Law
February 8, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Today the jury returned its verdict in the defamation trial of Michael Mann v. Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. The verdict was disappointing to those of us who followed the case and thought that Michael Mann presented a pathetically inadequate case. The jury actually agreed: it found that the defendants had defamed Mann, but awarded only a token $1 in damages, since Mann had failed to prove any. But it
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February 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It often happens that jury trials start slowly, then finish with a rush. That happened in the case of Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg. Evidence wrapped up rather quickly, and today the lawyers delivered their closing arguments. I assume that jury deliberations will begin tomorrow, as the arguments concluded late in the afternoon. John Williams, an elderly lawyer who is Mann’s senior counsel, argued first. I didn’t
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February 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected President Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from election-related criminal charges deriving from official acts taken as president. The panel’s ruling comes in a 57-page per curiam (i.e., unsigned and unanimous) opinion yesterday. The court’s opinion is posted online here. After a slog through precedent, the court holds: “Former President Trump lacked any lawful discretionary authority to defy federal criminal
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January 31, 2024 — John Hinderaker
I have been mostly AWOL the last few days, so I thought that I owe our readers an explanation. My wife and I have been in Washington, D.C. I have had a few meetings of various kinds, but mostly we are here to spend some time in the D.C. Superior Court, observing the trial of Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, finally before a jury after 12 years
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January 31, 2024 — Scott Johnson
John Hinderaker and I wrote this article for Bench & Bar of Minnesota, the monthly publication of the Minnesota State Bar Association. It was published in the October 2002 issue. I provided background on it here yesterday. Working on this article was a labor of love. I hoped it would be both interesting and useful. I did my best to get the facts straight and provide examples within the space
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January 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Former United States Attorney and federal district judge Herbert Stern retired from the bench and returned to private practice in 1987. While on the bench he wrote the memoir Judgment In Berlin (1984), which was turned into a 1988 movie directed by Leo Penn. The movie starred Martin Sheen and Sean Penn. Morton Mintz reviewed the book for the Washington Post here and Professor Maynard Pirsig for the William Mitchell
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January 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Cliff May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. He is a veteran reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor for the New York Times and other publications. Cliff’s current column is “The blood libel at the Hague” (at FDD, where it is posted with links). Cliff has kindly given us his permission to post his columns on Power Line.
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January 18, 2024 — John Hinderaker
After 12 years of wandering in the wilderness of the D.C. court system, Michael Mann’s defamation case against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg has finally gone to trial. Opening statements were delivered today. The trial is being live-streamed, and I got the court’s app to work just in time to hear Steyn’s opening. The case, as you likely recall, arises out of an internet post written by Simberg, which Steyn
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January 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
California pioneered modern product liability law, which probably has done some good although it had unintended consequences, too. But now California has gone too far. Its appellate court has held that a manufacturer can be sued for not producing a product: Some 24,000 patients have sued Gilead Sciences in California state court for failing to introduce an allegedly safer version of an HIV drug. The Food and Drug Administration in
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January 12, 2024 — John Hinderaker
A group of Jewish graduate students at Harvard, including several from the law school, have sued that university alleging rampant anti-Semitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The complaint is embedded below, and I encourage you to at least skim it–it is 77 pages long. What is striking about the complaint is the breadth and depth of its factual allegations. If they are true,
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January 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to hear Donald Trump’s appeal of the Colorado case in which he was absurdly kicked off the ballot in that state. This is the Court’s order granting the writ: The Court has ordered an expedited briefing schedule that may allow it to rule in time to preserve the integrity of the primary process. We will see how this develops, but
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January 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
There has been a lot of media excitement about the release of unredacted versions of documents from the ultimately-settled defamation lawsuit that Virginia Giuffre brought against Jeffrey Epstein’s friend and collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015. The release has been done in batches, and news accounts indicate that more than 170 individuals referred to in the documents as “John Doe,” etc., have now been identified. Some casual consumers of news may
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January 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Speaking of identity politics, as I do in the adjacent post on Claudine Gay, we should note that the left never gives up. That is what occurs to me and it is the place where William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal column “Making discrimination okay again.” In the column McGurn recounts the efforts of California Democrats to make discrimination by race legal after its apparently decisive legal defeats: Do
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December 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Maine became the second state to bar President Trump from running for the presidency when, earlier today, its Secretary of State, a left-wing activist, declared that Trump was an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment. On the merits, this is an absurd claim. What happened on January 6 was a protest that got out of hand. The principal violence, and the only fatality, was inflicted by a capitol police officer. Not
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December 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Special Counsel Democratic Party activist Jack Smith has filed a motion in limine in his Washington, D.C. prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to reverse the apparent result of the 2020 election. The motion won’t be heard for a while, as the case is now on appeal. But Smith is desperate to get it tried in time to imprison Trump, or at least convict him, before the election. So he
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December 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
In the wake of the Colorado Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that bars Donald Trump from the ballot in that state, many Republicans have urged that states controlled by the GOP do the same thing to Joe Biden. My point here is not to endorse that strategy–partisan majorities banning their political opponents from participating in elections is obviously not a good thing–but rather to note that, if Republican-leaning courts in some
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December 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Association with President Trump has led to the ruination of many of his supporters. Rudy Giuliani seems to me foremost among them, but I may be shortchanging some other prominent members of his team. These supporters of President Trump are nevertheless adults responsible for their own actions. In my opinion, the country would nevertheless have been better served by their counseling Trump to take another path than the one he
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