Tag Archives: courts

“UCLA pleads for legal immunity….”

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This is a measure of how deeply embedded antisemitism bigotry is in the managers running UCLA. They ordered, according to the charges in the case in which they demand immunity, exclusion zones that barred Jewish students from certain areas of the UCLA campus—areas which granted antisemitic protestors and terrorist supporters proclaiming Israeli genocide—veto authority over who could enter areas of campus those protestors occupied.

The defendants in the case already have had an injunction issued against them barring such actions and barring the defendants’ proclaiming programs that certain groups could have but that barred other groups from having similar or participating in the former. The presiding judge in that injunction opened his order with this [emphasis in the original]:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

This is the bigotry from which these personages demand their immunity. They rationalize their demand to be excused from their bigotry with this:

“There was no blueprint for how to respond to a protest encampment,” and UCLA used de-escalation in the context of “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations, which justifies qualified immunity….

Right. We’re supposed to believe that the folks at the pinnacle of this major university’s management team had themselves to be told what to do before they acted. At the very least, that’s their confession that they’re unfit for the positions and should be fired for cause.

And they need to be sanctioned monetarily for their actions in furtherance of their bigotry along with any education-related licenses they may hold rescinded with prejudice.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

The ICC and a Dream Defense Team

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Alan Dershowitz, a defense lawyer of some skill and renown, as well as a Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, is assembling a dream team of defense lawyers to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant against the scurrilous charges of the International Court of Justice and associated ICC international arrest warrants.

The question is what would be the point. That Dershowitz’ team will make a strong—essentially irrefutable—legal case against the ICC is neither here nor there. The ICC has already arrived at its guilty verdict, as demonstrated by its continued use of a well-known Israel hater as the court’s lead prosecutor in this sham case.

This is why the case must be mounted anyway:

It will also be tried in the court of public opinion, both in the US and throughout the world.

However.

Even with resounding acquittal in that public court, the ICC’s guilty verdict will stand as the “official” outcome. This will necessitate physical protections for Netanyahu and Gallant against those arrest warrants, which will remain extant. The only way to get those undone is to disband the ICC, which has irretrievably poisoned itself, with those charges and arrest warrants, as a court of justice.

Naked Threats of Vengeance

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This is what the leftist American Bar Association is tolerating in its midst—intolerance to the point of seeking destruction of those who don’t kowtow to their ideology.

[A] group called “The 65 Project” has taken to social media vowing to go after the licenses of attorneys who chose to work for former President Donald Trump.

Apparently, only the Precious Left and a section of the ABA guild are allowed to use the courts to seek election integrity.

The 65 Project isn’t troubling itself with facts in their attacks, either. Here’s Managing Director Michael Teter:

Across the country, lawyers who lent their credibility as officers of the court to Donald Trump to file factually and legally baseless claims to overturn legitimate election results have been investigated by state bar associations, been fined, had their licenses suspended, and even disbarred[.]

Not so much. The vast majority of the cases brought over election results never got to the merits, legitimate or baseless; they were dismissed on procedural or other grounds. Further, “across the country” is a cynical exaggeration. Only a very few lawyers have been sanctioned over the cases they brought.

Alan Dershowitz, still a staunch Democrat and Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, has the correct characterization of the project’s shenanigans:

It’s pure McCarthyism. And unethical. And it’s scaring some lawyers away.

This is what wants to rule over us. Keep it in mind next month.

Intolerance and Frivolous Lawsuits

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Jack Phillips, owner/operator of Masterpiece Cakeshop, had yet another lawsuit against him dismissed, this one by the Colorado Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it was dismissed on the trivial technicality that it wasn’t filed correctly.

The Wall Street Journal editors ask the question

[W]hen will the progressive cultural police finally leave him alone?

As long as the courts—which includes our Supreme Court, whose ruling in Phillips’ favor in an earlier lawsuit was based narrowly on the animus of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission—continue rule to timidly, the intolerant progressives will continue to persecute Phillips and the rest of us Americans who won’t bow and scrape at their intolerant feet.

What’s necessary to put an end to progressive bigotry, at least in our courts, is to sanction such legally frivolous, but morally bigoted, lawsuits. The plaintiffs in such cases should be required to pay their persecution target all legal costs, which often is already the case, and they should be required to pay the damages identified by the plaintiff. Further, the lawyers and their employing law firms—which do not have to be a party to such…frivolity—need themselves to be heavily sanctioned: the lawyer(s) fined steeply, beginning with 10% of their top line income and moving up for each subsequent frivolous suit in which they might participate, and the law firms employing them fined similarly steeply.

Courts are justifiably reluctant to find against plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers on the basis of their frivolous cases, but it’s been made crystalline by the persecution of Phillips that courts are being too timid here.

Misunderstanding

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It’s surprising that so many so-called journalists misunderstand, but it’s a widespread failure, and it includes too many economists, as well. For good or ill, there is a loophole in the 2018 tax law that’s providing windfalls for American companies.

The loophole is a mismatch of critical dates between that law’s Section 245A and Section 78. The former lets US companies bring home their foreign profits without paying US taxes, with an effective date of 1 January 2018; the latter was intended to prevent inappropriate tax breaks in the old international tax system, with an effective date of 31 December 2017. Those 24 hours are a loophole far beyond the size of a single day. Three companies, for instance, are claiming—and one has already won in court—tax refunds:

[Varian Medical Systems won its case for] $150 million in deductions. The electronics manufacturer Kyocera and the food distributor Sysco have similar court cases pending, each involving more than $100 million in deductions.

Others are putting together their own refund filings that, in their aggregate will be worth several tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars more.

The misunderstanding is not about the Congressional gridlock blocking reconciliation of those two dates, as the writer of the Wall Street Journal article went on about, even though she got it right in her lede.

That [loophole] is now allowing big companies to save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to the government.

The misunderstanding—an understanding which goes to the core of our tax system and its and its constitutionally mandated purpose—is this:

The Varian case highlights how gridlock in Congress can cost the public….

No. Leaving money in the hands of our private economy, or returning money to those hands, is not a cost to the public—we American citizens and our enterprises are that public—but a benefit to the public, to us. Leaving the money or refunding it does reduce the amount of money accruing to Government, but that also could be a benefit to the public by restricting the money available to government to misspend. That latter, though, puts the onus on us in the public to elect politicians who will honor that restriction by not borrowing to spend more than government takes in and by not raising taxes to match excess spending.

Then there’s this:

A recent ruling by the Supreme Court will put more emphasis on the literal text of laws….

Literal text of the laws: the text of a law is what Congress intended the law to say, else Congress would have passed a different law saying something different.

And that’s as it should be, since the American system of governance restricts legislation to Congress and judicial action to the limits of those laws’ text. Judge Emin Toro, writing in his ruling on the Varian case, was quite clear on this:

Congress “spoke clearly” when it selected the mismatched effective dates. “Appeals to policy and Congress’s overarching purpose cannot overcome these choices[.]”

Activist judges—and that’s the only kind that presumes to legislate from the bench, that presumes to Know Better than the rest of us what a law should be—are broadly held as Truth Sayers by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party. These unelected representatives judges writing law rather than ruling within it are the bane of American liberty.