John Culbreath Blog

Repercussions of Supreme Court’s Janus ruling on bar associations’ compulsory extraction of dues from nonmembers [ Oregonian ] “State Supreme Court calls a ‘timeout’ for Washington Bar Association to review its rules” Steve Miletich, Seattle Times ] “ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) Cannot Survive the Supreme Court’s Recent Decisions in NIFLA and Matal” [ Kim Colby, Federalist Society , earlier on rule banning some types of speech and expression by lawyers on anti-discrimination grounds] Pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio sues New York Times for libel [ Quint Forgey, Politico ; Joe Setyon, Reason ; over the years ] When may governments boycott private companies’ output because those companies promote disapproved ideas? [ Eugene Volokh , more ] First Amendment has consistently foiled Donald Trump’s designs against critics’ speech [ Jacob Sullum ; related, David Henderson ] “The culture of free speech has been deteriorating for long enough that politics, sadly and predictably, is catching up.”...

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Now, I will readily admit that many times co-counsel relationships work out just fine. At the conclusion of representation everyone, including the client, feels satisfied in how it all went. My interest, however, is in looking at the times when it doesn’t go well and Betty’s story is one worthy of discussion. Written by Mark Bassingthwaighte Placing Trust in Your Co-Counsel is a Good Thing, Until It Isn’t curated from Solo Practice University®

In learning to reason impartially about constitutional law, a valuable exercise is to come up with a list of instances in which the best reading of the Constitution cuts *against* your own view of good policy. Ilya Somin goes first , with examples that include near-total Congressional control over foreign trade; too much use of juries; the extreme difficulty of removing a seriously bad President; the near-indelible status of state lines; and an amendment process that is too hard to use. Tags: Article V , constitutional law , juries Constitutional law as it shoulda been curated from Overlawyered

Reuters  reports  (“French lawmaker proposes bill to outlaw mockery of accents”) that lawmaker Laetitia Avia of Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party intends to introduce a bill adding discrimination based on accent or pronunciation (“ glottophobia ”) to the list of banned discrimination categories. This came after an exchange between leftist party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and journalist Véronique Gaurel, born in Toulouse, in which he appeared to make fun of Gaurel’s southwestern accent and then called for the next question to be in “comprehensible French.” I thought of researching whether France has enacted other vaguely framed laws aimed at soothing the sensibilities of the Toulouse region. But since there is no way to search for vague laws as a category in themselves, I soon realized that might set me off on — if you will excuse the expression — a Too-Loose-Law Trek. [cross-posted from Cato at Liberty ] Filed under: France , language bias “Eet eez, how yo...