Non-Volokh, enunciates what may become the new Democratic argument for the filibuster: you can't change the rules in mid-stream. He writes: "My broader point is that the real issue in the filibuster fight isn't the filibuster itself — or blue slips or Rule IV or any other specific rule — it's the general principle that rules shouldn't be cynically changed en masse just because your guy is in power and you've decided they're no longer convenient. As it happens, I'm not much of a...

A Massachusetts court has recently had to resolve the question, as a matter of tort law, what duty of care a pair of non-married adults owe to each other for injuries resulting from consensual sex between them. I'll leave the details of the case for those with strong stomachs who are willing to read the opinion found in the preceding link. In summary, however, the plaintiff (male) was injured when the defendant (female) changed her position during the middle of intercourse. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant, finding that, as a matter of law, there...

The latest liberal crusade is against the Wal-Mart stores. A big headline on a long article in The New York Times asks "Can't A Retail Behemoth Pay More?" Of course they can pay more. The New York Times could pay its own employees more. We could all pay more for whatever we buy or rent. Don't tell me you couldn't have paid a dime more for this newspaper. But why should any of us pay more than we have to? According to The New York Times, there is a book "by a group of scholars" due to be published this...

The stakes in politics are about to get a lot higher. The partisan battles in the coming weeks -- on judges, Social Security and the future of Tom DeLay -- are part of a larger struggle in which Republicans are seeking to establish themselves as the dominant party in American politics. Essential to their quest is persuading Democrats, or at least a significant number in their ranks, to accept long-term minority status. The current acrimony in politics is incomprehensible unless it is understood as the inevitable next act of a long-term struggle. Its ferocity arises from the Democrats' refusal to...

Ever wonder just what it is about Janice Rogers Brown that prompted the Democrats to so fiercely oppose her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals? It's her radical position on the Constitution. Or rather, it's her dedication to constitutional limits that has enraged the left. They don't want anyone on the bench who might get in the way of federal policies and programs that can't withstand constitutional scrutiny. Brown, the African-American daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, happens to believe the Supreme Court's protection of the government's expansion of the 1930s was "the triumph of our own socialist revolution." California...

"When I was in Alabama 13 years ago, they had no child labor law," wrote labor activist Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, in 1908. "In Alabama 13 years ago, women ran four or five looms. Today, I find them running some 24 looms. This is the Democratic south, my friends -- this is a Democratic administration. This is what Mr. Bryan and Mr. Gompers want to uphold." The "Gompers" that Ms. Jones judged to be insufficiently concerned about the subjugation of labor was Samuel Gompers, the 10-year-old who was taken out of school to become an apprentice...

It feels like Armageddon is just around the corner. The Republican threat to eliminate the filibuster rule in judicial confirmations has led both parties to cautiously assess what the political landscape would look like if the so-called nuclear option were used. But for many here, this political brawl is only a dress rehearsal for the coming battle over a replacement for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose recent illness has led to the expectation that he will retire before the end of the Supreme Court term in June. Legal scholars who have studied confirmations wonder whether the president wants to risk...

U.S. District Court judges by a sizable majority oppose mandatory sanctions for lawyers who file groundless suits, a recent survey shows. The Federal Judicial Center surveyed 400 judges via e-mail in December 2004 and January 2005. The survey, which garnered 278 responses, found that 87 percent preferred the current Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. That rule gives judges the discretion to impose sanctions on attorneys who file pleadings that are frivolous, presented for an improper purpose or lack evidentiary support. The survey, consisting of 13 questions dealing with Rule 11, comes in the wake of the...

Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, calls Majority Leader Bill Frist's proposed compromise on judicial appointments a "big wet kiss to the far right". Certainly this is one of the more uncomfortable non-sequiturs uttered in public in a long time. Does it suggest that that the Majority leader is "enamored" of the far right or that he is merely unhygienic. I can't tell. In any event, is this any way for a Democratic Party leader to talk about the procedure of federal judicial appointments? Has the world's greatest deliberative body sunk this low? The Majority Leader's proffered compromise was both...

Bob Dole says that amending the Senate's rules would be unnecessary if only Senate Democrats would forswear use of the filibuster. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pete Du Pont recounts that many Democratic Senators have had a change of heart when it comes to the propriety of filibusters: "Other Democratic senators have had similar changes in belief: Joe Biden and Robert Byrd, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, Joe Lieberman, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer and their erstwhile colleagues Lloyd Bentsen, and Tom Daschle have all vigorously opposed the use of the filibuster against judicial nominations. Mr. Schumer was for voting judicial...

Thomas Sowell, writing on the pending Senate showdown over judicial confirmations, notes that: "A disinformation campaign has already been launched to depict judges who believe in following the written law as being "activist" conservatives, just like liberal activists." "Those who play this game of verbal equivalence can seldom, if ever, come up with concrete examples where conservative judges made rulings that went directly counter to what the written law says or who made rulings for which there is no written law." It is indeed remarkable that the opponents of many of the current nominees can go so far in their...

ANYONE still clinging to the notion that cam paign-finance reformers are interested in "clean government" solely for its own sake should take a look at Illinois — specifically a race for a state Supreme Court seat last year that turned into the most expensive judicial contest in U.S. history. The race was a money magnet — with more than $9 million spent by the time the dust cleared. Why? Because tort lawyers from all over the country go to Illinois' Madison County to file lawsuits against deep-pocketed corporations. If Democrat Gordon Maag won the Supreme Court race, the trial-lawyer gravy...

Free advice, as they say, often is worth what it costs. Les Moonves, who runs CBS, has been getting a lot of it on what he should do to resurrect the "CBS Evening News." The positive is that all this attention to the evening news--advice appearing even in serious newspapers, no less--is yet another sign of its continued importance, despite the splintering of the audience among broadcasters, cable outlets and the Internet. The evening news still has a major role to play in this democracy; it can survive and even thrive if it develops new ways of serving the public....

A prominent member of the Senate leadership recently described a Supreme Court justice as "a disgrace." An equally prominent member of the leadership of the House of Representatives on the other side of the political aisle has characterized another justice's approach to adjudication as "incredibly outrageous." These excoriations follow other examples of personalized attacks on members of the judiciary by senior political figures. So it is time to take a deep breath, step back, and inject a little perspective into the recent heated rhetoric about judges and the courts. We might start by getting a firm grip on the reality...

Shearman & Sterling sees things differently. Last month, the law firm filed a trespass and breach of contract action in San Francisco Superior Court involving an e-mail sent to a staff manager’s Shearman.com account. The communication forwarded a post about the manager from Craigslist.org, an online community billboard. The writing, since removed, was posted on the site’s "rants and raves" section. Filed as a "Jane Doe" action, the lawsuit alleges the sender is a current or recent Shearman employee who was under contract to use the firm’s computers only for legitimate business purposes. "The e-mail was hateful and racist, and...