Category Archives: law

There is No Difference

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Nathan Diament, Orthodox Union Advocacy Center Executive Director, wrote eloquently of the importance of St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, Colorado’s effort to force Catholic schools to accept as students those who reject, or whose parents reject, the school’s religious mission. He also asked a couple of questions:

What if the state doesn’t explicitly exclude religious schools? What if it attaches conditions that force religious schools to choose between accessing public benefits and compromising their values?

The answer to these seems crystalline to me.

Applying criteria as a condition of participating in a program with which an institution cannot comply and maintain its character and mission is precisely the same as explicitly excluding that institution.

That’s OK, if not necessarily good, if the conditions are applied to private enterprise. No business has an intrinsic right to any particular business model or practice.

It’s entirely different, though, when the conditions are applied to religious institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, whathaveyou have precisely that intrinsic right to operate under their specific practice. That inalienable right is clearly acknowledged in our Constitution’s First Amendment bars against government interference with an institution’s and its members’ right freely to exercise their religion (or lack of such) and the equally explicit bar against government establishing a government-devised or -run religion or religious entity, whether to compete with or to supplant other religious or areligious establishments.

An Unjustifiable Delay

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It’s unconscionable, too. Utah District Court Judge Tony Graf is looking at setting a 2029 trial date, even as late as the end of January 2028, for Tyler Robinson’s trial, the man accused of murdering Turning Point USA‘s Charlie Kirk. This is absurd, as his widow, Erika Kirk, has said.

The defense attorneys are claiming that they

have to sift through tens of thousands of files the prosecution turned over to them. They will need to conduct extensive investigations into Robison’s life to seek mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted, and they also need to devote “substantial time” to issues such as jury selection…[,]

and they need those three(!) years to get ready.

Leave aside that seek[ing] mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted is strictly and solely a matter for the sentencing phase if he is convicted. Any time spent on that, were he acquitted, would be a blatant waste of time and of the State’s money, and it does not need to be spent at all during trial prep and trial. The defense lawyers are just nakedly stalling.

If Graf is to take the defense’s move seriously, he needs first to demand to see those defense attorneys’ and their staffs’ time sheets in the 10-minute increments that law firms typically use to accumulate their billable hours. What else are these worthies working on besides Robinson’s case that would take up so much time that they actually need three years or more years just to get into jury selection?

We have these doofers commonly known as computers, have had them for some decades. We’ve also got these software packages, AI apps, many of which are tailored for the needs of lawyers and their research. Whatever happened to the general push for a speedy trial for defendants? Aside from that, does not the victim/victim’s survivor also deserve a speedy trial?

Kirk’s lawyers are much closer to the mark with their push for an October 2027 trial date. Graf should set the trial for that October and sanction those defense lawyers for their evident indolence and rule further that their behavior lays no ground for an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal.

Featherbedding in Trucking

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It’s coming. In fact, it’s already being pushed for in California.

Driverless trucks have been operating for some time in Texas and other States across the south, moving the middle mile—the travel from warehouse/depot to warehouse/depot. Human drivers handle the first and last mile, loading and hooking up/unhooking and parking and unloading freight trailers at the start and destination sites. Especially at the destination, since driverless trucks still can’t back up (that’s skill that’s much harder to teach a computer to do).

With this empirically demonstrated capability and safety as backdrop, California enacted state regulations that removed a ban on driverless trucks weighing 10,001 pounds or more, and allowed testing and deployment of such vehicles through a permit process. Naturally, unions don’t like that, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in California sued the State’s DMV over those regulations. The Teamsters’ plaint:

The deployment of Self-Driving Trucks, authorized by the regulatory changes, has the potential to eventually wipe out the jobs of more than 200,000 employee semi-truck drivers working across California[.]

The union doesn’t care that there is no intrinsic right for anyone to drive a truck for a company or for himself. Hiring, or not, truck drivers is strictly a business decision as companies seek to hold down the cost of their delivery operations, and as customer companies seek to hold down costs of getting deliveries. Driverless trucks are cheaper to operate than driver-ed trucks: as recently as 2025, roughly 44% of the cost of operating a truck was in driver wages and benefits. Robots don’t have much need for those.

Peter Finn, the Teamsters’ Vice President At-Large, added that communities want to see investments in people and middle-class jobs against the broader backdrop of artificial-intelligence growth. Again, this is a business decision, not an inherent right to any particular job in the pursuit of those investments.

If the union succeeds in scotching those California regulations, its next move will be to push for literal featherbedding: a human in the driverless tractor pulling those freight trailers, even though they’re not needed for any reason other than fueling union coffers. And artificially elevating costs to trucking companies, companies receiving truckers’ deliveries, and us American consumers as the end buyer of the trucked goods.

Gun Control

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This one in Bend, OR. A mass-shooter wannabe, after firing into nearby cars, broke into a locked elementary school by shooting out the door locks. The violence began around 1300 last Thursday. More precisely,

The violence started and ended within minutes, with police saying they received an initial call at 12:59 pm local time and then arriving at the scene with the suspect dead at 1:02 pm.

A teacher armed with a cell phone as a throwing object and her own physical courage and a bystander armed with a firearm had responded and stopped the mass shooter and his butchery by the time the police arrived. The teacher had followed her thrown phone by charging and tackling the shooter. She was still struggling with him (I speculate in an ultimately losing effort) when the bystander arrived and shot the shooter, killing him.

The shooter had already killed three children and another teacher and severely wounded another child and teacher; his butchery was cut short at that point by those two civilian first responders, one of whom was armed.

Yet, gun control…persons…insist on disarming and keeping disarmed civilians already on scene—the true first responders—in favor of police, who won’t arrive for some few minutes (three of them in the present case, which is a fast response. For those in the peanut gallery, the police failure in Uvalde, TX, was an extreme exception; most police response times in urban areas are quite good, in the range of 3-7 minutes.). These gun control persons don’t seem to care that the butchery will continue apace until the police do make it to the scene.

Go figure.

Short Memories or Blinders

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Or both. In their house editorial about the ongoing kerfuffles throughout France, the sages of The Wall Street Journal closed their piece with this.

France is in a violent democratic funk, and it will probably get worse. Don’t think it can’t happen in the US given the current state of American politics.

On the other hand, the French Left haven’t yet started trying to assassinate politicians of whom they disapprove; they’re merely rioting in the streets and burning and looting mom-and-pop businesses and historical buildings. Those editors seem to have missed what’s been going on in the US for some years. Our Left has moved beyond mere rioting, looting, and arson.